First this week some quick updates, which are mostly good news.

My cut finger has healed nicely, to the point where I‘m being cavalier with the kitchen knives again – do watch this space for further updates.

Unsurprisingly, in the end I chickened out of braving the China shop lady in the hope of making some exchanges. Bernice has womanfully found a use for the wrong-sized disposable aluminium baking dishes, and I decided to keep my other purchase, which proved to be worth every cent of the ridiculously low price I paid, and not a single cent more. So, a bad decision to buy it in the first place, but at least I didn’t dig myself into a deeper hole by exchanging it for the next model up.

More significantly, last weekend the kids took delivery of a rejuvenated truck, The replacement gearbox definitely seems to be an upgrade, and having the truck back means both that they are able to get to the land easily again and that Tao can go back to his rural gan, after a long period when he wasn’t able to.

Tao resumed his regular two days a week at gan last Thursday, and took very little time to adapt to the new-old routine. He has certainly matured socially over the last year. His month in Israel last November exposed him to a much larger circle of unfamiliar children and adults than he had been used to, and was quite a growing experience for him.

Although his nursery teacher is native Portuguese, none of the other children are (other than her own). They are mostly English speakers, with a couple of Dutch children. After a couple of months of gradual introduction to Portuguese, she has now switched to conducting the gan exclusively in Portuguese, which Micha’el and Tslil are very pleased about. We are also delighted that, with luck, this time next year we will have our own interpreter for the supermarket and other negotiation situations.

Last week included another event: we took Tao to the local library for a Portuguese story-time and related craft activity. This was arranged by his nursery teacher, and included most of the children at the gan, so it was a useful lead-up to his return to gan. Tslil had fortunately been sent a synopsis in advance, to familiarise Tao with the story before the actual event. This had the added advantage of familiarising us with the story, which is just as well, since I for one understood barely a single word of the narration, about a snail whose shell was damaged, and whose friends refused to take her in, but then provided her with her own new shell. Had the story not included friends making excuses that she snored, or sneezed too loudly, with both sounds reproduced by the narrating librarian, I would have been totally lost.

However, that spoken Portuguese humiliation was followed, at home, by a written Portuguese triumph. Bernice had picked out a couple of story books for Tao to borrow, and I was nominated to read one with him when we got home. Fortunately, written Portuguese looks like the Romance language it is. I was able to confidently decipher the title – A Montanha de livrose mais alta que o mundo – The Mountain of Books Taller than the World. (Of course the cover illustration helped to confirm this translation.)

Once inside the book, I was able to keep up a narrative that more or less matched the pictures, was consistent with what words I could make a stab at translating, followed a very satisfying narrative arc, and, most important, engaged Tao. When he immediately demanded a rereading (as he usually does with new books), I was able to embellish the early thrust of the narrative with the benefit of hindsight, and to notice, and incorporate, many details from the wonderful illustrations that I had missed on the first, more challenging, ‘reading’. The only downside of this triumph was that it left me even less motivated to do anything about the fact that I cannot communicate with anyone in Portugal much beyond saying ‘Good morning’, ‘Good late in the day’, ‘Good night’, ‘Thank you’, ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘Pardon me’.

Having spent the last couple of weeks in Israel before we flew attempting to give away, and work our way through, the generous crop of lemons from our barely mature tree, we arrived in Portugal to find that the lemon tree that flourishes in the backyard of the house here put our own tree to shame. This tree holds fruit that can be picked from the lower and the upper levels of the yard, and also from the first-floor balcony of the kids’ bedroom. The trouble with lemons, as I may have mentioned before, is that, while there is no shortage of recipes to be found that use them, most call for ‘two tablespoons of juice’ or ‘the zest of half a lemon’. So, as my contribution to the cause here, I have been starting the day with a cup of hot lemon water, and adding the juice of a lemon to my orange juice at breakfast. I feel a bit like Sisyphus, since I am sure the tree generates new fruit every night, but at least it seems like a healthier alternative to eating my weight in lemon cake and lemon curd.

Being an observant reader (all my readers are surely observant), you will, by now, be starting to wonder about the title of this week’s post. Well, if this were a selfie, you would see me perched in a coach seat, laptop on my knees, as we travel in relative comfort, en famille (six people, infinite luggage, no dog), to Lisbon, for a three-day, two-night city break. There is a story behind this mini-holiday; but then, isn’t there always a story?

Since Ollie’s birth, the kids have been trying to fulfil their legal responsibility as Israeli citizens to register his birth with the Israeli embassy in Lisbon. This is proving immensely difficult, for a variety of reasons that range from the almost reasonable to the utterly ludicrous, but which all have in common a very high degree of aggravation. Let me offer you just a small selection of what is a labyrinthine list, some of whose finer points, I readily admit, escape me, and are too painful for Micha’el and Tslil to try to explain to me again.

• The Israeli embassy in Lisbon is closed for all of the Jewish and Israeli and Portuguese holidays (which leaves precious little time).
• Israeli embassy staff have, in common with Foreign Office officials around the world, been taking industrial action for months.
• The kids are not regarded, under Portuguese (or, indeed, Israeli) law, as married. (They would like to arrange a civil marriage in Portugal, which would make their bureaucratic lives in general easier.* However, the Portuguese authorities require, for this, proof from the Israeli authorities that they are not married. Pause here for a moment to contemplate what a document that states that two people are not married would look like, and how the fact of their not being married would be verified, so that such a document could be issued…..Yeah. Me neither.)
• The Israeli authorities require from the Portuguese authorities a piece of paper that the Portuguese authorities do not issue.
• Even though the entire process of registration depends on documentation, the embassy does not offer the possibility of online submission of documents and registration; it has to be in person.

Enough of this. Anyway, before we came out, Micha’el and Tslil were planning to go to Lisbon to get a notarised translation of the last piece of paper they have been told they need, and then to go to the embassy to register the birth. It seemed to everyone a good idea that they time this for when we would be in Portugal. We could then all have a few days’ holiday, during which Bernice and I could take the children one day while the kids ran around doing all they needed to do.

In the end, this is not going to work out, because of the incredible inflexibility of the embassy, who are now offering an appointment in over a month’s time. At this point, the kids have decided that, if the registration of Ollie’s birth in the embassy matters to Israel, they will let the embassy figure out a way for it to happen that does not involve the kids taking a round-trip of 700 kilometres and losing two full days of their lives. If they can’t figure out a way, then it will have to wait until a time that is convenient for the kids.

All of which means that we are still getting a mini-break, only with less stress. The kids plan to go to a climbing wall. We have received (on Tao’s behalf) excellent recommendations for the aquarium and an on-hands science museum that currently features a special dinosaur exhibit. Tuesday – our last day in Lisbon – is, we now discover, Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) and we may even get to watch the big carnival parade through the city. The weather is forecast to be warm and dry. Our hotel is in a central area of the city, not too far from the river estuary and with plenty of vegan and vegetarian restaurants. What, I ask myself, can go wrong? (Tune in next week and you will doubtless find out.)

Meanwhile, don’t take my word for it that Tao enjoyed gan this week. And Ollie appears to have enjoyed staying home.

• Bernice has jus reminded me that getting married now will not advance the registration of Ollie’s birth with the embassy, since they weren’t certified as married before Ollie was born.