The Mill Hillbillies

Silly food stuff

2012-02-05T15:39:00.000-08:00

This cold weather has kept me in the house. And allI feel like doing is curling up with my laptop, a cup of something hot, andsome nice stodgy comfort food. Maybe a donut. Did you know that in Canada, theyeat more donuts per capita than anywhere else in the world? Just one of thesnippets of information I’ve picked up.

Sugar is in the news. A group ofscientists in the US have just said that sugar should be regulated like alcoholand tobacco. They say that it’s driving disease and obesity epidemics that posea greater health threat than infectious diseases and argue for increasing taxes on foods containing added sugars,tightening licensing requirements on vending machines in schools andworkplaces, and limiting sales of added-sugar foods during school hours. Incase that happens here, I’d better go and stock up on donuts before tax isadded to them.

‘Sugar makes kidshyperactive,’ I hear you say. No, it doesn’t. Back in 2008, an article in theBritish Medical Journal debunked this, citing over twelve controlled clinicaltrials as evidence, and there have been lots of others saying the same thingsince. None of the studies could detect any differences in behaviourbetween the children who had sugar and those who did not. Scientists have evenstudied how parents react to the sugar myth. When parents thought theirchildren had been given a drink containing sugar (even if it was reallysugar-free), they rated their children’s behaviour as more hyperactive. Thedifferences in the children’s behaviour were all in the parents’ minds.

I found that there are other usesfor food besides eating it. A report fromresearchers in Detroit recommends a method called “nasal packing with strips of cured pork” as aneffective way to treat uncontrollable nosebleeds, in a girl who had a rarehereditary disorder that brings prolonged bleeding. They say there’s anestablished tradition of using pork for this purpose, but people stopped doingit because of the risk of infection. I don’t know whether that was to the pork,the patient or both. I wonder if a sausage would work as well. Would a BLT?None of this is much use to us, but perhaps salt beef would do the trick.Who's up for running a clinical trial?

Two Israelientrepreneurs reckon diners want a background check on the pedigree of theirsteaks. They’ve devised a Smartphone app that lets you photograph the barcodeof likely-looking meat at the supermarket and get an instant reply about whereit was raised. The programme also contains a DNA database that catches lowquality meat pretending to be the good stuff. And in Israel, it can not onlysay whether the beef is organic, but also when it was processed and finallywhether it’s kosher.

If you’re boredwith beef, you could try something else. Giraffe. Vets treating an adult,female giraffe at Israel’s largest zoo tested a routine sample of milk andfound that it clotted in the way required for kosher certification. Theysubmitted more milk for verification by the rabbinical authorities who ruledthat giraffe meat and milk would be kosher. This confirmed what you might haveexpected, since the animal has a split hoof and chews the cud. But I don’tthink we’ll see giraffe steaks on the butcher’s counter any time soon. Apartfrom the obvious difficulties with shechitah, it’s a protected species.

I’ve been vegetarian for 25 yearsso I think I’ll have some falafel instead, especially now researchers at JordanUniversity of Science and Technology have pronounced it OK to eat. They fedrats nothing but falafel for a month (I reckon I could handle that) and decidedthat if eaten in moderation and with other food items it can be considered assafe. So falafel, pitta, salad and all the trimmings, please.

Back in England, aConservative MP says that society’s obsession with beauty is having a badeffect on food. She is hoping to reverse the trend after calling for misshapenfruit and vegetables to be specially promoted and sold in supermarkets bysetting up a company to sell it, under the brand name Ugly. She says that wehave had cheap food here for many years, and that causes us to value it less,while costing more to produce. I reckon I could go one better than that hereat the Mill Hillbillies and run a page just for your photographs of unusually shapedvegetables. I await your photos with interest.

Happy 2012

2012-01-03T23:11:00.000-08:00

Now is the time when every would-be hunourist presents his or her predictions for the year. These are mine.

You may have gathered that I favourthe scientific approach, and that’s what I’ve adopted here. First, I thoughtI’d see how accurate the 2011 predictions were in Old Moore’s Almanac. This isa wonderful mix of astrology, greyhound racing winning numbers, lighting uptimes and ads for booklets about The Hand of God. This piece of magickalinformation (I suppose it’s more efficacious if you spell it with a k) musthave been what Maradona deployed in 1986.

It predicted that our mood wouldfeel as it did during the nineteen sixties so, wherever I went, I was sure to wearsome flowers in my hair. It didn’t work. Also Libra-born people like me were supposedto find their worlds enriched by personal relationships. But we’d also findourselves working harder than ever. Some of that came true.

All this is nothing compared withsome of the things being predicted by the gullible and the conspiracy theoristfor 2012. Apparently, the world is going to endon December 21st. So stop that career planning, don’t bother buying a house,and make sure you spend the last months of your life doing something you alwayswanted to do but never had the time,as long as it takes no longer than 11 months 3 weeks.

According tothe doomsday theorists, the Earth’s direction of rotation will reverse, the north andthe south pole will swap, a planet (and a meteor, in case that wasn’t enough) will hit the Earthwhich will also be swallowed up by thecentre of our galaxy (I suppose that will have to be after it’s been hit).

The sky is falling!Actually, no it isn’t. Let’s look at just two of these predictions. The doomsday story is actually based on a work of fiction written in the nineteen seventies,claiming that Nibiru, a supposed planet discovered by the Sumerians, is headedtoward Earth. I spy a trend here because scientology was started by a sciencefiction writer so as soon as I finish this I’m off to start my own religion. Nosuch planet has been detected in real life. But no wonder, say the conspiracytheorists, it’s invisible!

This catastrophe wasoriginally predicted for May 2003, but when nothing happened the doomsday datewas recalculated (as often seems to be the case) and moved forward to December2012. This conveniently enabled it to be linked with the fact that the Mayancalendar ends on 21st December 2012. Butso what? Perhaps the Mayans ran out of rock to carve the rest on. Calendars exist to keep track of the passageof time, not to predict the future. My last calendar ended on December 31,2011, but it was just the beginning of a new year. Armageddon didn’t break out on New Year’s Eve,we’re all still around and you’re reading this in 2012.

And now to the nextearth-shattering problems predicted for 2012 – the reversal in the earth’s spinand the swap of the North and South Pole. Let’s get the first one out of theway - a reversal in the rotation of Earth is impossible. But Pole shift is arare phenomenon that can happen. It has done, at irregular intervals averagingabout 300,000 years. It’s been about 780,000 years since the lastone. Then we’ve been due another for 480,000 years! But there’snothing to say it’ll happen this year. And even if it did, the process takes5,000 years to complete so we probably wouldn’t notice much.

It reminds me ofa doomsday scenario doing the rounds when I was a teenager. This said thatbecause the number of lemmings committing suicide had increased just before thefirst and second world wars, and another increase had been observed in 1970,that the third world war was imminent. Of course, it never came and it turnsout that lemming mass suicide is a myth, popularised by the likes of Disney ina film in which the lemmings were allegedly launched off a cliff from aturntable.

So much for whatwon’t happen this year. Here are my predictions for what will. Ken and Boris will be in the media during the first half ofthe year. The Queen will be in the news, particularly around the month of June.And there will be a lot more sports coverage around the months of July andAugust. You can find out more in Old Field’s Almanac. Buy your own autographedcopy via writeto.jude at yahoo.co.uk and find out what else will be happening in 2012. Ifwe’re spared.

Yay me - a story acceptance

2011-12-21T01:53:00.000-08:00

My first story acceptance! My story 'Reboot' will be appearing electronically in April 2012 and in print in May 2012. I don't quite believe it. Now, about all these others...

Little neutral one

2011-12-03T02:02:00.001-08:00

“Hey!” the bartender shouted, “we don’t serve yourkind in here!”
A faster-than-light neutrino walks into a bar.

No, this isn’t some massive typesetting foul-up: time travelmay be possible. Or so suggest the results of recent experiments. It’s been aninteresting time for physicists over the last few weeks. They’ve been presentedwith experimental findings that threaten to blow their vision of the universeto bits.

In September a team of French and Italian scientistsannounced that they had measured tiny particles called neutrinos (strangesubatomic particles that don't interact with normal matter) travelling faster than the speed of light. Lastweek the scientists did it again, using an improved experimental setup.

This is hard to get your head round, because light speed isthe ultimate speed that anything can possibly go. Einstein said it andexperiments have over the last 100 years have backed him up. Scientists are nowall tied up with conflicting emotions. They support Einstein but they’d alsolove the new finding to be right, and have the special speed of neutrinos asthe ultimate speed limit instead. But whatever the speed limit, I bet therewill still be people driving 10 mph less down the middle lane of the motorway.

Many more tests will be needed, however, before physicistsaccept the revolutionary result as final. Perhaps the scientists made an error somewhere. Oneexplanation being offered for the neutrino shocker is that, apparently, theyfailed to account for the fact that the GPS satellite they used as theirtimekeeping device is moving. If they had corrected for the motion of thesatellite as Einstein’s theory of special relativity says they should, theywould have found that the neutrinos were moving ever so slightly (sorry for thecomplicated scientific language) slower than light.

So maybe, after all, it’s all down to a problem with a satnav. Turnround at the first opportunity, neutrinos. Youhave reached your destination. In which case, it turns out that Einsteinwas right about the universal speed limit. Not only is special relativity safe,it provides an explanation for those faster-than-light neutrinos. They’re notbreaking the light-speed barrier; they just appear to be.

This is a shame, because there are a few things that travellingfaster than light would enable us to do.

Which brings me back to the the joke at the startof the article, in case you wondered. Somethingmoving faster than light would move backward in time. So the neutrinos would theoretically arrivesomewhere before they left and we could use them to go back to delivermessages. I’d send them to the mid seventies to tell people that heels with 4 inch platforms were not a good look. And neither were massivepointed collars on patterned shirts with matching five inch wide ties, enormous28 “ flares that tripped you up, or dungarees worn to the youth club disco. Ormaybe I’d use them for something more serious, like telling Moses to turn rightinstead of left so that Israel would get the oil (yes, this week you get twojokes even though one is older than I am). In these situations, an effect couldtravel back to a point before its cause had occurred, like a child in theplayground swinging before they get a push. I can see a lot of demand for that.

Travellingfaster than light would also mean that all thoseStar Trek fantasies about interstellar travel could come true. We could build awarp drive and, instead of comparing the price of a litre of petrol atdifferent garages like we do now, we’d be comparing the cost of dilithiumcrystals.

It doesn’t look like I’ll be doing any of that soon and thetheory of special relativity is not going to be overturned. If it was it’d beweird and they’d have to rethink everything. I get a headache thinking of theeffect that time travel would have on Shabbat starting and finishing. And howdo you light candles if cause and effect are reversed? It could be a Halachicnightmare.

But before we can really dismiss the neutrino findings, theresults of these experiments are going to have to be replicated many times. Thisgives me even more faith in science, where any discovery or observation issubjected to critical evaluation, testing and research, to clarify things andmake sure we get them right. To quotethe late Carl Sagan: “We are constantly prodding, challenging, seekingcontradictions or small persistent residual errors, proposing alternativeexplanations, encouraging heresy.

