What if you were walking home one day and everything stopped, as if on pause? The cars ground to a halt where they were in the road, people stopped walking mid-stride, mid-nose-scratch; birds froze in the sky and the planets and sub-atomic particles stopped orbiting? What if all change ceased suddenly and stayed that way for an entire day or a whole year throughout the universe?

Is it possible?

I went to this great jewellery and knitwear sale last week. I’m pretty sure the woman who made the jewellery has a dazzling future ahead of her as a world-class designer of dangly crystals and beads, because she was selling beautiful things and the only thing stopping me from buying the bracelet and ring she was determined not to sell because it took her so long to make was lack of funds. She also knitted the most incredible jumpers with tassels and sparkly yarns, which are almost unsellable as well as they take so much time to make and she insists on making them with Jaeger wool, which alone costs hundreds of quid and that's before she’s sat for hours with a pair of knitting needles. Anyway, despite being a reluctant saleswoman, she twisted my arm to come and support her, laying a big fat guilt trip on me, but it was worth cancelling my meeting for, as she will now continue talking to me. Can I stop this now please, N? Phew.

(Update: The photos are now uploading)

 

I went to the Chief Rabbi's talk last Wednesday night. Dr Raphael Zarum, the (youngish, interesting-looking) man who runs the LSJS (London School of Jewish Studies) where it was hosted and where the stonking 70,000 volume library is that I have yet to discover the delights of, was happy The Chief Rabbi was going to the House of Lords in November because then he becomes a walking advertisement for the school - Lord Sir Jonathan Sacks. Ha ha.
 

As these are the ten days of repentance the main theme of the talk was tshuvah, and as the parashat ha shavuah last weekend was Ha'Azinu we were reminded of the importance of not speaking ill of Am Israel. Rather than a lecture, it was more an informal shiur to a room of people of outwardly mixed observance levels that included the importance of Elul, the point of sefer Bereshit when there are no Mitzvot in it and the Rambam's insightful understanding that we need to make teshuva on our character traits and not just our sins.

My only criticism was...
 

                                                

Why is England called Blighty? This is a Googleable question. Aha - the answer surprises me: it can be found here,  in the fountain of all truth. Another well-assimilated slang word in our fair language also comes from Hindi at the time of the Raj - the word for not very good quality. Kharab. As does Pucker, for excellent. Anyway. 
 

My one month summer holiday in London turned into a mind-chew, a soul-search, a huge dilemma and a mission towards change, which means we, that is the kids and I, decided we might just move back to Blighty, and although husband was not delighted about the idea in the slightest, he understood our reasoning.
 

Decisions like these aren’t easy to make and with six people in the household and the children at a crucial time in their secondary education, taking everyone’s needs, desires, futures and happiness’s into account is a monumental responsibility. I tore myself in two –Israel is my spiritual home; it’s where my heart lies; it’s mad and bad and achingly beautiful. Jerusalem—intense, stressful, haunting and ancient—has been a place of religious yearning, elevation and war for millennia. My husband has just set up a shop selling his handmade Judaica silverware in the swanky new shopping ‘boulevard’ near David’s Tower and the Jaffa Gate of the Old City, from where the historic, antediluvian  walls are visible, and his brothers need him there to help keep the family business alive and kicking.
 

Why, then?
 

                                                                                            



London was almost as hot as Israel today. The temperature may have been the same on a thermometer but the difference is, the heat in a Middle Eastern summer builds up day by day from May or June; by July and August, dry, intense sunshine pummels daily, mercilessly, the walls of the houses, seeps into the paving stones, warms the Jerusalem stone that covers every building in the city and clings like a leech only to heat them up the next day and the next until waves of heat throb from surfaces and wallow in dark alleyways. Getting into a car is like stepping into an oven and sun-facing rooms are sweltering by late afternoon, even if the blinds have been drawn all day. At least in Jerusalem, which lies nearly 800 meters above sea level, we have mountainous evening air that's chilly enough to warrant long-sleeves outdoors at night. A solace of coolness; the possibility to breathe and sleep. At sea level it's a different matter. Tel Aviv is sauna-like even in the evening in July and August - humid and sticky - sleeping without air-conditioning is a sweaty, tossing and turning affair and it smells varyingly foul around every corner, near every bin. So today in London, although hot, didn't have the heat around the sides wah wahing out of inanimate objects like a baleful radiator, so it was wonderful - I enjoyed it. I even left my jacket on all day.

I met a lovely estate agent this afternoon, which sounds an oxymoron but I can now vouch that they do exist. I liked him before I even met him because he sounded so nice on the phone. It might be because he's young, has only been an estate agent for three months and I doubt very much will be one for long, but still. I spent most of our meeting secretly hoping and praying my sons would turn out like him and wondering what the likelihood of that was. What delicate combination of qualities, characteristics, education, attention and nurturing does it take to mould a child into exactly the kind of person that someone might meet and be delighted to know such a person exists on the planet? More importantly, how can I implant  into my children by osmosis the precise qualities and characteristics that will turn them into excellent human beings? Will it happen naturally anyway? Because they seem to be on track but I have no way of knowing. Being a parent is hard because you have no idea whether your particular method of parenting and your struggle to balance discipline, fun and overt brainwashing will work until it's way too late.

