A mixed bag of vignettes this week, all designed with the sole purpose of taking my mind off the elephant in the room this week, and all failing miserably in their purpose.

The elephant, in case you haven’t realised already, is almost certain to be let out of the bag (if you can have a cow elephant, I don’t see why you can’t have a cat elephant), later today (Monday). If the Israeli parliamentary opposition’s expected filibuster is particularly effective, that may be much, much later today, indeed in the early hours of tomorrow (Tuesday). The item in question is the first reading of a bill covering one (theoretically less controversial) element of the Israeli government’s proposed judicial reform: namely, the reform of the reasonableness standard. I really don’t wish to antagonise any of my regular readers, who range from the looniest of lefts to the most raging of rights. (How am I doing so far in not antagonising them?)

I’m not sure I can walk the tightrope of explaining this legislation without inflaming someone, but let me try. Broadly speaking, decades ago, the Supreme Court gave itself the right to apply judicial review against any adminstrative decision taken by the government on the grounds of it not being reasonable. Before you ask: ‘What did they mean by reasonable?’, let me ask you: ‘How long is a piece of string?’ The justices did not see fit to attempt to define reasonableness. So (back to Humpty Dumpty) a decision is unreasonable if a majority of the sitting Supreme Court justices deem it unreasonable.

A large segment of the population sees in the government’s total package of planned judicial reform a genuine threat to Israel’s democracy. For many of them, this first piece of legislation is the thin end of the wedge. They are therefore planning a National Day of Disruption tomorrow. The principal target of that protest will be the international airport, Ben Gurion. A similar, but smaller-scale, protest last week disrupted the smooth running of the airport but did not cause flight delays. At least one of the leaders of the protest has stated that it is not the object of this week’s protest to disrupt flights. However, it seems likely that there will be flight delays.

Technically, we land at Ben Gurion not on Tuesday, but in the early hours of Wednesday. In addition, disruption is likely to be caused to departures from and not arrivals at Ben Gurion airport. However, an El Al flight is due to depart from Ben Gurion at 11AM tomorrow morning and land in Lisbon at 3PM. I am assuming that this plane is scheduled to turn around and fly us back to Israel, departing at 10:25PM.

My expectation is that this flight from Israel will be disrupted and our flight will be delayed until Wednesday morning or cancelled and we will have to hope to get onto the following evening’s flight. My hope is that we will find out about the change of plan early enough to be able to change our arrangements without stress. Since Bernice will be reading this, I won’t tell you what my expectation is.

In either event (delay or cancellation), we will not be insured for the extension, since, in common with all travel insurance, we are nor covered for any of the actual reasons why flights are delayed in the real world. We will therefore incur additional costs in extending our travel insurance. An extension of our car rental will also incur an additional charge, which, the small print informs me, is not required to be at the additional daily rate. I will probably suggest to Bernice that we leave Penamacor as planned, return the car on time, and, if necessary, stay overnight in a hotel near the airport.

And after the elephant, we have the vignettes.

First, I have to update you on the neighbourhood supplies front. The neighbour who has been dropping round bags of fruit outdid herself last week. First, she brought about two-and-a-half kilo of plums, assuring Tslil that these were the last of her crop. The following day, she brought a second bag of plums, of equal weight, and a slightly smaller bag of peaches. All of this fruit, I have to say, was deliciously ripe and juicy. The plums were mouth-wateringly tart, and the peaches were sublimely sweet.

Tslil and I spent an hour or so pitting plums and making jam. By the time the jam was ready to pour into jars, the neighbour had brought yet another two kilos of plums round. Tslil has an electric fruit dehydrator, which she put to good use, and the following morning she and Tao went round handing parcels of dried fruit to neighbours. Having brought silan to Portugal, we will now be taking a jar of plum jam back from Portugal.