But let’s not take that so far that we end up believing intripe like toxins-as-the-cause-of-all-evil and astrology. Let’s also rememberanother of Sagan’s sayings: “Keep your mind open, but not so open that yourbrains fall out.”

Making nice

2011-10-17T01:54:00.000-07:00

If you think that fings ain’t wot they used t’be and that society getting less well-mannered, here’s some breaking news: Brits are polite. According to social campaigners the Young Foundation, in the report of a new survey, called Charm Offensive, people in all sections of society value politeness in others and tries to show it themselves. Although most people believe there was once a ‘golden age’ of politeness, in some ways we are behaving better to each other than one or two generations ago. Our society is said to be among the most polite and civil in the world, with great value placed on a smile from a stranger or a small act of kindness.

The report’s researchers travelled to wealthy and deprived areas and most people reported daily acts of kindness and courtesy from strangers. Bad behaviour was more likely to be something they had read or heard about, or seen happen to someone else. People reported that rudeness in their neighbourhood upset them more than crime. The research concludes that civility can be nurtured by encouraging people to be more aware about how their behaviour impacts on others.

This last bit isn’t all that new. In 2005, the American airline Song recognised that sometimes, people weren’t all that polite and started a programme in which nice passengers were rewarded with free tickets. Examples of behaviour worthy of a free trip include helping another passenger carry a bag, helping a flight attendant, and staying ‘upbeat’ in a difficult situation. I don’t know whether it worked, because the airline was wound up in 2006 – maybe because they gave out too many freebies. But it’s a shame other businesses don’t try rewarding niceness. I always say ‘thank you’ to bank staff, but they never give me any free money.

What is considered polite varies from one country to another. Many people comment that Israelis are rude and inconsiderate. But Israelis find polite behaviour – like saying please and thank you – superficial and only display manners with friends, rather than casual acquaintances or customers in a shop. Life is informal: teachers are called by their first names and after basic army training, soldiers are similarly friendly with their officers. Perhaps native-born Israelis cultivated this abruptness as a reaction against the manners of Europe's Diaspora Jews, who were seen as cringing and subservient.

What about other countries? An internet portal aimed at diplomats has told me all sorts of things I never knew, starting right here in Britain. For example, we’re told we should leave a very small amount of food on our plates when we’ve finished eating. Perhaps if I followed that I wouldn’t be the size I am. Here’s another: it’s considered impolite to ask for a tour of your host’s home. I agree with this one: ‘never try to sound British or mimic their accent’. American people seem to think there’s only one ‘British’ accent, and it’s that ‘jolly-good-show’ thing, so cod it ought to be battered and served with chips. As should those deploying it. We’re also told not to make jokes about kilts or ask a Scot what he wears under his. And when in America, we’re not told we shouldn’t imitate them so that’s OK, but y’all please note that holding the middle finger up by itself is considered insulting and vulgar.

On further Googling, it gets even more complicated. We mustn’t extend our hands palms outwards in Greece because it means ‘I rub mud (or worse) in your face’. Take my advice and never use the thumbs-up sign in West Africa and South America – I can’t repeat here what it represents. And in Russia, you should never to give someone an even number of flowers – that’s only done at funerals, otherwise it’s seen as inviting death.

Choosing the right gift, if you don’t want to wish someone dead, can be a minefield. Never give a clock to a Chinese person, because the word clock is almost identical with the word for death. Never give an apple to a Chinese person who’s not feeling well. The word for apple sounds a bit like the word for illness. On the other hand, the apple is a symbol of safety in China, so go figure. And if you do manage to work out what to give, don’t wrap it in white paper because that suggests funerals.

We should all learn what’s polite and what isn’t, because the Young Foundation has reminded us how much good manners matter. Rude Britannia is a myth and we’re trying hard to mind our ‘pleases’ and ‘thank yous’. Except in Mill Hill. In the unlikely event that the cyclist who shouted at me to make up my mind as he pulled in front of my car is reading this: I have made up my mind. You’re a &^%* and I hope you noticed me shoving my hand out of the window to do that insulting and vulgar American gesture mentioned earlier. But to everybody else, thanks for reading this. You can read my next article free of charge because you’re all so nice.

Nothing but the truth

2011-09-26T14:56:00.000-07:00

According to Mark Twain, ‘If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.’ But provided I had a good memory, I could tell you anything in my columns. I could say I was 16 years old with the body of Kate Moss. You couldn’t tell if I was telling the truth. I could say I’d just taken up skydiving. I could even say I’d found the secret of getting more than a feeble little parp out of a shofar after the 25-hour Yom Kippur fast, and you’d never know it was a lie (unless you came along to my synagogue at Neilah).

But now you might be able to tell, if I spoke to you face to face. Last year I wrote about an Israeli computer programme that could detect humour and irony in conversation. Now, a team of scientists in Newcastle have developed a new lie-detector test that uses cameras and computer software to recognise untruthful faces, monitoring tiny changes in expression and blood flow. Apparently, we give our emotions away in our facial asymmetry, eye movements, blinking, dilated pupils, biting or pressing together our lips, wrinkling our noses, breathing heavily and swallowing. And these are just the visible signs seen by the camera. Even swelling blood vessels around our eyes betray us, and the thermal sensor spots them too.

In future the system could be used covertly by police and border officials questioning suspect criminals or terrorists. With hidden cameras positioned up to three metres away, suspects would not know they were being subjected to a lie-detection test. Scientists hope to trial the technology at a UK airport soon, probably running alongside experienced immigration officers as they conduct security interviews.

This new system is non-invasive, unlike the ‘polygraph’ lie detector tests that involve wiring up subjects to equipment to measures blood pressure, pulse, heart rate, respiration and electrical skin activity. People have been known to beat that test using a range of techniques, like controlling their breathing and heart rate. The problem with all these tests is that they detect emotions, such as distress, fear or distrust, and not the act of lying itself. Fear can sometimes be the fear of not being believed rather than the fear of being caught.

With Rosh Hashanah round the corner – a time when we think about judgment and good deeds – I thought I’d see what Judaism had to say about lying. There’s a Rabbinic saying ‘Truth is the seal of the Holy One, blessed be He.’ But Jewish tradition acknowledges that there are occasions when the telling of a ‘white lie’ can be in order, for example to promote peace and harmony, to spare the feelings of others or end a dispute.

Also, while truth has a high value; the saving of innocent life is considered to have a higher one. There are examples of this in the Torah: when Pharaoh tries to eliminate the Israelites by drowning their firstborn male babies he appoints midwives Shifra and Puah to do it. But they help save the babies by telling Pharaoh that they get to the Israelite women too late to do what he asks. We’re then told that God ‘deals well’ with the midwives, rather than considering them cowardly and disliking the fact that they lied.

The Talmud records an argument between Hillel and Shammai about what we should sing to a newly married woman as part of the wedding festivities. Hillel said that the words should be the same for all: ‘What a beautiful and graceful bride!’. Shammai disagreed, saying that each bride should be described as she really is. Hillel’s position is accepted as Jewish law: one praises the beauty of all brides. I’m sure any bride is beautiful in the eyes of her groom. So when you look at the wedding photos in any Jewish paper, think on.

I’ve been told some pseudo-Jewish things over the years that I suspect weren’t true. Here are just a few examples: ‘I finally understand the meaning of Shabbat. It’s to give a girl like you a rest from running through my mind the rest of the week,’ and ‘the gates of repentance are always open, just like my heart for you.’ Feh and double feh. But worst of all was the guy I met at a friend’s seder who asked if it hurt when I wrestled with Jacob, because I’m an angel! I thought of the perfect reply to such such a Torah maven: the saltwater reminded me of the tears of pain that came to my eyes when I first saw him. Unfortunately, I thought of it about a week later.

But those of us who can’t see through that sort of chat need to wait till someone develops a naffness detector, rather than a lie detector. Until that day, I leave you to decide what, from what you’ve just read, is actually true. There’s a prize for the person who guesses correctly. Maybe.

Obesity - a soft target

2011-09-03T10:03:00.000-07:00

It’s a hard life if you’re overweight. Or maybe that should read, “a soft, wobbly life”. I write as one who knows. Everywhere you look, there are articles about obesity, and it makes me feel that the next target in line will be those who are “only” overweight, like me.

Obesity is measured using BMI, which classes us as underweight, a healthy weight, overweight or obese for our height. Although BMI is meant to allow for natural variations in body shape, it has limitations as it measures total body weight, not the actual amount of fat a person is carrying. So a weightlifter or a stocky rugby player could fall into the overweight category, when in fact their weight is due to muscle (which weighs more than fat) and a heavier bone structure rather than excess fat.

A person is classed as obese when their weight has risen to the point where it affects their health. “The obesity crisis” or “obesity epidemic” is never out of the news. Almost one in four adults in Britain is classed as obese. This figure could rise to eight out of ten men and seven out of ten women by 2020, according to reports. It could cost the NHS billions extra because of the health problems related to it. In this country, even now, we have specially designed 'obesity ambulances' that can carry people weighing up to 70 stone.

It’s even worse in the USA, currently the fattest country in the world: obesity rates will rise from the present one in three to about one in two.

Some researchers say that tough action, like taxing unhealthy food and drinks would be so beneficial for health that they would save money in the long run. Norway and Finland have started doing this already, and Hungary are going to start taxing on pre-packaged foods with a high salt and sugar content, like crisps and chocolates.

Now we’re being told that we should not only worry about weight gain, but also about how long it persists. Analysis of results from a long-running heart research project shows that the longer people stayed obese, the greater their risk of dying from any cause. This is particularly important in today’s society where people are becoming obese at an earlier age: one in 10 children younger than 11 in England are obese.

So what’s causing it all? OK, we know: putting more calories into our bodies than we use in exercise. But what’s behind it? Some blame the variety and sheer abundance of food choices around today. But there’s more to it than that – it’s also a matter of how we live. Marriage seems to affect our weight. Both marriage and divorce can trigger weight gain, according to still more research. Apparently there is an increased risk of piling on the pounds in the two years after a marriage starts or ends, so you can’t really win unless you stay single.

I also found reports of a study suggesting that religion can make you fat, praise the lard. It said that religious people were 50 percent more likely to become obese, based on a correlation they said they’d found between the frequency that people attended religious “activities” (which meant meetings as well as services, so nobody escapes) and obesity rates.

It doesn’t say which religions the people they looked at practised, but I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t apply to Judaism as well. I would be interested to see the results of a study relating Jewish belief and obesity.

Here are some reasons why I think a link might be found: meetings (see above), we do love our committees; challah, cholent and big Shabbat meals; festivals lasting two days, each with their own high-calorie foods (think cheesecake, doughnuts, hamentaschen); eating matza for 8 days (a slice of matza is about as calorific as a slice of bread, but who can eat just one? And who eats them without slapping cheese, butter, jam or other calorie-laden stuff on top?); and finally, Jewish Mother/Grandmother Syndrome – one of my late step grandmother’s highest accolades was to call someone a lovely eater. We used to have plans to open a kosher caff called “Lovely Eater”, to rival the Happy Eater chain that was around till the nineties.

