News from Israel continues to be overwhelming. However, truth to tell, we don’t have the time here in Penamacor to immerse ourselves in it as we tend to do, if we’re not careful, when we are at home. By the time I walk Lua in the mornings, it is past 10 AM in Israel, and the morning program I usually listen to has finished. I often listen to, or at least dip into, the archived previous day’s broadcast. I also use this time to listen to Daniel Gordis’s podcast Israel from the Inside, on the days when a new edition is available.

Beyond that, we read our thrice-daily WhatsApp feed of the news round-up, and one or other of us will sometimes read a story in more detail in other arms of the mainstream media. This is arguably a healthier news diet than our routine when in Israel; it leaves me feeling rather out of things, but there are times when that certainly feels like an improvement.

All of which is a long-winded build-up to the statement that this week’s post is unashamedly and exclusively devoted to what I’ve been up to this last couple of weeks: when I haven’t been with the boys, that is.

Two weeks ago, I ended my post with the following words: “We are confident that by the end of the second week we will have hit our stride, and be ready to go the distance. Tune in next week, to follow me eating my words.” This observation proved prophetic when I put myself to bed last Sunday afternoon and slept soundly for 90 minutes. Bernice, remarkably, just keeps going, despite firing on far more cylinders than I do throughout the day. But then, she is considerably younger than I am.

There is very little to report from here, other than that spending time with the family continues to be wonderful. Ollie’s appetite for listening to songs is as gargantuan as Tao’s for imaginative play. After Ollie mislaid Tao’s new Black Panther during a walk with Tslil one Shabbat, I found the superhero model in the grass while walking Lua on Sunday morning, and became, fleetingly, something of a superhero myself.

The following day was the 10th of the month, which, conscientious readers whose lives offer them little excitement may remember from our last visit, is the one day of the month when our supermarket senior citizens’ loyalty card entitles us to a 10% discount. So, of course, we went on an outing, and, much to Bernice’s surprise, 10% was indeed deducted from our total bill. These little victories loom larger, somehow, in a foreign language.

Even more remarkably, because totally unexpected, was what happened today (Monday) at the same supermarket. When we reached the checkout, I presented my loyalty card, which was duly swiped, as always. I know that certain items are offered at discount to card-holders, but I have never seen any sign indicating which items these are, and we have never enjoyed such a discount.

However, today, after telling us the final total for the bill, the cashier pointed out that we had accumulated credit of over 14 euros on our loyalty card, and asked whether I wanted to deduct this from the bill. I assume that we have been steadily earning discounts, but that these are added as credit to the card rather than being deducted from the original bill.

To save 14 euros on your bill is, naturally, a very pleasant experience. To do it unwittingly is doubly pleasurable. We left the supermarket (or the ‘super-dooper-market’ as Ollie has taken to calling it) with a spring in our step.

This last week has represented for me something of a mad social whirl, within the constraints of life in Penamacor, obviously. Friends of Tslil and Micha’el, also from Israel, own land about 20 minutes away. The wife’s parents are currently on a week-long visit, for the first time. The parents are religious, and, clearly, careful arrangements had been made for their visit, with the young couple koshering their vegetarian kitchen and buying new tableware and cookware.

On Wednesday, Tslil’s friend called to ask whether we could possibly spare them a bottle of wine, since her parents had not thought to bring any from Israel. (Needless to say, they are not seasoned travellers.)

As luck would have it, on this trip we brought six bottles with us from duty free. Each Shabbat we open a bottle, and, depending on how much anaesthesia we feel we need, the bottle lasts us until after lunch on Shabbat, or dinner on Sunday or Monday. So, we knew that we could easily spare a bottle.

On Thursday, they dropped in to collect the bottle, and the father (originally from South Africa) and I had a very pleasant chat about this and that (cricket, mostly, unsurprisingly). Bernice had been rather concerned that they might not welcome a bottle of dry white wine for kiddush, but, in fact, he seemed very relieved that I wasn’t offering him Palwin No 5 (or Manishewitz, if that’s your side of the pond).

Then, on Sunday, on our regular morning walk, Lua met up with what was clearly a friend, albeit an unlikely one: a little terrier who barely came up to Lua’s ankles. As the two of them raced around together, the terrier’s owner, a woman of Micha’el’s age, and I struck up a conversation. She, unsurprisingly, recognised Lua, and knows Tslil and Micha’el. From her accent, I would say that she had a middle-to-upper-middle-class Home Counties English upbringing.

