This week, as I sit here pondering which path to follow in this week’s post, I can almost feel, under my feet, the eggshells starting to crack.

Bernice and I are now seven days into our ten-day four-centre holiday in Britain. From Heathrow, last Sunday evening, we took the coach down to Swansea, where we spent two nights with the closest of friends. Back in London on Tuesday, we traversed the city to stay with my brother and sister-in-law in Chigwell. On Friday, we all went over to North-West London for my great-nephew’s barmitzvah.

Tomorrow (which, by the time I publish, will be yesterday), Monday, Bernice’s brother and sister-in-law are picking us up to spend one night with them in their newish home that we have never seen in Surrey. This will be our last leg, at the end of which we may well feel on our last legs.

My problem, of course, is that almost all of these people, and the cousin of mine that we met up with in London, constitute about 20% of my readership. The chances that I will be able to write about the last week without offending at least one or two of them are, to be honest, fairly remote, So, on the whole, I think I need to choose a topic that does not directly involve any of them.

Friday was Lag b’Omer, which may need just a little background. Over the seven-week period between Pesach and Shavuot, religious Jews count the Omer. The first four-and-a-half weeks of that period cover a time when the students of Rabbi Akiva were struck by a plague that killed 24,000 of them, representing the mass of the cream of Jewish learning. On the 33rd day of the Omer, the plague stopped, and no more students died. Rabbi Akiva decided to immediately gather new students and resume teaching. From this body of students emerged the rabbis who were responsible for codifying the Oral Law, which was responsible for ensuring the continuity of Jewish practice.

For this reason, the first 33 days of counting the Omer represent a period of semi-mourning, one aspect of which is that men do not shave. (In modern times, in Israel, many religious men, myself included, elect to shave on Yom Ha’atzma’ut, Independence Day.) On Lag b’Omer, the 33rd day of the Omer, the tradition is to resume shaving. End of background.

So, I planned to resume shaving on Thursday evening, as soon as Lag b’Omer began. To this end, I had brought my electric shaver to Britain. However, I had noted, the last time I shaved before Pesach, that my shaver was low on juice. I decided that, rather than charging it before we left Israel, and have it sit unused for a week, I would wait and charge it in Chigwell, on Thursday. You can probably already see where this is leading.

Amid all of the excitement of arriving in Britain and reuniting with long-unseen friends and family, all thoughts of Lag b’Omer and flat batteries flew out of my head, and it was not until I was about to go to bed on Thursday night that I remembered that I needed to charge my shaver.

“No problem,” I thought, with the level of clear-headedness that I usually display after a long, stimulating and exhausting day. “I’ll plug in my phone charger” (because, after a long day, my phone needed charging overnight, we only had one socket adaptor each, and Bernice also needed to charge her phone). “Then, when I get up to go to the bathroom during the night, my phone will be fully charged and I will be able to replace it with my shaver. My phone alarm will then wake me in plenty of time to shave before going to shul on Friday morning.” You must, by now, see where this is going, although I defy you, at this stage, to work out how it gets there.

We have to pause here for a little more background. In Israel, I daven in a minyan that begins at 7:00 on Sunday–Thursday mornings, and at 7:30 on Friday morning. So, I have a 6:10 repeater alarm and a separate 6:40 alarm for Friday.

Before we left Israel, I disabled both alarms. When we arrived in Chigwell, I reactivated the repeater alarm, since the minyan in my brother’s shul also starts at 7:00. What I forgot to do was to redefine it to include Friday. As luck, or Fate, would have it, I only woke once during Thursday night, which is unusual, and that was very early in the night.

When I checked my phone it was less than half-charged, so I decided to leave switching to the shaver until my second nocturnal bathroom break. Of course, on this particular night, there was no second bathroom break. In addition, of course, I had no alarm set for Friday morning, and, for the first time since our arrival in Britain, I did not wake just before 6:10, but, rather, at 6:25, leaving me only 15 minutes before we needed to leave for shul.

I sprang out of bed, grabbed my shaver, and swiftly shaved the week and a half of stubble from my left cheek. At that point, the uncharged shaver died. I plugged it in to charge it, but, unsurprisingly, even a quick charge takes 15 minutes, which I did not have. As a result of which, I went to shul feeling that I looked like a comedian about to go stage to perform a one-man double act, presenting his left profile to the audience to represent one character, and his right to represent the other.

The fact that nobody, not even my brother, commented on this I can only attribute to traditional British reserve and respect for the feeble-minded. I was, however, never more pleased to get home from shul and complete my shave properly.I do hope your week has been a little more sane.

Aside from which, and on a serious note, our trip so far has been wonderful, from the flight leaving on time, through reminiscing with multipole generations of very good friends in Wales, spending quality time with my brother and sister-in-law, enjoying a very special barmitzva Shabbat in a wonderful warm and vibrant community surrounded by family and friends. It’s amazing to think that we still have the barmitzva party and two days with Bernice’s brother and sister-in-law in beautiful rural England before we fly home on El Al, the airline that doesn’t stop flying to Israel!