The researchers would have to make up their new categories for BMI measurements. I suggest “too skinny, eat eat already”, “you’re a lovely eater”, “cut out the kneidlach” and finally “say no to schmaltz”. Look out for just such a BMI calculator appearing in the online version of the Jewish News. I’ll be checking mine regularly. I’ve got nothing to lose but my latkas.

Dark sides of the moons

2011-08-12T00:33:00.000-07:00

For centuries, mankind has been intrigued by the idea that a full Moon drives people to madness and crime. The sun provides heat, light and life but because the Moon doesn’t really seem to have an obvious purpose, people made them up.

It’s a really enduring set of myths, there’s the idea of werewolves and even the word lunacy is based on the Latin word for Moon. The argument goes that if the Moon can affect tides, can’t it affect a person’s body since we’re 60-70% water?

But imagine if, when you looked up, you saw not one Moon, but two? The most widely accepted theory about how the Moon was formed says that another planet hit the Earth, throwing debris into orbit that came together to form the Moon. But now, two planetary scientists have suggested that Earth may have once had two Moons. They say that, billions of years ago all the junk came together as two different objects instead of one. They go on to say that the two were eventually splatted together in a slow-motion collision into one by the Sun's gravitational forces. They base this on differences between the lopsided terrains of the Moon. The near side, which always faces the Earth, is low-lying and relatively flat, the far side is high and mountainous, with a much thicker crust. They say this splatting (they actually use this highly scientific language) suggests that something ‘squished’ elements onto one side of the Moon only.

Of course, none of this explains why it looks like it’s made of cheese. Something to do with giant intergalactic mice?

If there were still two Moons, not only would we have to update a lot of song titles like ‘Moons River’, ‘Blue Moons’ and ‘Moons Shadows’ but there would also be major implications for Judaism. Our calendar’s a lunar one and all the holidays depend on the date of Rosh Chodesh, the new Moon. Would it mean that we had 24 months in the year? Or that we had to repeat a year every six months? Two Purims would be fun, but I’m not so sure about having two Yom Kippurs. In fact, the early kabbalists treated the day before each Rosh Chodesh as Yom Kippur Katan, a ‘minor Yom Kippur’ and spent the day fasting and saying penitential prayers. So – 24 of those?

Rosh Chodesh, the appearance of the new Moon, has long been considered a special holiday for women, I found several explanations including its being given to us as a reward for not worshipping the golden calf. One I liked less was that the Moon’s being smaller than the sun, means that women likewise have a lesser status than men. Whatever the reasons, Jewish women traditionally used to celebrate Rosh Chodesh by having a day off family chores. I like the idea of having two of those every month.

If I did, I’d spend more time on hobbies. Astronomy and astrophotography are two of mine. The good thing about them is that you can do them at home without running into problems with the authorities. Unlike a Swedish man who was arrested in July after attempting to split the atom in his kitchen, claiming that it was just a hobby. He had the radioactive elements radium, americium and uranium in his flat, although we’re not told how he planned to split the atoms. Perhaps he planned to use high energy protons. Or maybe a cold chisel and a four pound lump hammer. Whichever way it’s the sort of thing you should really only do in your garden shed. Police showed up and arrested him on charges of unauthorised possession of nuclear material.

He said he had tried to set up a nuclear reactor at home for months and kept a blog about his experiments, describing how he created a small meltdown on his stove. I know what he was going through – I once tried to toss a pancake in our kitchen. When he realised it might not be legal he sent a question to Sweden’s Radiation Authority, which they answered by sending the police. If convicted, he could face fines or up to two years in prison. At least that’s unlikely to happen to me, unless I happen to turn my telescope in the wrong direction. But if I got away with it, my skill in taking long-distance photos of the stars could be the start of my new career among the paparazzi. Or the blackmailers.

Hoist the colours, save the world

2011-07-24T15:47:00.000-07:00

Religious headgear has been in the news again. But this time, it’s not the nikab or hijab that have been attracting attention. It’s a plastic colander.

Niko Alm, an Austrian atheist, won a three–year battle to appear, in his driving licence picture, with a pasta strainer on his head as religious headgear. A ‘Pastafarian’ - a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster - Alm decided a colander would be the best sign of his religious devotion, and submitted a picture of himself wearing the kitchen equipment with his application for a licence. He wanted to test an Austrian law stipulating that head coverings were only allowed in photos on official documents for religious reasons.

At first, the application only earned him a mandatory appointment with a doctor to confirm that he was mentally fit to drive. The authorities say that religious headgear may be worn in licence photos, as long as the face is visible. But in this case they say that religion was never an issue. They say the photo fulfils the criterion of leaving Alm's face fully recognisable. According to Alm, though, the granted licence signifies Austrian recognition of the colander’s religious importance. He’s working on having Pastafarianism officially recognised as a faith.
Pastafarians are members of the US-based (where else?) Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. This was founded in 2005 in opposition to pressure from Christian groups on the Kansas school board to teach the theory of intelligent design in biology classes as an alternative to evolution. Since then it has engaged in a light-hearted campaign against religion. Key to the beliefs of Pastafarians is that the world was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but, owing to the monster being drunk at the time of creation, it has a flawed design.

The colander in the photo looks like it’s made of plastic. I wonder what you’re meant to do if, like me, you’ve also got a metal one bearing the names of different sorts of pasta? Perhaps that’s for Shabbat only? Or maybe not, perhaps Pastafarians can’t drive on Shabbat. Perhaps the choice of material depends on whether you’re a Reform or Orthodox Pastafarian. If that’s right, you can either drive all the way to Pastafarian church, or park round the corner and walk the rest of the way, depending on which you are.
This wasn’t the first time Pastafarianism got into the news. Last year, an American student was suspended from school for a day for coming to class dressed as a pirate. The disciplinary action provoked controversy because he said that the ban violated his rights, as the pirate costume is part of the Pastafarian religion and so a crucial part of his faith.

Pastafarians acknowledge pirates as being ‘absolute divine beings’ and stress that the worldwide decline in the number of pirates has directly led to global warming. The school were adamant that their decision to suspend the boy had nothing to do with his religion, and a lot to do with his repeated refusal to take any notice of warnings against wearing pirate outfits.
What would Captains Jack Sparrow and Pugwash say about it all? I’m not sure the pirate look is the right one for most of us, but maybe we should change our Facebook language settings to English (pirate) if we want to save the planet.

If you want a long life, it isn’t pasta you should be eating, it’s lockshen. Figures compiled by the Office for National Statistics suggest that there are nearly three times as many Jewish people who are 100 or older than there are in the general population. In the 2001 Census, the proportion of those in the Jewish community aged 90 or more was twice that of the rest of England and Wales. It might be because of the relatively high level of educational achievement among the population and the equally high numbers of Jews in white collar jobs. It seems that good education and good jobs tend to correlate closely with longer life-spans. It also turns out that we Brits live longer, on average, than Americans.

So maybe, if Pastafarians want to live long and prosper, me hearties, we should suggest that they move to the UK. But using the same logic as the pirate/global warming connection, I think the reasons for Jewish longevity must have something to do with clothes and headgear. So just to be sure, Pastafarians should wear sequins, pizzazz and penang, like the man said in the ‘Strictly Kosher’ programme, instead of pirate gear. And streimels (streimlach? streimeln?) instead of colanders, as long as they make lots of holes in them first.

Welcome to the silly season.

Blame it on the sun

2011-06-30T15:29:00.000-07:00

There are prayers of thanksgiving, prayers of praise and prayers that ask for things. When it comes to the natural world, there are blessings on seeing a rainbow or lightning, hearing thunder, experiencing an earthquake, and more. There’s a prayer for rain we recite from the autumn till Pesach: even the rustling sound the lulav makes is meant to remind us of it. Then there’s a prayer for dew. There’s even an incredibly rare blessing for the creation of the sun. We only say it every 28 years, when tradition has it that the sun returns to the position it had when the world was created. It’ll be there again on April 8^th 2037, put it in your diaries.

But, does anyone know of prayers to make things stop? Especially rain, here in London and the south. It may be dry now but you may not have noticed last week, as you switched your central heating on and scurried along the street under your umbrella, that the 21^st was the longest day of the year, the summer solstice.

I couldn’t find any traditional Jewish rituals to mark the summer solstice. But, there are legends, like one saying that on that day nobody has a shadow. That was certainly true this time, since the sun was absent. The term solstice comes from two Latin words meaning ‘sun stands still.’ For several days before and after each solstice, the height the sun reaches in the sky does not seem to change. There are passages in the Tanach that might have occurred on the summer solstice, like when Joshua stopped the sun in the sky till the Israelites had conquered their enemies.

It’s the only day in the year when the public are allowed right up to the stones of Stonehenge without making an appointment. As usual tens of thousands of party-goers, eco-warriors and new age groups showed up seeking a good time, a ‘spiritual experience’, or both. These included people calling themselves druids, trying to recreate the rituals they imagine prehistoric pagans might have enacted, although they wouldn’t have had to put up with the morris dancers who also came along.

Really, very little is known about the ancient druids as they left no written accounts of themselves and the only evidence of them is a few descriptions left by Greek and Roman authors. Stonehenge dates from 2,000 years before the druids (if they existed), so they’d have been no wiser about what it was meant for than we are.

In Austria, last year, druids were brought in to deal with a motorway accident blackspot near Salzburg, using rock and magnets. As well as using quartz standing stones to restore the area’s ‘natural energy’, they came up with a cheaper modern-day option – burying plastic slates with magnets in the ground. The Austrian arch druid reckoned the crashes were caused by radiation from a nearby mobile phone mast disrupting the area’s normal ‘terrestrial’ radiation and the number of deaths at the notorious crash site dropped from six a year to zero in two years.

As a scientist, I can’t take this seriously – I could fill a whole page with reasons why it’s drivel. I can’t be doing with all this touchy-feely business, particularly if it includes that all-purpose airy-fairy word ‘energy’. But, hang on - could there be something in it? I work from home, but ‘head office’ is on the edge of Salisbury Plain. It’s in a place marked Danger Area on ordnance survey maps, probably something to do with its proximity to a military training area. Whenever I drop in to see the boss, I drive past a road sign warning about tanks on the road. But, despite all that, I’ve never seen any crashes there. Applying the same cock-eyed logic as our new age friends do, that’s got to be entirely down to the druids at Stonehenge beaming energy up the A303.

. If a Jewish Buddhist is a Bu-Ju (and about a third of American Buddhists are said to be Jews), is a Jewish druid a Dru-Ju? I decided to ask Rabbi Google if there is such a thing as a Juid and at first it looked like there wasn’t, but then I found out about the best sort of druid. The Anglo-Jewish friendly society, the Hebrew Order of David International is an offshoot of a Jewish brotherhood originating in the United Kingdom in the 19^th century as the Hebrew Order of Druids. If any member is reading this, thanks for donating a minibus to Jack's school.