She told me that she had been living in Berlin, but had grown tired of city life. After Covid, she was holidaying in Lisbon when a friend invited her to visit him on a piece of land he had just bought in the middle of nowhere. After camping on his land for six weeks, she decided to stay. Having recently come into some money, she was in a position to buy a house in nearby Penamacor, where she has now lived for three years.

At this point, my companion took the left fork in the path, to loop around back home, while Lua and I were going to carry on into the forest. Lua took a little persuading to leave her companion, but eventually she agreed. Once back home, when I wondered aloud whether my new friend worked or was of independent means, Tslil and Micha’el were able to tell me that she is an artist (so, presumably, she both works for a living and is of independent means), and makes her new home available for various art events.

It is certainly true that chance encounters in Penamacor can lead to very interesting back-stories. Not for the first time, I found myself wondering at the footlooseness and fancy-free-ery of today’s young – and no-longer-so-young – adults. I then reminded myself that, in our mid-thirties, Bernice and I, with our almost three-year-old Esther, moved from Wales to Israel.

I then “Yes, but”ted myself with details such as the financial and infrastructure assistance of the Jewish Agency, our previous history of 25 years of Zionism and the presence in Israel of Bernice’s sister and her and my various cousins and more distant relatives. It’s not quite the same as fetching up in Penamacor, or indeed Berlin, with no prior.

When my social engagements have allowed, I have found the time to do a couple of odd jobs around the house. This is undoubtedly the ideal way to curry favour with your daughter-in-law. Micha’el has a good set of tools, and is a keen and talented handyman, but he tends to be seduced by more major projects, is currently investing most of his time in teaching English online to help the bank balance, and has a less developed sense of the aesthetics of interior design.

Tslil complained one day about the state of the salon walls. The previous owner of the house had a large collection of art reproductions hanging around the house. Many of these were dark and dusty; several were devotional, depicting crucifixion and the performance of miracles. Tslil and Micha’el removed all of the religious ones long before our first visit to Portugal, and, over the years, they have removed more and more of the secular and sombre ones. Silent witnesses remained strewn across the walls, in the form of nails hammered in. These were beginning to really annoy Tslil. In addition, around the internal electricity box, which is a wooden cube sunk into the entrance hall wall, where damp has crept in over the years the plaster has started to crumble.

Enter the father-in-law. Having established that Micha’el did not have the necessary equipment, I set off for the China shop. I needed Polyfilla, and an implement to apply it with. I did not know what either of these things was called in Portuguese. (Indeed, in English, I’m not quite sure whether what I sometimes call a spatula is really a putty knife or a palette knife.) Fortunately, a suitably small (and very cheap) filler knife was on display in the shop, but I could not find any filler powder.

Undeterred, I made my way to the ‘proper’ hardware and builders’ supplies store, where, after a thorough search of the shelves, I still failed to find the powder I was looking for. I had done a little language homework, and was steeling myself to ask about “po, mistura água, preencher buraca na parede”, while knowing full well that my saying this gibberish would elicit, from the affable but non-English-speaking shopkeeper, a burst of response that would leave me infinitely further from my goal. Just then, wonder of wonders, I heard a lady my age conversing in British English with a younger man (her son), who, moments later, engaged the shopkeeper in fluent Portuguese conversation.

I explained my predicament to him. He spoke a sentence to the shopkeeper that contained none of the words I had assiduously gathered up in preparation, and, moments later, I was leaving the shop with a kilo of estuque de acabamento (finishing stucco, since you ask). Two days of occasional work with pliers (levering out the nails) and filler knife (filling in the holes) and Tslil was over the moon with the results.

I have to admit that the job was made considerably easier both by Tao’s assistance with the one or two holes and crumbling pieces of plasterwork that were at his eye level and by the fact that the original wall was finished by someone who clearly had all of Micha’el’s sensibility. We were able to go for a ‘natural’ finish that blended perfectly with the rest of the wall.

So, what with one thing and another, it’s a wonder I’ve managed to find the time this week to write a post. Join me next week for what promises to be more of the same, in my last post from Portugal. (Even though, by the time you read next week’s, we should be back in Israel…and asking ourselves where those four weeks went.)