You can’t say I’m not giving you fair warning this week, with that heading.

One of the things on which Bernice and I agree to differ is competitiveness. She used to remonstrate: ‘It’s only a game!’, until she realized that I had no understanding of what the word ‘only’ meant in that sentence. In the early years of our marriage, when we had no children and boundless energy (and I had two working hips), we used to play badminton regularly. However, it was never an entirely satisfying experience for either of us, because I couldn’t ‘enjoy’ the game in the way she wanted, and she couldn’t take the game as seriously as I wanted.

Those of you who don’t hail from Britain may be unfamiliar with the observation of Bill Shankly, a very successful football (soccer) managers of the 1960s, who said (or, my research suggests, didn’t exactly say, but it’s a great quote, genuine or not): ‘Some people say that football’s a matter of life and death, but it’s much more important than that.’ Well, I don’t actually agree about football, which has always left me cold, but I applaud the sentiment as applied to competitive sport in general, and, indeed, competition of any kind.

One measure of the magnitude of Bernice’s devotion to family is the fact that, after both of our kids had inherited my competitive gene (‘I’m more competitive than you!’ ‘No, you’re not! I’m much more competitive than you!’), she participated with scarcely a word of complaint in years and years of board games, charades and trivia quizzes. Indeed, even through those stormy teenage years (mine lasted until well into my forties), we were always the family that would play together to stay together.

I’ve always had a fairly good general knowledge, or at least I did have until I put it down somewhere, and now for the life of me I can’t remember where. I’ve also always been interested in finding out the answers to things I didn’t know, or couldn’t remember. These days, to do that all you need is an internet connection and a nose for distinguishing between fake news and fact; where (and when) I come from, you needed a good reference library.

Of course, I realise now that distortion, misrepresentation, and pure invention did not start with the internet. I was for several years the proud owner of a handsome volume entitled The Commonwealth Annual 1963, full of informative articles about the far-flung islands of civilization that Britain had established among the barabarians. When, a few years ago, I revisited this book for the first time in 40 years, I turned into the deeply ashamed owner of it, with its colonial condescension and cancelling of indigenous culture…and then I binned it.

Fortunately, for us the importance of a good reference library has not been completely eclipsed by Google. If you are Shabbat-observant, then none of those thorny questions that arise over the Shabbat dinner table can be resolved on the spot online. Your only options are to wait until after Shabbat (and you probably don’t need me to tell you that the challenge then is to remember what the hell it was that you didn’t know six hours previously) or to refer to your reference library in real time. Among my favourite volumes in our particular library is Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, whose every entry is a miniature enlightenment. Here’s the entry on tawdry, for example:

A corruption of St Audrey. At the annual fair of St Audrey, in the Isle of Ely, cheap jewellery and showy lace called St Audrey’s lace was sold; hence tawdry, which is applied to anything gaudy, in bad taste, and of little value.

Many’s the time that I’ve been able to satisfy our curiosity as to the origin of, say, raining cats and dogs, which, by the way, has nothing to do with household pets being washed out of their beds in the thatched eaves of a medieval dwelling.

Let me attempt to steer this ramshackle carriage back towards my intended subject. I remember Micha’el telling me a few years ago that he still remembered the shock he felt when he first discovered that I didn’t know everything. Knowing me, I would have expected that to be a humiliating moment for me. And yet, it was a moment that gave me immense pleasure: recognizing that your parents don’t know everything is an important step on a child’s journey to autonomy.

In a similar vein, I fought as hard as I could to win any game I played with the children; nobody could ever accuse me of throwing a match in order to let my kids feel good. What that meant, and what I wanted it to mean, was that when they did beat me for the first time, at tennis, or chess, or snakes and ladders, or uno, they knew that they had beaten me on equal terms. These are the only contests where I have accepted defeat with equanimity, and even delight. To be outstripped by your children, it seems to me, is one of the great pleasures of parenthood.

These days, of course, I have long since ceased to be a worthy opponent: here I am, a physical wreck, whose knowledge of popular culture ended in the early 1980s, and whose grasp of academic subjects ended much earlier. Good grief: the school I went to didn’t even teach biology; the only ‘respectable’ sciences were physics and chemistry. These days, I know that Micha’el’s grasp of quantum mechanics far outstrips mine. (To be honest, I don’t actually have a grasp of quantum mechanics.) We knew Esther had left us behind when she started her master’s in Glocal Development, and we gently told her there was no such word as glocal.

However (and here we reach today’s subject), I had thought I would have a bit of time before I needed to be worried about being outsmarted by Tao. Our grandson is, after all, not quite 19 months old. And yet…

For Bernice and I, the highlight of our week is a video chat via WhatsApp with the kids every Thursday. As well as catching up with any news, it also gives us a chance to spend time with Tao. In the last few months, his engagement has grown, and he is now a very active, and pro-active, participant in the conversation, even though he is not at all verbal: vocal, yes, with a variety of animal sounds and a few sounds of letters, but, for the moment, he substitutes grunts for words.

He also has a limited repertoire of songs of which he is excessively fond. On Thursday, almost as soon as we started our chat, he ‘said’: ‘I wonder if you would mind singing for me: The wheels on the bus.’ Rather than me trying to describe just how he conveyed that message, Tao kindly agreed to demonstrate for you.

Just in case this is a song that has slipped under your radar, its primary thrust is: The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round. The wheels on the bus go round…’You get the idea!

Of course, like the doting grandparents we are, we obliged. This was doubly satisfying. Not only did Tao reward us with a generous round of applause when we finished, but we also earned Micha’el’s gratitude, since every time we sing it is one less time that he has to sing it that day.

We carried on our conversation and, a couple of minutes later, Tao rolled his arms again to indicate that he would like a reprise. How could we say no?

When he asked for a fourth time, I decided to apply some of that clever child psychology that I have learnt from my wife, who has a T-shirt with the totally accurate slogan: I’m a kindergarten teacher. What’s your superpower? I ignored his hand signals, and asked him whether he would like to show us a book or a toy. As he instantly turned and trotted off to his book cupboard, I allowed myself a moment of self-satisfaction. I have spent the last 25 or so years behaving like a matchbox – Keep away from small children – and here I was managing Tao like a pro.

When Tao came back and placed himself in front of the screen again, he had one of his favourite books, a Hebrew word and picture book. Without hesitation, he turned to the page with a picture of a lorry (truck), and pointed, pointedly, to the wheels. There I was, sucker-punched by a child just over a year and a half old; paradoxically, I couldn’t have felt prouder. Needless to say, Bernice and I treated him to a 5-star rendition, with 4 verses and harmonies, which, in fairness to Tao, earned us a big smile and another generous round of applause.

Grandparenthood: the dote to which there is no known antidote.