Sunshine, come on down. I can’t find a ‘keep the rain away’ prayer in any denomination’s siddur so I’ll have to make up my own. We can all try doing that. As long as we bear in mind that, although all prayers are answered, sometimes the answer’s ‘no’.

You know you need to lose weight...

2011-06-26T15:47:00.000-07:00

...when you need a new bra. M & S don't do the right configuration of band and cup size. So you look for bras on eBay and the ones that would fit are meant for transvestites.

Only 34 lbs to go...

One minute it's in your hand

2011-06-10T16:12:00.000-07:00

Food has been in the news lately. A couple of weeks ago, Marmite was made illegal in Denmark, on the grounds that the vitamins added to it make it a risk to public health. Some people said that we Brits should get our own back, by boycotting bacon. Fine unless you’re vegetarian, Jewish or Muslim, I suppose we’ll just have to find our own way to do it.

Then at the end of May, despite the event’s being officially cancelled because of health and safety fears, hundreds of people took to the top of a hill to watch competitors throw themselves down it after a eight pound Double Gloucester cheese. This was the Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling, an annual event going back at least 200 years. The winner got to take the cheese home. I don’t think I’d like to eat it after it’d been down a rain-sodden grassy hill, but that isn’t the point. What the point actually is, I don’t know.

If the winner doesn’t fancy eating their prize, they could try wearing it. A group of students at the University of Bath have stunned the fashion world by creating five dresses – heat-moulded and sculpted entirely out of a tonne of cheese. The range includes a ball gown encrusted with melted cheddar and each outfit comes with a pair of “Jimmy Cheese” shoes. Not practical for a cheese lover like myself: I'd be arrested for indecency within half an hour.

People in the US can now buy a sandwich in a can. We can get them online. They’ve got a shelf life of a year and don’t need to be kept chilled. Twelve flavours are planned, including US-style peanut butter and grape jelly, barbecue chicken and pepperoni pizza. If they introduce chopped liver or humus varieties I think they’ll be onto a winner.

At the moment, though, there is no getting away from cucumbers. One supermarket sold a heart-shaped cucumber to give to your Valentine. Roses are red, cucumbers are green?

According to police in Dorset, cucumbers feature among the bizarre excuses given by motorists for dangerous driving. One man who was stopped for using his mobile phone while driving was asked by the police officer whether the call was an emergency. The driver replied, ‘Er, actually, no - my wife was calling me to remind me to get a cucumber.’

And now, our salad bowls look threatening. Because they’re eaten raw, salad veg have more potential to pass on deadly organisms. In Germany, vegetables carrying E coli had caused the death of 18 people (at the time of writing this), with thousands more suffering from serious, potentially fatal, symptoms. Scientists believe the source is salad vegetables been infected by bacteria in animal manure used to fertilise crops. At the start of the outbreak authorities blamed contaminated Spanish cucumbers, but later admitted this was wrong.

I’ve heard it said that life is like a cucumber: it can be long or short, it can be hard or soft, it can be bitter or sweet, but mostly it’s bland. But not in the EU, at least as far as that long/short bit is concerned. It might look like one of those Euro-myths that the likes of UKIP put about, but there really is a regulation that lays down quality standards for size and also for the degree of curvature.

There’s no escape from cucumbers, even in the Torah. This week’s parashah describes the Israelites whingeing at poor Moses because they’re fed up (literally) with eating nothing but manna. They describe all the vegetables they claim to have eaten in Egypt – and cucumbers are first in the list.

Recently, I wrote a letter to the hints and tips bit of Another Jewish Newspaper, after they’d printed a suggestion from a reader that kidney beans could cure bedwetting. I said that the suggestion seemed to be based on something called The Doctrine of Signatures, dating from around 2000 years ago. This had it that herbs that resemble various parts of the body can be used to treat ailments of that part of the body. I went on to say that, while many medicines have been developed from natural sources, there is no scientific evidence that plant shapes and colours have any bearing on what they might treat, and that professional advice should be sought.

I don’t suppose you’ll be surprised to see that my letter wasn’t printed, probably my use of the phrase ‘superstitious nonsense’ didn’t help. But it has left me wondering what on earth the original writer-in might expect to treat by eating cucumbers, particularly the short, curly ones that Europe doesn’t like. Answers on a postcard, please.

I can't stop listening to this

2011-05-25T15:37:00.000-07:00

Let's walk like a panther! Let's dance!

Douze points

2011-05-19T07:18:00.000-07:00

The Eurovision song contest: a load of musical naffness that nobody should take seriously, or a stage on which the realities of the new Europe are played out? It began as a way of presenting the European ideals of freedom, unity and peace and it’s been going for 55 years, with some 100 million people tuning in, whatever their motivation.

Every year, when the contest comes round, at least one person asks me the same question: what’s Israel doing in Eurovision? This year the answer was ‘getting knocked out’. It’s down to the Field Effect again. I mentioned this last year: my family’s Jonah-like ability to close shops and make football teams lose, just by supporting them. I thought Dana International’s Ding Dong song was quite good, and that was enough. So farewell then, Dana. Sorry.

For the final, we didn’t know who to support. We couldn’t vote for the UK (just as well, really). So we decided to go for countries in my family tree that hadn’t already been Field-effected out in the semi-finals - Germany, Austria, Russia, Spain, and Lithuania – with mixed results. This year’s theme was ‘feel your heartbeat’. At times during the three and a quarter hour show I had trouble finding mine, especially during Azerbaijan’s winning entry – a love song with no distinguishing features besides male singer Ell stroking female Nikki’s face. I wonder how you say ‘Mind the makeup, Mush’ in Azeri.

Like most of them, that song was in English. At one stage all entries had to be sung in a country’s official language, but now they can be in any language, real or made up (like Belgium’s 2003 and Holland’s 2006 entries). There have never been any rules about the titles, though and a tradition of silly names was started by the French entry of 1959 with Oui Oui Oui Oui (not sung by This Little Piggy). It’s been followed over the years by gems like Boom Bang a Bang, Pump Pump, Ding a Dong and Diggi-loo Diggi-ley. Sweden came third one year with a song called Bra Vibrationer – meaning good vibrations.

Every year there’s always one country that comes up with something completely daft. This year it was Moldova’s mad group of ‘ethno-rockers’, wearing giant cones on their heads and featuring a woman in a fairy outfit riding a unicycle. I shouldn’t knock it: they only got 3 points less than we did, coming in one place behind us.

It’s not just love songs that get entered and some have been about pretty unlikely things. Norway’s 1980 entry was about the Sami autonomy movement. The 1982 Finnish entry was a protest against nuclear power and the 2003 Austrian one was all about how much the performer loved animals’ cute paws and noses. And this year Finland entered a lad of about 14 singing Da Da Dum, about trying to save the dying planet.

Points get awarded using a system called positional voting – countries rank their 10 favourite entrants, giving 12 points to the favourite, then down to 1 point for the rest of their picks. The song with most points wins. Perhaps the Lib Dems should have pushed that one in the referendum instead of AV.

We haven’t won a lot of points lately, till now. The first UK act to get the dreaded ‘nul points’ was Jemini in 2003, and with 26 countries competing (the highest number at this point) it made the out-of-tune duo the least successful entry in the history of the contest. In many of the last few years, we’ve done so badly that if we weren’t in the Big Five countries that automatically get into the final by subsidising the whole thing, we’d probably not have appeared at all.

Does everyone hate us? I don’t think so. It’s more a matter of our entering rubbish songs, whether sung in tune or not. In the years when we’ve done particularly badly, our entry has also done badly in the UK charts. If we don’t like it here, what chance does it have anywhere else? But this year we had a decent song, a band who sang in tune and we came 11^th.

I reckon I have as much chance of winning as some British entries in recent years, especially as solo female artists are more likely to win. Over the years, there have been 27 female winners but only 7 men. I’ve started practising, look out for me next year in Baku. Ignore any reports of earthquakes in north west London– it’ll be me doing Riverdance in the interval (I’m available for weddings and barmitzvahs). After all, if Abba can win with a song called Waterloo, I’m sure I’ll do well with mine. It’s called Mill Hill East.

Imperial Signet

2011-05-06T03:52:00.000-07:00

Imperial Cygnet

A late nineteen sixties portable typewriter I inherited from my mother. The sort of thing I don’t suppose many of us have seen for a long time. Made of grey metal, about the size of the laptop I use every day.

It has a faintly metallic smell, and the basic Courier character set of keys plus the margin release – letting you to go past the margin (which you set with a little sliding thing) and right off the end of the page if you want! Authorial freedom. It also has a key that will type a decimal point. Not much use to a fiction writer, and then just as now, there is no single key you can hit that will fill a page with deathless prose.

I’ve put a piece of paper as a reminder of what the output looks like; it’s a long time since anyone used it. You hit a key (and hit is the right word – it’s hard work) and a metal lever comes out and strikes the ribbon, imprinting the letters onto the page. You can’t change the font or its size, and there’s no delete or erase facility.

What a din it makes when you use it, “hammering” we called it, when my mother was typing her stories and novels. The last stage after longhand drafting, redrafting, reading to the teenage me: “What shall I call the boyfriend in this one?” “Tony” “No, don’t like that. Steve.” “Again?”

Double spaced, big margins, carbon paper sandwich. She had a wooden desk in the back bedroom we called the “writing room”, my father’s metal writing desk was on the other side. For some reason it was the only room without heating, they’d kept the gas fire. Two authors in a Liverpool garret.

We kids got the carbon copies for drawing paper, I didn’t get to draw on a fresh page till I was about 16. Were we scribbling on the back of untold and unsold tales, dreams? Perhaps so, I have carbon copies of the ones that were published. We didn’t ask our parents about that, didn’t want to remind them that they were waiting – for a letter fluttering through the door, or a ring from the postman with a manuscript too big for the letterbox. Publishers are bastards (Field, J, 1967-2011).

Locked in the typewriter’s memory, written into its levers and springs, roller and ribbon, are forty stories, five novels, one woman’s dream. Cut short at the age of 44.

As American as apple pie

2011-04-27T14:24:00.000-07:00

This is a guest post from my cousin Elaine, who lives in Seattle.

The antique cookbooks sit on the shelf. Every once in a while I dust them off, open one randomly, and lovingly try to imagine what it must have been like to cook on a wood or coal range, not for a camping trip, but every day in summer and in winter.

In honor of Independence Day, I put my cookbook collection to the test. My oldest cookbook is 1852, when the United States was a mere 76 years old. My recipe target for the holiday: apple pie, of course.

The 1852 The Lady’s New Book of Cookery by Sarah Josepha Buell Hale shows its worldly focus by providing recipes for both American Apple Pie and English Apple Pie. You would recognize the American pie today. Pare, core and slice apples, place them on pie crust (here called paste and very similar to today’s crust), strew some sugar and either lemon peel or cinnamon on top, add the top crust and bake. If your apples are green, stew them beforehand with a bit of water and sugar. English Apple Pie has paste only on top. The apples are accompanied in the dish by cloves, sugar, lemon peel, nutmeg and a tablespoon of ale or water.