Thus, forming a thing called life is not an easy matter. Forming a thing called the life you want to be living isn't either. Like child-rearing, it seems it's a matter of juggling certain elements you put in by choice, dealing with others that appear unplanned, steering away from unsavory or unacceptable features once you see them developing or if they go on too long, and relying, to a large extent, on faith, nature and luck. I'm trying to form a life that will be exemplary, or at least pretty great, and children that will be too. Any advice on how to do either is welcome.
   

                                     


In keeping with my inadvertent habit of meeting interesting people while using various forms of public transport, I met a man, his wife and their son in the departure lounge at Tel Aviv airport who sat near us as we waited, eating overpriced chocolate, to be called to our gate, and asked where we were from. We got talking about Turkey (their destination), California (their home and one of my potential study destinations), Jerusalem, tiny Acer laptops, and they made a kind observation that I appeared calm and sane despite 'having my hands full' as they politely put it as, by that point, my boisterous children were dragging each other across the highly-polished floor by their ankles. The man told me he owned one of the best knife manufacturing companies in the world, based in California, called alfi and that if I could come up with a name for his new kosher, colour-coded knives, he'd send me an entire set. He handed me his card - Mr Elias Alfi - and, obviously, I spent the entire flight to London thinking about colour-coded knives and names for his range and having come up with some pretty good ones, I thought, promptly lost his card when I arrived. Dammit. 
 
 

                                                   
First things first: this week is Passover, and from where I'm standing, Passover isn't a holiday as much as a destination. Preparations to rid the home of all chametz (wheat, grain and anything made of or containing it, including whisky) begin a month beforehand and take, basically, the entire month. No crumb of biscuit, no tiny speck of bread, no paff of flour must lurk anywhere in the house, which means using up stocks well beforehand, (pancake day must have originated via Passover because surely no one gives up flour for lent?) and rolling up sleeves for the mother of clean outs. Passover coincides with the onset of spring, hence the spring cleaning culture that has suffused into the rest of the world, and the weather has been sunnily helpful in that regard. One of the beauties of Passover is the clear out ensures that - unlike in my mother's fearful cupboards - there are no tins or jars bearing use-by dates that match the birth years of my oldest children; there are no unidentifiable sticky substances glued to dresser drawers that are overfull with things never used and never needed, and no malodorous whiffs of something possibly dead hum from behind the dishwasher.

It means working flat out to make your house look how it should really look all year round. This is the last stretch of the journey - we host  Leila Seder at our place tomorrow night - and soon the most tiring days of the year will be over. Every single cupboard has been cleaned out, every room turned upside down and washed with buckets of water, schoolbags are emptied and washed, shelves dusted, unused crap chucked, rugs washed, and our regular plates have been swapped over for ones kept in boxes in the storeroom for the other fifty-one weeks of the year. 

Luckily, this year I don't have to cook as well. A few years ago in London, at least one of the kids had a ragingly high temperature and we had the cooking to do on top of the cleaning and consequently, after the second of the obligatory four cups of wine, we fell asleep with our heads on our arms on the table.

I took my kids to Malcha, Jerusalem's shopping centre, yesterday to eat and buy presents for my in-laws, along with every other family in the rest of the city, it seemed, and saw a very serious-looking religious man standing next to a small stall with a sign saying 'Sell Chametz'. This means that if you possibly have any chametz left in your house after all that excruciating effort, you can get around the prohibition by selling it to gentiles so it's not technically yours any more.  

I went up to him and looked at the odd collection of not very many items on his stall, trying to figure out how it worked .
'Yes, please, I want to do this,' I said. 'What do I have to do?'
'You write your name, address and sign here,' he muttered, indicating the petition-like paper before him.
I dutifully obeyed. 'Now what?'
He held out a shoelace tied in a whole bunch of bows with a little knot and said something very quickly in Hebrew. I looked from him to the shoelace and back again, calling upon every faculty of intelligence I had, but nothing. I had been wondering if it involved money because he had a charity box on the table as well, and wondered how much this would cost me - or, better -  if I'd GET some money, but the shoelace thing utterly threw me.
'Ummm...wait. Can you say that again, please?'
'Amdhnosfiudhgn afdhajkdsno;iaijnvn viei oiegrjjnwoighiaopj' he said in a strong Yiddish version of Hebrew, faster than a worn-out-from-cleaning human brain could register.
'Again, please. Slower this time.'
Didn't make any difference. 
What I did understand, after going through it again, together, was that I was to take the shoelace from him, repeat what he said somehow and hand the shoelace back, taking great care not to touch him in any way in the process. I took the shoelace, got him to say it again, said something not exactly the same but passable (I gathered from his dubious side nod) and handed him the shoelace triumphantly.
'Is that it?' I asked. 'Only this is the first time I've done this, as you can probably tell: my husband normally does it.' (Only he doesn't - he claims he will and then forgets, hence my desire to make amends.)
'Yes,' he said, smiling tenuously at my imbecility, 'That's it. Happy Holiday.'
'And to you.'
So I'm exonerated should there be a deviant piece of biscuity dog food somewhere in the storeroom beyond the reach of my vacuum cleaner nozzle, but I'm still confused. Can someone please tell me, why the shoelace?

Before the next section of John Whyte Macpherson's article on the British Occupation of Palestine, I'd like to say Happy Holidays, whatever or whenever your holidays may be. Friends in the hood - you gotta come see my gleaming, organised house, because one thing I promise you is that with my tribe of unruly banditos and the moulting hound, this won't last long.