Day 79: Sunday

Two of my readers last week asked me to drop them from the list of recipients, because “What started out as an interesting blog posting highlights of Michael’s experiences in a new country has now become political …. the news is distressing enough without adding to it.” I’m not sure that ‘political’ is the word that I would choose for what these posts have largely been over the last couple of months, but that is nit-picking. I accept the charge by-and-large, and it has set me musing about this whole blogging business, not for the first time.

The fact is, of course, that Penamacorrespondent has not been an accurate title for a very long time now, and the blurb on the Background page of the blog, proclaiming that ‘This blog is the story of our retirement adventure’ is only intermittently accurate. The simple truth is that this blog is a distillation of whatever swims most powerfully into my head in the twenty minutes after I sit down at the laptop on a Sunday or Monday every week. There have been weeks when I knew what I wanted to write about well in advance. Some of those have been recent weeks, and others have been weeks when we actually were in Portugal. However, more often than not, I start writing and hope that a theme will emerge. This is, as you may have suspected, starting to feel like one of those weeks. It’s not that the war is any less real or immediate, but rather that I do not feel that this is a week where there were dramatic developments on any front. I don’t feel I have anything new to add to the debate.

For us personally, it’s been a funny old week. Bernice has been opening more and more doors of her own personal Advent calendar. I’d better explain that quickly.

Micha’el, Tslil, Tao and Ollie should be arriving on our doorstep, God willing, around 4:00AM Monday morning, for a three-week stay. (Don’t worry – I’ll update you at the end of this post.) So, we have been excitedly counting down to December 25. For Bernice, rather than the calm before the storm, this has meant a co-ordinated campaign, mapped out meticulously in a series of to-do lists strategically deposited around the kitchen; a campaign of borrowing mattresses, bimbas (which are ride-on toys – we have to have at least two, and preferably three – to avoid tensions when Raphael joins us), high-chairs and so on; buying the one or two items of toddler and child equipment we haven’t yet acquired; organizing the children’s books; finding increasingly fiendish hiding places for the presents; cleaning bedrooms, washing windows, making up beds; leafing through menus; stocking up on nappies, favoured snacks and suchlike.

I cunningly managed to avoid almost all of this heavy lifting, by scheduling to give a talk in shul on Shabbat eight days ago and a talk to the local English-speaking seniors group last Tuesday. This meant that I was locked in the office researching, creating a PowerPoint presentation and polishing my notes until Tuesday. I conveniently came down with a cold then, which has actually become quite chesty, so I have been severely restricted. I did manage, on Wednesday and Thursday, to lay down supplies of my baking that would, in other circumstances, see Bernice and myself through the winter. If I’m lucky, they may last the expanded family a week: granola, rye bread with caraway seeds, platzels and beigels, seeded spelt-flour crackers.

This Shabbat I made it to shul on Friday evening, and we actually had two couples as guests for dinner. The attraction of a winter Shabbat Friday night is that you can chat for a while before dinner, eat a very leisurely meal, shmooze for hours afterwards, and then discover, when your guests leave, that it’s still only 9:30. I felt very congested through Friday night, and slept on some four-and-a-half hours later than usual on Shabbat morning. It’s fair to say that Bernice and I both spent Shabbat recharging our batteries. Today, not wanting to risk infecting Raphael, who has his own catalogue of childhood ailments without my help, thank you very much, I have stayed at home, leaving Bernice to spend the day in Zichron and explain to a devastated Raphael why Grandpa is not there. At least, we anticipated he might be devastated. Since it is now three hours after Bernice collected him from gan and he still hasn’t asked to video call me, I’m guessing maybe he’s putting on a brave face.

In Bernice’s absence, I spent the morning adding to our digital photoframe all of the pictures from the last 14 months, having been talking for the last few weeks about how under-represented Ollie is on the display, and how he is sure to be really upset by that. With any luck, he won’t read this post, and will never know how last-minute the redressing of the balance was.

And so, without even a feeble attempt at any kind of segue, to today’s trivia question. Who wrote the classic horror story The Monkey’s Paw? If you answered ‘Edgar Allan Poe’, you can give yourself a bonus point…but only because you fell into my trap and gave the wrong answer. The correct answer is ‘W W Jacobs’. (If it’s not Poe, it’s always Jacobs.) The real question is: Why do so many of us mistakenly attribute it to Poe? I know that I did, and at least two friends who I regard as men with impeccable educational and cultural credentials did as well, so what is going on here?

I spent a little time sniffing around online and discovered the following. First, Barnes & Noble, who, one would have hoped, know something about literature, have an excellent page advertising for sale an eBook of a radio script of the story, in which the text is headed ‘The Monkey’s Paw, by Edgar Allan Poe, Dennis Rhodus (created by)’ which doesn’t seem to me to be very coherent, but actually means that Rhodus ‘created’ the radio script. This text stands opposite a facsimile of the book cover, which proudly proclaims: ‘The Monkey’s Paw by W W Jacobs’.

Next, Amazon offers a Modern Library edition of an anthology entitled: ‘The Raven and The Monkey’s Paw: Classics of Horror and Suspense.’ The first author listed is Poe, which might lead to confusion.

It is ironic that this story, which is far and away Jacobs’ best-known work, should be misattributed by, I suspect, so many, to Poe, whose prolific work is so well-known that he would scarcely notice one story more or less. It hardly seems fair.

Jacobs’ other claim to fame is that he was a jury member in the mock trial of John Jasper for the murder of Edwin Drood, the character in Dickens’ last and unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. This was something of a celebrity mock trial, organized by the Dickens Fellowship and held in the Covent Garden Assize Court in London in 1914, with G K Chesterton presiding as the judge, and George Bernard Shaw acting as foreman of the jury. As I was tumbling down the Google rabbit-hole of this story, I noticed, incidentally, that the charge sheet states: “John Jasper, feloniously, wilfully, and of his malice aforethought did kill and murder one EDWIN DROOD on the 24^th day of December in the year…one thousand eight hundred and sixty.”

I cannot help observing that I am writing these words exactly 163 years after this murder took place, to the very day! I find that coincidence no less remarkable for the fact that the murder didn’t actually take place, since the victim, and, indeed, the defendant, are both fictitious characters, and, as if that were not enough, the ‘facts’ of the murder are not even stated in the fiction in which they appear, so that the murder is only speculatively fictional. It may not even not have really happened.

Forgive me for these ramblings. I shall put them down to nasal and bronchial congestion and stop here to make another of my excellent hot toddies. Come to think of it, these ramblings may have something to do with the toddies. Perhaps this time I’ll step up the lemon juice and honey and ease off on the brandy….and perhaps not.

Promised update: As you can see below, Raphael stoically accepted my absence yesterday. (I can’t reasonably expect to be able to compete with a banana.) Tao and Ollie arrived with their parents, on time, and were sufficiently recovered by lunchtime today (Monday) to test drive the trike and the bimba.