The apple pie recipe in The Everyday Cook Book by Mrs. E.C. Blakeslee, Miss Emma Leslie, and Dr. S.H. Hughes (1896) suggests you stew and mash your apples adding sugar, a teaspoon of butter and some nutmeg before placing them in the crust . A lattice top or no cover is suggested. Eat cold with powdered sugar “strewed over it.”

The 1887 White House Cook Book by Mrs. P.L. Gillette lists Green Apple Pie and Irish Apple Pie. Quince marmalade makes Irish Apple Pie Irish. More interesting is Mrs. Gillette’s hint on how to make a crust flakey:

“After you have rolled out your top crust, spread it over with butter, then shake sifted flour over the butter, enough to cover it well … fasten the edges as any pie. Now take the pie on your left hand and a dipper of cold water in your right hand; tip the pie slanting a little, pour over the water sufficiently to rinse off the flour. Enough flour will stick to the butter to fry into the crust, to give it a fine, blistered, flaky look, which many cooks think is much better than rolling the butter into the crust.”

Plain Cookery Recipes written by Mrs. Charles Clarke of the National Training School for Cookery, Buckingham Palace Road, SW (1905) advertises Ten Plain Cookery Practice Lessons for a bit more than 2 pounds. The book includes lessons in scullery work such as cleaning ranges, kitchen tables, and copper stew pots as well as how to lay and light the fire. Recipes include Salt Fish Pie, Pigeon Pie, and Rabbit Pie. The closest recipe to apple pie is the Batter and Fruit Pie, which suggests using apples or another fruit. It starts with a pancake batter to which is added fruit cooked with sugar. This mixture is baked in a greased pie dish for half an hour.

Mrs. S.R. Dull (yes that is her name) in her 1941 book, Southern Cooking, has two apple pie recipes. For an Individual Apple Pies place cold applesauce in baked pastry shells and garnish with whipped cream, cottage cheese, or cream cheese. Apple Pie a la Virginia is a bit cryptic. “Make 2 pie shells. Fill with cold, sweetened and flavored applesauce. Place one on top of the other.” The pie is then cut into sections and topped with whipped cream and nutmeg. “The crust must be crisp, and the sauce cold.”

For Men Only: A Cook Book, written by Achmed Abdullah and John Kenny in 1937 starts with a less than flattering picture of women:

“The real trouble with woman as a cook, nor only as a cook, is that, most of the time, she is too case-hardened and hide-bound in an early New England way which makes her believe that, just because her grandaunt Priscilla – the one who, rightly suffered from indigestion – used lard in baking apple pie, it is up to her to be guilty of the identical culinary outrage.”

And this is after saying “Let us not forget that Eve proved what a rotten cook she was by handing Adam a raw and regretfully unripe apple.”

Thus one might expect that a wonderful apple pie recipe will be included in the book. Abdullah and Kenny’s Apple Pie has the usual ingredients: apples, sugar, flour, cinnamon and butter. All pretension of elegance is dashed with the first direction: “Make pastry from ready-to-mix preparation.” Lest classiness be totally forgotten, the authors advise you to “press the edges [of the pie crusts] together with the back of a silver fork.”

Of modern recipes, cooks.com‘s recipe for Perfect Apple Pie wins the prize for most ingredients. The crust has ten, including Crisco and lard and a choice of buttermilk or lemon juice. The filling sports eleven with both white and brown sugar and nutmeg, mace, cinnamon, ginger, and vanilla.

Is apple pie still relevant? Long ago, in my single days, a young man, whom I occasionally saw in the large facility where I worked, gave me a recipe for apple pie. Sadly, the presentation of the recipe did not lead to a date with the gentleman. I don’t remember if I ever made the pie. A friend was luckier. She met her husband through a company chat site due to an argument over piecrust. He claimed you needed ice water and she, being Chinese, insisted on warm water in the dough. They got together to figure out the difference and married not long after.

Elaine P. Bishop passed away in early June at age 68 in the presence of her family. She was a vivacious, enthusiastic, creative and loving mother, wife and friend. Her passions were writing poetry, reading, hiking, and dance (modern, folk and tap which she started on her 60th birthday.) She asks us to remember her by reaching out and sharing our love with others. Here is an excerpt from Elaine's poem. How Glad I Am

The dishes piled up in the sink.
The dirty pans began to stink.
The clothes were lying on the floor,
Multiplying, making more.
But all I did was stop and sit
And watch my children play a bit.
Now my dark hair is turning white
And no one wakes me up at night.
My dish is washed, my bedroom's neat.
I miss the sound of running feet.
How glad I am I stopped to sit
And watch my children play a bit.

She is survived by her loving husband, Jay, daughters Rachel and Sarah, mother Sophie Pollard, brother Robert Pollard and sister Marilyn Rand (Dennis). She was was buried at Hills of Eternity Cemetery.

Happy Easter

2011-04-24T02:10:00.000-07:00

I must say, Good Friday isn't like it used to be. I have a vague sense of having to keep a low profile in the early sixties for fear of racist attacks. Even this year I had this feeling at the back of my mind that I shouldn't hang washing out for fear of provoking the neighbours (who never hang anything out at all, at any time of the year.). And one year a great lump of coal fell out of the fireplace overnight and burned a hole in the rug.

But now all the shops are open, and it's like any other day. For some of us.

Wordy Rappinghood

2011-04-08T14:44:00.000-07:00

I was interested to see last week that Fabio Capello, England’s Italian football manager, says that he’s having problems learning some of the basics of English. He claims to be able to manage his players with just one hundred words of the language. I wonder which ones they are? Could someone persuade him to make ‘win’ the one hundred and first?

There are lots more for him to try. English has acquired the largest vocabulary of all the world's languages, perhaps as many as two billion words, and has generated one of the noblest bodies of literature in the annals of the human race. But it must be hard to get your head round it if you’re a learner like Fabio.

A woman can man a station but a man can't woman one. Why is it that when the sun or the moon or the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible? Hammers don't ham, ushers don't ush (although they can hush), grocers don't groce. Slim chance means a small chance, but fat chance means none. And then there are those unpaired words that look like they should have an opposite, but don’t: have you ever met someone who was ruly, gruntled, or peccable? Peckable, maybe.

It makes it hard to know what word to pick, when you need to get verbal. But, choose wisely. While doing a bit of research for this article (you see, it isn’t all made up) I was proud to find that there’s a verbal intelligence test called the Mill Hill vocabulary scale – confirming what I’ve always known: we Mill Hillers are intelligent and we’re certainly verbal. The test was developed during World War 2 when Mill Hill School was evacuated and the Maudsley Hospital moved a lot of their staff and services in to what they then called the Mill Hill Emergency Hospital. They treated soldiers and civilians suffering from the emotional traumas of war.

Oxford Dictionaries say that the word ‘time’ is the most often used noun in the English language. They got this information from the Oxford English Corpus, a research project representing all types of English, from literary novels to newspapers to the language of chatrooms, emails and blogs. Apparently, ‘the’ is the most commonly used word, followed by be, to, of, and, a, in, that, have, and I.

More than 45,000 new words and meanings were added to the latest revision of the Oxford English Dictionary. These include the heart sign, the first graphical symbol to signify a word. You can now also look up OMG (oh my God) and LOL (laugh out loud or lots of love), Muffin Top (a roll of fat visible above the top of a pair of women’s tight-fitting low-waisted trousers) and WAG (the wife or girlfriend of a sports player). They’ve added Tinfoil Hat – (noun used with allusion to the belief that such a hat made of metal foil will protect the wearer from mind control or surveillance – well, it works for me) and Five-second Rule (a notional rule which allows you to pick up and eat food dropped on the floor within the specified period of time). And they’ve added our very own ruach and rugelach. I heart it.

English welcomes words from other countries. We don’t have an organisation to keep these foreign ‘loanwords’ out and to make our own up instead, unlike the Academy of the Hebrew Language in Israel. That is responsible for creating new Hebrew words to keep up modern usage and it officially adds about twenty each year.

What they try to do is use Hebrew roots and structures to replace words derived or copied from other languages – like ‘televisia’, ‘cornfleks’ and ‘clips’ (meaning just one hairgrip). Or like, when our car broke down, it was because of a problem with the ‘brakesim’. And the hissed intake of breath that means ‘it’s going to cost you’ is the same in all languages.

At the moment the Academy is looking for Hebrew words for things like ‘compost’ and ‘composter’ and suggestions have included variants on the Hebrew root letters for words concerned with decomposition. But they’ve run into problems with the negative connotations of these words, because they want to persuade people that compost is a positive and useful thing.

Some families use totally made up words. Does yours? Sometimes they’re kids’ first attempts at a word that just stick. But others don’t seem to have any basis - my late father in law, when feeling listless and tired, used to say ‘I’ve got Lawrence’. There’s no record of what Lawrence felt about it.

Sometimes, though, people get things plain wrong. My daughter has a friend who nearly had us calling to SO15 when she told us she had a job with Al Qaida. It turned out she was working at Top Shop, part of the Arcadia Group. So now we know where bin Laden gets his kit.

Tomb sweeping day

2011-04-01T15:32:00.000-07:00

It’s that time of year again. When you wake up feeling refreshed, renewed and with a whole blank slate in front of you. I’m not talking about spring cleaning, I haven’t started mine, let alone finished it, so you can take my photo off your dartboard. No, I refer of course to the start of a new leave year at my public sector day job. There the days are, plus bank holidays, ready for the taking.

We need more public holidays. I like the sound of this one. Going off with my broom now, back soon.

Prize-winning art

2011-03-22T01:25:00.000-07:00

My son, Jack, has had this self-portrait short-listed in the secondary schools' art competition True Colours. He said: 'My favourite colour is red and blue. I like the colours I used and I like my neck red.'

Find it with both hands

2011-03-17T09:46:00.000-07:00

Last week, newspapers left right and centre warned us how we are all dangerously dependent on global navigation satellite systems like the US-operated Global Positioning System (GPS), the thing that makes our sat-navs work. Perhaps it wasn’t left right and centre after all, I didn’t check it on a map.

It seems that back-up systems are often inadequate, while equipment that can jam systems illegally is easily available. It could result in a collapse of the banking system, mobile phones, public transport (might be a bit hard to tell), with car sat-navs going on the blink so that you can’t find Waitrose.

Are we really that dependent on technology? Is it really that hard to find your way about? For some people, like Himself, the answer’s yes. When walking in the wild, uncharted countryside, he’s a man to go into the jungle with. But put him in a car... if he gives you directions, it’s like one of those sat-navs that has you driving into a river. The nearest I’ve ever come to that is ending up in the depths of Hampstead Garden Suburb instead of the Elephant and Castle, arguably a better place to be, but I think you get the idea.

