On Shabbat morning, I was invited by one of the gabbaim to lead the shacharit service in synagogue. This is something that I have been doing, off and on, since my days in the children’s service in Beehive Lane shul 60+ years ago, so any hesitation I may have had before agreeing was only along the lines of: ‘I wish more people arrived earlier on shabbat morning, so that there was a bigger pool to choose from.’

When I lead the tefilla, I am always careful to read from the large-print siddur on the lectern, to reduce the chance of making any mistakes, even though by this point I know a lot of the service by heart. However, when it came to the end of shacharit, and I went up to stand in front of the ark and take the sefer torah before carrying it around the shul, I was in a position where I could not quite see the siddur. There are two verses which the leader recites and the congregation repeats, the first of which, Sh’ma Yisrael, must be the best known verse in the whole of the liturgy. The second verse is only a little less familiar. I must have recited it several thousand times in my life.

However, when it came to this second verse, I found that I simply had no idea what the penultimate word – ‘Kadosh’ – was. I stood there, struck dumb, unable to focus on the siddur behind me and to my side, and feeling devastated. Some prompting from around me put me back on track, but the experience was shattering.

Reflecting afterwards, a number of things struck me. The first was that nobody made any reference to my temporary freeze. This was, I assume, out of consideration for my feelings, but also, I suspect, because the thought passing through other people’s minds was: Is this incipient Alzheimer’s?

The second thing that struck me was that I suspected this was passing through their minds because it was certainly what was passing through mine.

The third thing was that I was over-reacting, and momentary memory lapses, while they do come with the years, are not necessarily Alzheimer’s. A reassuring rule of thumb I read recently was that if you go upstairs to your bedroom for something, and when you get there you can’t remember what it was you wanted, that’s ‘just’ a sign of age. If, on the other hand, you go upstairs and can’t remember which room is your bedroom, that’s a sign of Alzheimer’s.

Knowing this (at a cognitive level), why is it, then, that when I have a memory lapse my immediate thought is that it might be Alzheimer’s? I don’t believe this is just my Eeyorism. The answer, it seems to me, is that Alzheimer’s is so front and centre in modern consciousness. On the radio, in podcasts, at the cinema, in literature, and, of course, in the presentation of medical science in the media: Alzheimer’s is everywhere. Because we are kept aware of it, we are on the lookout for it. It is far from unimaginable.

Which brings me to the geo-political elephant in the room – an elephant that has reached such a size that, if I want to continue to ignore it, then, to paraphrase Roy Scheider in Jaws, ‘You’re gonna need a bigger room’. I’ve never been one to follow current affairs with the enthusiasm or assiduousness with which I follow some of the arts, Wimbledon, or The Times crossword, but even I feel there is something a bit bizarre in a blog that doesn’t mention what is going on in Ukraine. So here’s a partial take.

I would suggest that the reason why the world finds itself in this crisis is precisely because, for much of the Western world, it is unimaginable (or at least it was until two weeks ago). When I was growing up the world was very different. 1950s American schoolchildren practised ‘duck and cover’ drills where they sheltered under their desks. However practical a protection that would have been against a nuclear attack, one significant effect was to foster, in the public at large, the belief that America was facing an enemy that might conceivably attack, using even nuclear weapons.

Then, in 1962, the Cuban missile crisis greatly strengthened that belief. Then, in Britain, the BBC produced a chilling pseudo-documentary – The War Game – depicting a nuclear war and its aftermath. Although it was made in 1965, it was judged by the BBC and the government to be too horrifying to be screened. It was shown in some cinemas and at film festivals in 1966, but was not shown on television until 1985.

The early 60s also saw the release of both Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and Sidney Lumet’s very different but equally powerful Fail-Safe. These were only two of the many, many Hollywood films dealing with the prospect of nuclear war.

In this climate, the public in the West, and their leaders, were sustained in their belief that the Soviets would contemplate nuclear war. Any decisions about what action to take in the face of threatened aggression were shaped by that belief.

In the last couple of decades, on the other hand, and until a couple of weeks ago, the public in the West, and their leaders, appeared to believe that any confrontational belligerence on the part of Russia was unimaginable. We no longer lived in a world like that. Certainly Russia no longer represented an ideology opposed to that of the West. We now lived in a world of globalisation and post-modernism.

So, when Putin stated in an article last summer his position regarding Ukraine, and restated it in the months since, the West chose to believe that the situation could be rescued through diplomacy. The Guardian quoted a US intelligence official in mid-February likening the West’s tactics in handling Putin to “dealing with a kidnapper holding hostages in a booby-trapped building. The first aim is to keep the kidnapper talking.” The hope was that a professional negotiator, or a sympathetic family member, perhaps a member of the Russian army, could talk the highly strung kidnapper round and make him realise that whatever his grievances, this is not going to work out well for him in the long term.

It seems clear to me that this was not the situation. The argument that Putin is irrational reflects a failure to grasp reality not on the part of Putin, but on the part of the West. Putin is not highly strung or unbalanced; his was a cool and calm calculation. and the West lost an opportunity to make him realise that he had miscalculated the naivete of the West. (Except, of course, he hadn’t; he had calculated it pretty accurately.)

It does, at least, seem that the leaders of the free world (as I guess we need to start calling it again) have been fairly quick to recalibrate their assessments of the situation, and it may even be that a resolution will come through a combination of painful actions. The Ukrainians will need to continue their resistance, sustained by whatever aid the free world is able to give without risking escalation. At the same time, the West will need to impose and maintain far-reaching sanctions that will need to hurt the West if they are to cripple Russia. In time, these sanctions that may also create a reality in Russia that somehow weakens Putin’s hold on power, or even makes him realise that there is no way he can emerge victorious from this endeavour.

If that looks to you like wishful thinking, then the alternatives seem to me too bleak even for Eeyore to contemplate.

Meanwhile, as the man said, ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t buy any green bananas.’

No! I can’t end there. Here’s a reminder of more innocent days, last July.