Next, another quick supermarket story that occurred this last week, and that is a typical foreigner experience. There is a local cheese that Micha’el is very fond of, called Castelões. Before we left for the super last week, I checked the pronunciation with Micha’el. At the cheese counter in the super, I thought I saw the cheese at the back, but the label was obscured by a price stake. When my turn came to be served, I pointed to the cheese wheel and asked ‘Castelões?’ in an almost perfect reproduction (you’ll have to trust me on this) of what Micha’el had said.

The assistant hesitated, looked at me questioningly, and, I presume, asked me what I had said. I pointed again and repeated the name. After three times, I leant as far as I could over the counter and pointed unmistakably at the specific wheel. “Ah! Castelões!!” the assistant declared triumphantly, pronouncing it, I promise you, exactly as I had. My every encounter with this language seems to bring its own humiliation.

In other news: While the Portuguese heath service is highly spoken of, it is probably true to say that it is more efficient in the large cities than the rural backwaters. Several months ago, Micha’el trod on a branch, and it seems that there may still be some foreign matter in his foot. The doctor has told him to have a CT at the hospital in Castelo Branco, for which he expects there to be a three-month waiting list. The other day, he phoned the hospital to make an appointment. After a fairly lengthy call, he reported to us that, in order to make an appointment, he has to physically bring the necessary papers to the hospital, which is, of course, 40 minutes’ drive away. Presumably, the documents exist in the health service’s computer system. However, he is still required to present them. He cannot email the documents, or upload them to the hospital website, or fax them; he has to bring them in person.

And finally this week, a car story. When I was growing up, the joke that did the rounds was of a friend who had applied to join the police force, but was rejected because they discovered that his parents were married. (This joke represents more or less the extent of my teenage rebelliousness. Pathetic, I know.) Well, we think we have discovered another ‘profession’ that has the same entrance requirement: vehicle road test examiner. The kids’ experiences in Portugal have been about the same as ours in Israel.

The examiners, who clearly relish the power they wield, appear to assume that every driver both understands car mechanics and has mastered the entire arcane vocabulary of the subject in (in our case) Hebrew or (for the kids) Portuguese. They also assume that every driver already knows the procedure for the test, and that when a mechanic who does not enunciate clearly, and who is standing in an inspection pit directly under the car, shouts a command that can barely be heard above other shouts, and revving of engines, and whirring of power tools, then the driver will hear and understand the command. When the driver makes a not unintelligent but mistaken guess at what he is being asked to do, the mechanic becomes either sarcastic or belligerent.

Tslil had to take their truck for its annual road test last week. In preparation, Micha’el replaced a damaged headlight cover and their mechanic (a near-neighbour) checked the truck, finding no reason why the vehicle should fail. On the day, more in hope than expectation, we all awaited the result. The truck failed the test, for the following, most aggravating, of reasons. When Tslil took the truck last year, it passed; she returned home triumphant, with the green certificate and the disc to display on the windscreen.

This year, when she arrived at the test centre with last year’s green certificate, the examiner tested the truck and then asked why none of the repairs required last year had been carried out. ‘What repairs?’ asked Tslil. “These four’, the mechanic replied, pointed to four clauses on last year’s green certificate that neither Tslil nor Micha’el had read.

In their defence, they took the truck to be tested last year and they got a green certificate, meaning that the truck had passed. Nobody pointed out to them at the time the list of repairs that had to be carried out before the next year’s test. If someone were to ask the mechanic why this wasn’t pointed out, he would probably reply that ‘everyone knows about it’. So now the kids have a week’s grace to carry out these repairs, and, in this part of the world, there is no such thing as a garage mechanic who will carry out repairs within a week. Time moves much more slowly here. All very frustrating!

To end on a happier note. Tao and Ollie enjoyed a day at the pool last week, and Raphael enjoyed a morning at the supermarket!

Ed Note: When Bernice read this post, she commented that it all sounded as though I wasn’t very happy with the world. I hereby undertake that next week, whether I am writing from the comfort of our own home office, or the discomfort of Lisbon Airport, I will endeavour to be less Eeyore and more Piglet.