It’s more or less the same when he does the driving. I’ll say “Turn left here” and, as he starts to turn the wheel right, I say, “No, your other left”. So we went out and got a sat-nav, and found there was quite a variation in cost. We decided to go for the middle range, thinking that the cheap ones might be less polite and say things like “No, the other way, stupid!”. A woman’s voice tells us how to find our nearest kosher restaurants and shops, also synagogues, thanks to the kosher sat-nav files available.

A female voice is used because a male wouldn’t ask anybody for directions. But you can get different voices, in the same way as you buy ringtones for your mobile phone. In a recent poll, the favourites were Nigella Lawson, Billy Connolly and Julie Walters, with Simon Cowell, Catherine Tate and Baroness Thatcher getting the least votes.

Anyone who plans to write “Jedi” under the religious section of the census form may like to note that you can also get Darth Vader, allegedly he tells you bear left, to the dark side Or, you can have Brian Blessed’s voice if you’re deaf like I am, and you certainly will be after an entire journey spent listened to him telling you which way to turn. For ours, I’d like to get an Overbearing Emotional Jewish Mother voice: “I say turn left, and he turns right already. Oy, vay, you’re breaking my heart”. It’d save me having to do it.

This technology amazes me, when I think back to how things used to be. A mere 30 years ago, I had to drive from Cork Airport to the town centre and I found that road signs would only take you so far. You’d arrive at a T-junction and find no signs at all. And, over there, part of the route anyone gave you would include the step “and then ask someone” (I don’t know what men did in this situation). It was the same in France, with only two signs in operation at any junction: one with the name of a town you’d never heard of, the other saying “other routes”.

Not much later, when I lived in south east London and worked in Woodford, the only way to get advice on alternative routes to the traffic-clogged A1M was our trusty CB radio, which saved me from being late for work more than once. My handle was "Amethyst", I can't remember why - it's not my birth stone. We drivers would keep in touch with each other as we crawled along, calling ourselves “Club 25” after the radio channel we used. The lorry drivers kept an eye out for when the contraflow through the Blackwall Tunnel had opened (I think they called it “the drain”), we’d let each other in and out of traffic streams (“holding a front door open”).

I’d write more, but I must pop out and consult what we call the Sat-Nav Rebbe for directions to the bagel shop with the shortest queue. Last time I punched a postcode in, it tried to tell me the old joke about how, if Moses had turned right instead of left when he led his people out of the Sinai desert, the Jews would have had the oil and the Arabs would have the oranges. I turned the voice off after that. We’re gone. Catch you on the flip side, good buddy.

I'm on my way

2011-03-09T03:53:00.000-08:00

Or, I might be. Hooray, Jack's teachers sent home a letter about a possible residential trip in July. Let's just hope the other parents agree, so that it can go ahead. It's the nearest we ever get to respite care and I will have 2 nights at my disposal. Let's hear it now: LIV-ER-POOL!

We all need a bit of motivation

2011-02-26T15:51:00.000-08:00

One evening some time in 1977 I was sitting with my flatmates and this came on the TV, think it was on Whistle Test. I bought the album and thought of it again the other day. Just the thing for a late night when you feel old and past it.

Life, but not as we know it

2011-02-19T16:40:00.000-08:00

Our garden has just become a red light area. It’s all down to me, but I haven’t opened a knocking shop down the far end. No, I’m looking at the stars; the red torch stops me falling over in the dark but lets my eyes stay adapted to it. I’ve been interested in astronomy since I was a kid (be sure to get it right if you don’t want to end up seeing stars: that’s astronomy the science, not astrology the silliness). Since the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990, experts have said that we’re in a golden age of astronomy – for example, it’s enabled us to work out that the universe is 13.7 billion years old and that its expansion is accelerating. Just like mine.

I’m in my own astronomical golden age, since himself gave me the best Christmas present. It’s a portable planetarium, a clever device that you point at an object in the sky and it tells you what it is and gives you an audio commentary. It saves me having to try to look things up on a chart.

It’s also given me an idea for a destination for my next holiday: Sark. It was declared the first dark sky island in the world last month in recognition of the exceptional blackness of the night sky that makes for amazing stargazing on the island. This is because there are no cars or streetlights on the island, so no light to spill upwards and blot out the starlight. It joins a number of other dark sky regions in the UK, like Galloway forest park in southern Scotland.

I like to think I’m following in the footsteps of the medieval Jewish scholars. Astronomy was the main field in which they made original contributions, developing new theories, tables, and instruments. This may have been because of its practical use in determining the Hebrew calendar; one of the most important activities for the rabbis in Talmudic times was setting the calendar and the holidays, for example using observations of the new moon.

Many stars were named by Arab astronomers around the 10^th Century. But in Europe, during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, many star names were copied or translated wrongly by people did not know Arabic very well, so the names don’t always make sense. I’m very interested in languages and I like to look at connections between them and the derivations of words, the reasons why we say things the way we do. It turns out that the correct versions of many of these “sort-of-Arabic” names include words that are similar to what they’d be in Ivrit, and it makes it easier to remember where the stars are. For example Dubhe (sounds like dov, at least it does to me) is the first star in the Ursa Major, the Great Bear.

Recently, an Israeli scientist from Tel Aviv University helped to discover a planet very similar to Earth, although at some 500 light years from our solar system, it is too distant to see. This boosts the idea that there are billions of planets revolving around stars similar to the Earth’s sun.

NASA has announced that their planet-hunting spacecraft, Kepler, has discovered over a thousand potential new planets around alien stars. Of these, five of them are about the right size, and in about the right place, to potentially support life. They call this sort of planet a “Goldilocks planet” because it’s neither too close nor too far from a star to rule out liquid water on its surface and so life (as we know it, Captain) on the planet. The best example of a Goldilocks planet is the Earth itself, provided we don’t mess it up.

Some people have wondered whether the discovery of extraterrestrials would threaten organised religion, but I don’t see why it should pose any more of a danger than the discovery of a new species of animal right here. If God has unlimited power, then he could have placed life on other planets and nowhere does the Tanach say that he created life only on Earth – the kabbalistic view of creation supports the idea that God created many worlds before our own. But would extraterrestrials have religion? I’m teaching the family how to say “Funny, you don’t look Jewish” and “take me to your leader” in Ivrit, just in case we have our very own close encounter of the Mill Hill kind (feel free to contact me via the Jewish News, Mr Spielberg).

My portable planetarium will also direct you to objects, based on sat-nav technology, so I bet it will give me driving directions to Mars. It’s over 34 million miles away, so it’ll be another 7 months (or maybe a bit more in a Yaris) before I hear “you have reached your destination”. But think of the Nectar points I’ll build up buying all that petrol.

Never forget

2011-02-13T02:03:00.000-08:00

‘I will not hurt anyone or stand by and watch other people get hurt’.

‘Even though all the people died it’s still going on - it makes me feel like I want to do something to change the world.’

These are some of the comments from the young people who took part in my synagogue’s Holocaust Memorial Day events at the end of January. This year’s theme for the Day was Untold Stories. For the last six years, the synagogue has run sessions for local school pupils in year 9 (aged 13-14) and above and trainee teachers, to teach them how the Holocaust has a bearing on them, today.

Many of the youngsters had never met Jewish people before or been in a synagogue. They might have gone past the building and seen the security we have to put in place, perhaps they felt excluded, but we want them to come in, meet us and learn about us. We set up a Shabbat table to show them the things that we use, and took a scroll out of the ark and unrolled it.

We showed them the synagogue’s Czech scroll. It comes from the village of Uhříněves, whose entire Jewish community was deported to the Terezin ghetto on Rosh Hashanah, 12^th September 1942. Afterwards the scroll became part of a huge collection of Jewish ritual object sent to the Jewish Museum in Prague. The Nazis may have intended to set up museums of an extinct race, once they had completed the Final Solution.

‘I did not know it was that bad’. ‘I never knew that people could do that to other people just because of racism’.

Some of the youngsters had not heard of the Holocaust before so I was particularly glad to be able to take part in these educational sessions. The Holocaust is on the Year 9 curriculum but they may not have covered it yet. It’s impossible for any of us to imagine what six million looks like, so we encourage the youngsters to think of it in terms of one person. And one person. And one person. And one person…

‘I realise how important every person is.’

The event included a workshop about Irena Sendler, Righteous Among the Nations. She was a Polish Roman Catholic Social Worker who smuggled 2500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto and placed them with non-Jewish families, in convents and orphanages. She issued false documents to the children to give them non-Jewish identities but kept coded records of their true identities in jars and buried them, hoping that some day she could locate the children and tell them who they really were.

Irena she was arrested and imprisoned by the Gestapo. Withstanding torture, she refused to betray the families sheltering the children, or the children themselves. She survived the war and used the notes in the jars to find the children and try to reunite them with their parents. Most had been killed in Treblinka, but some of the children found relatives scattered around Europe. Although nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, Irena never considered herself a hero or claimed credit for her actions. ‘Wouldn’t anyone have done the same?’ she would say, ‘the children were human beings’.

‘I truly understand how important it is that you come up and bravely share your experience. Everyone must realise that we need peace in the world today and you inspire me to make my views count.’

For me, the most moving part of each session was the talk given by a Holocaust survivor. Some people have only just started to talk about their experiences. One of our speakers did not say anything about what happened to her for 40 years, but her sons realised they were different when they would go to birthday parties as children and realise that their friends had extended families.

It was not until this lady’s granddaughter got to the age she had been when she arrived alone from Germany on a Kindertransport that she felt able to tell her own untold story completely.

‘I felt touched by the answer you gave when you were asked if you had ever lost faith in God during any period. You said not to blame God, but the humans around you. Take responsibility for your own actions.’

Holocaust Memorial Day gives us all the chance to consider what we can do to put an end to discrimination and persecution and to inspire young people to believe that one person can make a difference.

Living by numbers

2011-01-20T16:12:00.000-08:00

This year the 10-yearly census will be taken, on 27^th March. In 2001, the UK had its first census ever to ask a question on religion. Combined with ongoing research it’s produced some useful statistics on UK Jews: 267,000 people classifying themselves as Jewish across the UK, although 72% live in the greater London area.

There are a several censuses recorded in the Tanach. The Book of Numbers is so-called because of it: at the beginning Moses is commanded to take a census of all males over the age of 20 who are able to serve in the army. So maybe what they were trying to find out was potential troop numbers. Another way of looking at it is that the Israelites had recently escaped from slavery so a census could have been a way of rehabilitating slaves and giving them a sense of their self-worth and pride.

In fact, according to the Talmud, we’re not meant to count Jews. This is derived from the Tanach, where it’s written that whoever counts Israel transgresses a prohibition because ‘the children of Israel shall be like the sands of the sea, not to be measured’. So even the census in the Book of Numbers was done indirectly, each person contributed a coin and the coins were counted.

We have to use odd methods if we do want to work out how many people are present. So for example when counting for a minyan, quite often people (or rather, men aged 13 and over) are tallied while a Torah verse containing ten words is recited. Or you can say ‘Not one, not two’ etc. I seem to recall that being used when I was at school, particularly in the early days of the Yom Kippur War when services were held at every break time. Of course, even though I used to show up, it didn’t matter (not) how many girls came along as we literally didn’t count.

