Well, blow me down. You turn round twice and it’s Tuesday again and, yet again, I have no idea what to write about this week. So far today I have been playing very elaborate avoidance games. We were in Zichron yesterday, experiencing the weekly double whammy of not only getting to spend quality time with our grandchildren, but also having our children express their gratitude to us for doing so. I keep telling them they’ve got that backwards, but they don’t seem to have caught on yet.

While we were in Zichron, two parcels arrived at our home in Ma’ale Adumim.

Following on from last week’s rant against delivery staff, I could tell you how one of the drivers called me to say that he wasn’t familiar with Ma’ale Adumim and wanted me to direct him to Hashminit Street! He then asked me where Number 14 was. I explained that he should find an even-numbered house, walk to the next house and check its number to discover whether he was walking in the right direction or needed to turn round, and then walk until he came to the house that has a 14 on the gate and two 14s on the wall of the house. He then called to ask me if the gate was painted black.

I congratulated him on having found the house and asked him to leave the parcel (which, incidentally, weighed less than a kilo) next to the electricity box, out of sight from the street. When we arrived home that evening, we found the package, in a box large enough to contain a microwave, placed just inside the front gate. As I say, I could tell you all this, but two weeks in a row would start to sound like an obsession, and, anyway, all of you have stories that can top that, and, as one of my readers commented last week, at least the parcel contained what I had ordered.

Which was, as it happened, a digital photo frame, to replace the one that died on us a few months ago. In preparation for its arrival, Bernice and I had sorted through the photos we had taken on her birthday, when all of the family were with us, so I spent a couple of hours this morning working out how to transfer from my laptop to the frame, which involved trying to deduce where my younger self would have stored the Micro-SD card after he last used it many years ago, and then working out whether the photos were better as ‘fit to frame’ (with a slight border on one axis) or ‘fill the frame’ (with the danger of lobbing off tops of heads or severing fingers, but usually then being able to slide minimally to restore the missing body part).

Then, having finished my granola yesterday, and returned from Esther’s too tired to make another batch last night, I cleared with Bernice that we would move breakfast to lunch today, so I breakfasted on boiled eggs and a toasted platzel, and made granola in time to lunch on fresh fruit salad, granola and yoghurt.

Which means (I realise I am risking my life beginning two paragraphs in one blog with a subordinate clause acting as a sentence, but, if I don’t start living dangerously at 76, what’s life for?) that I now have about an hour and a half to write my blog before we go off to join my brother and sister-in-law, Martin and Adèle, for an earlyish dinner in Jerusalem. That would serve as an excellent segue into one half of today’s topic, had I not decided to start with the other half.

What a week it has been. Apparently, if you ask AI how, as a suicidal jihadist co-pilot, it would recommend overpowering the pilot, taking control of the plane, and crashing it into a skyscraper in Israel, it will give you a much better plan of action than attacking him with the fire axe stored in the cockpit. So, until AI manages to organise its agents sufficiently to take over the world, and either kill us all or keep us as pets, which many estimates seem to suggest may be soon after Chanukah, it should be able to ensure much greater success for Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.

Then there’s the Irish football team, who seem to have missed the memo about either refusing to legitimise Israel by playing them or agreeing to play them and behaving in a civilised way. They preferred to have their cake and eat it. Or perhaps they simply wanted to make up for not having expressed the appropriate moral indignation when they were exchanging Heil Hitler salutes with the German national team back in the day.

All of this was, of course, topped by the Durban Revivalists, aka The Green Party of the UK, who, at their annual conference this week, passed a motion declaring that Zionism is Racism. Apparently, backing a “single, democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine” is not racist, despite the fact that this state would ethnically cleanse Palestine, and (in the best-case scenario) expel all Jews. I still don’t really understand the process by which most of the ecological evangelists became mindless antisemites, but that is undeniably what has happened in Europe.

In addition, of course, publication day for this post is October 7, the third anniversary of the pogrom of 2023. The huge shadow that this casts is even darker because of the double realisation that the process of understanding how Israel failed to predict or immediately respond to the horrific assault has not even started yet, and that, despite three years of military and political efforts, despite the progress that has been made, the multiple threats to Israel are still present on all fronts.

And yet…

And yet, our sweltering and seemingly endless summer appears, right on cue, to have ended. Sukkot, for the first time in years, gave us the most clement of weather: dry, but bearably hot-to-warm, with no strong winds. If you suffered in your sukkah in weather different from this, then perhaps you should consider taking the hint that the best place to build your sukkah is… in Israel. Just saying.

Now we seem to be moving into that shortest of seasons in Israel: autumn. Mornings start crisp. Days are sunny but feel a little fresher and lighter. Evenings are pleasant. We no longer need the ceiling fan on in the bedroom at night. We are seriously discussing whether we need to take sweaters when we go into Jerusalem this evening.

It really feels as though summer had ended, and it has been a very special summer. It began in earnest with Tslil, Micha’el and the boys over here for almost five weeks, and is ending with Adèle and Martin returning to England this week after a month in Israel – their first proper visit in three years. Nothing personal, national or global happened to interfere with those trips, and we were able to spend a lot of quality time with our nuclear and extended family.

All of the last few books that I have read aloud with Bernice have lived up to their promise – which is not always guaranteed – and we have enjoyed some good film, theatre and concerts in recent months. On Sukkot we both were entertained in friends’ and family’s sukkot, and entertained family in ours. We met up with friends we haven’t seen in too long.

For me, the tefilla in shul over Tishrei very much helped me to celebrate the chagim in a frame of mind and spiritual state that brought me much closer to where I would like to be than is sometimes the case, something that was helped by a book that I am halfway through reading at the moment and will probably write about here some time in the next month.

From the sublime to the gorblimey, as we used to say. Sub specie aeternitatis, it matters not a jot, but, I’m sorry, I can’t help my petty competitive streak. Shortly after I started playing bridge again, I joined the Israel Bridge Federation, and started competing in a weekly duplicate competition in Jerusalem. Beginning as a Registered Player, I quickly gained the handful of points needed to rise to the level of Advanced Player (a very generous misnomer). Last week I played not with my usual partner, but with a friend whose mental acumen at the age of 92 I aspire to. We came top, and the four points this earned me raised me to the next level: Vice Master. While I recognise this is a name open to misinterpretation, I feel ridiculously, and totally disproportionately, chuffed at having reached these giddy heights.

So, while it is true that some of the glass is full and some is empty, I’m not at all sure that, for me at least, and at this distinct point in time at least, the dividing line is as far up the glass as halfway. It honestly feels more like three quarters. I genuinely hope that the same is true for you. The secret, I read this week, is always to have aspirations and never to have expectations. My aspirations start with me having Bronze Vice Master in my sights. I invite you to pursue your own.

Blogger’s Note: Good grief. I’ve just written an upbeat self-help column. I certainly didn’t see that coming!

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