I suppose census taking all started in this country with the Domesday Book in 1085, but the first modern census is considered to be the one taken in 1841. Information from it is available online, as are details from those up to 1911. I’ve tracked my father’s family back to the 1881 Census, where my great-grandfather is listed as a master tailor and my great grandmother as a buttonhole maker. They came to England from East Prussia around 1873 and married in Manchester in 1875. Their marriage certificate records my great-great-grandfathers as a glazier and a shoemaker. The happy couple have made their marks, rather than signing – perhaps they couldn’t write in English (some people might say I’ve inherited that). It’s interesting to note that the marks are circles; they would not have wanted to make a cross.

Sometimes, though, instead of you finding them, your family finds you. In November, I wrote about taking part in AJEX’s remembrance events and mentioned my cousin who had served in Bomber Command. Earlier this month, the Jewish News received an e mail from a gent in Israel, who is also related to my cousin. This was the first time I had heard of this branch of the family, and I’m now in touch with ‘twigs’ from this branch in the USA as well. We’ve been exchanging e mails ever since they got in touch, and they’ve sent me some very moving photos taken by my great uncles and aunts during their emigration to the USA, for example their first ever sight of the Statue of Liberty.

It’d be good to think that, 100 years from now, people will be looking back at the 2011 census for information on their families, to find out how things have changed. Staff are needed for the census and I’ve applied for a job as an interviewer, following up people who haven’t sent in a form. So you may find me walking the streets of the London Borough of Barnet in May and June. If I knock on your door, all you need to do to fulfil your civic duty is remember that mine’s a black coffee, no sugar. Much obliged.

More doggerel

2011-01-14T09:36:00.000-08:00

Those officials who leave their laptops on public transport haven't done me any favours. Now all ours have to be encrypted. So I give you

Error message- the 5.30 am encrypted laptop blues

Woke up this morning, on with the laptop

The server gone done me wrong.

Waited to boot up

Onto the exercise bike,

Knitted.

Yarn round pedal. Waited

Brain boots up

Connected to server, dropped a stitch

Family won’t wear stuff I knit

Maybe this is why.

Coo, I'll be glad when we've finished the poetry module, and I'm guessing any readers I have left by then will be too.

The poem what I wrote

2011-01-05T15:56:00.000-08:00

My OU course has now moved into its poetry bit, crumbs 'eck. Here is my first effort, not produced by the methods we have done so far but one from the heart nevertheless.

I have gained understanding from all my teachers

Who is wise? He who learns from all men [1]
Save those who quack of toxins,

Energy

and wicked Big Pharma.

Evidence, evidence, shall you pursue. [2]

The knowledge of the unwise is as talk without sense.

How can he get wisdom...whose talk is of bullocks? [3]

1. From Pirkei Avot, a tractate of the Talmud dealing with ethical and moral principles.

2. cf Deuteronomy 16:20

3. Ecclesiasticus 21:18 and 38:25

Calling the kettle

2010-12-30T15:55:00.000-08:00

Earlier this month I nearly found myself in a kettle. The police sort, that is – it was the day of the most recent student fee protest. I’d come out of a building on Whitehall and found myself surrounded by what looked like every police vehicle and officer in the Greater London area. The ends of the road were blocked off and crowds, carrying placards, were converging on the area.

Because I’m doing an Open University course I decided I’d better hurry home and do my rioting there. But it was good to see such a large student protest. Tens of thousands of students felt compelled to travel to London to send a message to the Government that they were angry. Of all the policies to have come from the Coalition in the last six months, this is the first one that a significant proportion of the population has felt strongly enough to protest against. The protest was an altruistic affair since most students at the rally would not be affected by the proposed rise in tuition fees. But sensing that younger people would be saddled with a very large amount of debt after graduating, they felt it their duty to speak up. I was disturbed by the aggression, because the media carried that as the main story, and because students were involved in it. There was a violent minority who had gone along just for the fight.

In fact, the government is not saying that fees will go up to £9000 but that universities will be able to raise them to that amount. Can we expect to see more protests against those universities who implement the rises?

A well educated population benefits everyone in society. The better educated we are the better chance we have of remaining employed and paying our way in society. If higher education becomes too expensive for students from all parts of society then a university education will only be available to those with rich parents, which would create more social division and inhibit social mobility.

I believe that education is an investment for the future of the country, but not when people study subjects, like those some UK institutions offer, like Golf Operations Management. I do admit to a sneaking interest in Equestrian Sport Studies, though. I’ve had a moderate amount of success on the gee-gees this year so I’ve passed the practical. Do the students spend three years studying form? And what’s on the reading list - the Racing Post?

I think it's great seeing these people prepared to do something about a policy they do not like, showing initiative and spontaneity. I found both of these in short supply during my three years on the other side of the table, as a teacher, or rather as an “educator” (sounds much more impressive, doesn’t it?) teaching Hebrew and Jewish Studies at my synagogue’s religion school. It was not a match made in heaven– although I speak Ivrit, I felt like I was going into battle each week. We used a series of Hebrew books which drip-fed the aleph-bet over a very long time (I left before I found out quite how long). My class, aka The Young Offenders, had been at it for three years and if I tried to teach them a new word not in the book, (and there were many words I had to restrain myself from saying) I’d get blank looks, eventually someone would say “we haven’t done that letter” and it’d be back to the approved list. So I admire teachers as well as students, who have to go into battle every day.

My daughter asked Himself and me if we’d been on demonstrations in our student days (at least she didn’t say “when you were alive” like she used to). Himself told her about one he went on in the early nineteen-seventies when Margaret Thatcher was Secretary of State for Education, protesting against plans to reduce student grants. Around the same time, I was holding placards outside the Soviet Embassy, with my mother and the Women’s Campaign for Soviet Jewry, the “35s”. They were the most active and vigorous organisation in the campaign for Soviet Jewry in the UK, a group of housewives that defied the British Jewish establishment of the 1970s and 80s. They acted radically and used outlandish means in a very conservative environment, like releasing mice on the stage when the Bolshoi Ballet played, or distributing fake programmes with details of prisoners of conscience in concerts of the Red Army Ensemble.

My daughter seemed surprised to hear all this, just as I was taken by surprise at this upsurge in student activity 2010; student politics seemed to have lain dormant for years except for a lot of anti-Israel stuff. Maybe today’s students hadn’t “done that letter” as far as protest was concerned – but now they have.

Snow use at all

2010-12-06T16:50:00.000-08:00

Like the Eskimos in that urban legend, I too have many words for snow. Theirs (however many they really have) are unpronounceable, but mine are unrepeatable. I don’t like the cold, the transport disruption or what results from it – last week postal deliveries were disrupted, there were fears that shops could run out of stock and garages out of petrol. Traffic was snarled, schools and businesses were closed, extremities were frostbitten.

Things got really bad up north - in Newcastle last week, the police issued a reminder to the locals to wear their coats. Geordies are famous for their apparent insensitivity to cold, last year researchers planned to find out whether women in the north had thicker skin than those down south, and so could withstand the cold better. There don’t seem to be any results out but it can’t be right because I weigh a lot more than I did when I lived in Liverpool.

Even if I celebrated Christmas, I wouldn’t enthuse about the white sort, unlike Irving Berlin: some songwriters have a lot to answer for. As if that wasn’t enough, what about “Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow”? No, don’t, Sammy Kahn and Jule Styne. At least Gershwin tried to make up for it with “Summertime” - remember summer, when the living is easy?

This is wintertime, and the living is tricky. The snow melted but when it’s here, walking outside is a risky business. I was stuck indoors last week with only the laptop for company – I couldn’t take a “snow day” (bloody irritating expression that) because, as long as the electricity and phone work and the roof doesn’t fall in there’s nothing to stop me working from home as usual. But it was a bit quiet because the people I usually deal with couldn’t get into their offices, which left me with time to spare for a cabin fever-induced slide round Google. I thought I’d share with you some of the things I found out about snow.

Moving round in all the extra clothes you have to layer on when you go out in snow is good exercise – just walking in snow is like doing low-impact aerobics. Perfect timing for Chanukah – it meant we could eat more latkas and donuts.

If it snows again, why not try this recipe I found for “snow cream”, made from fresh snow mixed with condensed milk and berries? It carries a warning that the yellow stuff is not lemon sorbet.

A lot of the snow on the ground consists of empty space, that’s why it crunches if you’re the first to step on it. The empty space prevents the heat of the soil from escaping, protecting plants and animals in the soil from freezing and as the snow gradually melts it seeps into the ground instead of running off the way rain does. So first it acts like a blanket and then a nutrient – for soil at any rate.

Now for the Jewish snow trivia: a snowman does not count towards a minyan, however old he is.

Lebanon means white (as in the Hebrew “lavan”) and refers to the snow covering the peaks of the mountains in the north of the country for much of the year.

The tradition of wearing white on Yom Kippur to symbolise purity reminds us of the promise in the book of Isaiah that our sins shall be made as white as snow. I found over 20 references to snow in the Tanach.

A mikvah filled with water derived from snow, ice, or hail is regarded by the authorities as ritually fit for use but there seems to be disagreement about how to melt the snow.

Visitors to Congregation Or HaTzafon in Anchorage Alaska can buy t shirts bearing the logo “frozen chosen”.

The designers of Christmas cards are right after all – it does sometimes snow in Israel, in Jerusalem and other high-up places. That’s how Israel has its one and only ski resort, on Mount Hermon in the north of the country. But, card makers please note – robins don’t visit Israel (or anywhere else - they're residents).

There seem to have been quite a few Jewish figure skaters but few Jewish skiers, although I did find a course in skiing using the terminology of kabbalah on offer next year. I’ve got no wish to go skiing, with a red thread tied round my wrist or not. Everyone I know who has done so has injured themselves. Better to stay home and fall over in your own back yard. I used to like to go ice skating years ago, but not on a Mill Hill pavement. I don’t recommend it as a winter sport - last week I stepped out of my front door, did a half Lutz and fell right on my triple Axel.

Voici les vers de farine

2010-12-01T16:08:00.000-08:00

Sounds much classier than mealworms, don't it? We have been feeding the birds in our garden, poor little buggers in the snow. We give them suet, dried vers de farine, birdseed, fat tings from Homebase and keep topping the bath up with boiling water. Himself tried to make homemade bird food by soaking some stale bread in melted dripping, I wasn't there but I am led to believe it didn't work, so we won't be trying the croutons a la graisse de roti again.

Takes me back to my youth, schmaltz on bread sprinkled with salt...you could feel your coronary arteries narrowing by the second but the ecstasy. Now I'm a vegetarian and Trex just doesn't do it.

It's too cold here. I remember what snow looks like so please take it away again.

Well, it's happened again

2010-11-25T06:44:00.000-08:00

Every few years someone asks me where they can get body bags. Honestly, folk - I REALLY haven't got any, despite the fact that I look like one stuffed with waste matter tied in the middle. Day job, who loves you?

At the going down of the sun, and in the morning

2010-11-24T07:53:00.000-08:00

We should never take our freedom for granted, and we should remember the people who fought to make sure we are free today - without them we would not be here.

British Jews have always served in the Armed Forces. Many of those who were resettled in England in the 17^th Century served. In 1803, with the threat of a French invasion, a patriotic wave swept the country and over 200 served during the Napoleonic Wars. Some 6,000 served during the Boer War.

In the First World War some 50,000 served, more volunteering than were conscripted, nearly 10,000 were killed or injured. 1,596 were decorated, including six who received the Victoria Cross.

During the Second World War 60,000 Jewish men and women served, out of a total of 5 million under arms. This was greater than the proportion of Jews in the general British population.

Last weekend I went to two AJEX (Association of Jewish Ex-Service Men and Women) remembrance events. The first was the memorial Shabbat service at St John’s Wood Synagogue. Attendees included the Chief Rabbi who gave the sermon, the Lord Mayor Locum Tenens Councillor Louise Hyams, the Chairmen of the Jewish Committee for HM Forces and of the Jewish Police Association. AJEX members were there, and members of today’s Armed Forces Jewish Community and their chaplains.

Standard bearers processed the Colours through the synagogue as the Chazan recited the memorial prayer for the men and women of HM Forces who fought but did not return, for civilians who died in enemy action and for victims of the Holocaust.

I thought of those who died, but also those who survived. I thought about my father, whose war heroics I wrote about earlier this year, and my uncle Gerald, who had been serving in the Haganah but who volunteered for the British army at the outbreak of the Second World War. He fought in Palestine, North Africa and Germany, where he witnessed the Belsen atrocities and was responsible for arranging vital supplies for the survivors. I thought of my cousin Lenny, who flew in RAF Transport Command and who was killed in the Israeli War of Independence.

On Sunday, I went to the AJEX annual remembrance service and parade at the Cenotaph in Whitehall. AJEX always have a large contingent at the national parade on Remembrance Sunday but they also have their own parade one week later. This is because, in 1919, a member of the Royal family overheard an anti-Semitic remark about Jews not serving enough in the First World War and the King asked the Chief Rabbi to get the Jews to parade separately to show this was not true.

This year, marking the 70th Anniversary of the Battle of Britain, the parade paid special tribute to those who served in the RAF. I thought of my cousin, Sergeant Maitland Ellick, a rear gunner in 106 (Bomber) Squadron, shot down over Germany in March 1944, aged 22. During the war, the men of Bomber Command - all volunteers - were regarded as heroes without exception, but they have never been given a public memorial. Now, the Bomber Command Association is raising funds to erect a permanent memorial in Central London. I support for the call for a campaign medal for Bomber Command to be issued for the 30,000 pilots, aircrew and ground crew who are still alive; and to the next of kin of those who were killed in action during the war, or have since died.

My nephew Samuel West, of the JLGB (Jewish Lads’ and Girls’ Brigade) and aged 12, laid a Poppy Posy at the Cenotaph in memory of his great uncle Sergeant Henry Landau, who served in 166 Squadron. He died at the age of 24 in January 1944, when the Lancaster Bomber he flew as Navigator/Bomb Aimer was shot down in a raid on the rocket factories in Magdeburg, Germany. Samuel was honoured to be chosen to present the posy, and feels that it is important for young people to respect those who served in the forces for our country.

Wearing my father’s medals, I marched with the Westminster branch of AJEX, down Whitehall to the memorial service at the Cenotaph then back to Horse Guards Parade, the street lined with waving and saluting spectators. Stand at ease, stand to attention; I marched the way my father taught me (more years ago than I’m going to say) when I told him I wanted to be a soldier.

We will remember them.

Reveille

2010-11-13T01:59:00.000-08:00

British Summer Time ended on October 31^st . This was, for me, more of a trick than a treat because I was still waiting for summer to start. I hate having to get up in the dark: I tell myself it’ll be cold, I don’t need to get up right now; I’ll function better if I have more sleep. I eventually force myself out of bed, only to feel frantic because I’m late and then groggy for hours. My Creative Writing course was full of stuff about writing “morning pages”, for which you might have to get up an hour earlier than usual. For me, that’d be a night page and I do those before I go to bed. Confusing or what? Soon it’ll be dark in the late afternoon as well and that’s no fun because, thanks to the Meniere’s, when I can’t see, I can’t balance. Walking stick, torch: not exactly winter fashion items, and I’m fed up with being told to take more water with it.

I wasn’t surprised to read that Monday 1^st November was “officially” the most miserable day of the year. Not only was it cold and grey, but the clocks went back as well. I don’t know who these officials are, but they probably live in households like mine – now that my husband has taken (early) retirement I’m the first person up and it’s really hard to get going. I agree with Garfield, the grumpy cartoon cat: if people were meant to pop out of bed, we’d all sleep in toasters. I'd like mornings better if they started later- 6am is too early.

Now, a senior academic argues that if we did not put the clocks back at the end of October, but still put them forward in the spring, we would vastly improve our health and well-being. He says that we are happier, more energetic and less likely to be sick in the longer and brighter days of summer, but our mood tends to decline during the shorter and duller days of winter. So far, so obvious, but he also points out that where there is less daylight we spend more time indoors, making it harder to do vigorous physical activity and get fit, which can allegedly help protect against coronary heart disease, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and some cancers.

In December a Private Member’s Bill will be presented to parliament, aimed at making the government carry out a study of the costs and benefits of not putting the clocks back during the winter and take appropriate action in the light (sorry) of the analysis. SAGA, the organisation for the over fifties, has urged MPs to back the Bill, saying that a fifth of their members take less exercise when the clocks go back, while a quarter of them do not want to drive in the dark. I agree, especially right now – there are few things scarier than being driven at night by a learner. But I don’t know if people really would back it: would we want to give up the extra hour in bed we get the day the clocks go back?

And the bolt-on Jewish stuff that I add to these posts is there too: halachah dictates every detail of how we should face getting up. Modeh Ani thanks God for returning our soul and there is a series of blessings centring on the routine of waking up. We are supposed to wash our hands as soon as possible – right hand first. There is even a rule for putting your shoes on: the right shoe on first but tie the left one before the right. The Shulchan Aruch begins with the instruction “Arise like a lion to serve your Creator in the morning” although, in my case, it’s more like Bagpuss.

As if that wasn’t enough to make me feel inadequate, let’s not forget the Woman of Valour, the Eyshet Chayil, whose virtues are listed in the passage traditionally recited on a Friday evening after coming back from synagogue. We read that this Jewish Superwoman gets up while it is still night; she provides food for her family and also that her children arise and call her blessed. Yes to the first two but no to the third in my house – unless you count “blessed” as a substitute for something less complimentary, followed by variations on “go away”. The passage goes on to say that her husband also arises and praises her. I expect she brought him a cup of tea.

We’re also told that she selects wool and flax and that when it snows she has no fear for her household, for all of them are clothed in scarlet. With that in mind, I got the knitting needles out. It was then that the entire family refused to wear anything hand-knitted by me: it’s either too hot, the wrong shape or not stripy, depending on who you ask. Even That Leo the cat runs off when he sees me advancing with the tape measure. Anyone interested in a job-lot of red yarn? Buyer collects.

Too cold to snow (what DOES that actually mean?)

2010-10-30T16:20:00.000-07:00

One morning last week I looked out of my bedroom window into the dark, slumbering Mill Hill street to find that Jack Frost and his elfin helpers had been tripping hither and yon during the night, flicking their fairy brushes to paint trees, pavements and car windows with a dainty crystal dusting. Yes, winter paid us a visit, prompting memories for Himself of his early life on a farm, of having to go out in the morning and break the ice on the cattle trough. Our townie version of this is scraping the ice off the car windows – where’s the de-icer? Fill a jug with warm water, don’t slip where it falls on the ground and freezes. And with it comes the battle of the sexes we have over the central heating thermostat. He turns it down again and reminds me that he was brought in Kent, where the wind came straight from the north pole without stopping. I turn it up again and point out that I am from a desert tribe, have Spanish ancestry and that this warmer ambient heritage is not changed by later Ashkenazi influence or by being born a tough Northerner.

I’m glad that George Osbourne (brother of the more famous Ozzy) hasn’t done away with the winter fuel allowance, but I’m disappointed that he didn’t introduce one for winter cruises as at this time of year, I wish more than ever that I could be somewhere hot. Cold weather could also raise your risk of having a heart attack. Low temperatures are known to raise blood pressure and also increase levels of proteins that could increase the risk for blood clots. Certain activities more commonly performed during cold weather, such as clearing snow, might also contribute to the risk. So there are more dangers to it than being sued by people slipping thanks to your inexpert shovelling.

I don’t seem to be alone in this general wish to be somewhere warmer – it turns out that there have been lots of Jewish adventurers and explorers. I don’t know why that should come as a surprise, it’s just an extreme expression of an outward urge to travel that sometimes grips us, although for most of us it manifests in a trip round the Great Barrier Reef, sunning in Eilat, or just in a never ending quest to find somewhere to park. Here’s a bit about just three of them. There was Luis de Torres, a crew member on Columbus’s 1492 voyage to the New World and the first Jew to step foot in the Americas. Then there was Gaspar da Gama, who went to India where he met and married a princess, allegedly. Nathaniel Isaacs was an explorer and soldier in Africa’s Zulu region. For his services to chief Shaka, he was eventually crowned Chief of Natal.

But do you see a pattern? None of them went to cold places and while there has been many a Dr Livingstein, there hasn’t been a Schmaltz of the Antarctic. It’s that desert in the blood again, and it’s also down to the problems caused by the wide variations in day length at extreme northerly and southerly latitudes. In the arctic between late October and the middle of February, the sun never shows above the horizon. Whereas in Antarctica, during these months, the sun never leaves the sky.

This presents a halachic nightmare. Can you pray Shacharit if the sun doesn’t rise? When does Shabbat start and end on a day that doesn’t get dark? It’s the same problem that Jewish astronauts experience, as I mentioned in April. One suggestion is that people should follow the solar calendar of Jerusalem, but others say that only applies to land masses contiguous with Israel, making the North and South Poles something of a halachic no man’s land.

Some people, though, are determined to do what they can, regardless of the conflicting advice. In January, the first ever Shabbat service was held at McMurdo Station, a research outpost in Antarctica – even though there were problems in facing east since, at or near the south pole, every direction is north. Six out of a possible twenty showed up for this first service. I expect the rest of them started their own congregation.

Driven round the bend

2010-10-23T15:31:00.000-07:00

Next time the inspectors search for weapons of mass destruction, they need look no further than Mill Hill. In fact, they need look no further than the road outside my house. There sits what was a 10 year old Fiat Punto, but which is now an L (for lethal)-plated fear generator. You’ll know it by the way it clears parked cars by nanometers and stalls at junctions. The Munch ‘Scream’ lookalike in the passenger seat stamping at a non-existent brake pedal is me. In the driving seat sits Laura – provisionally licensed to terrify.

Learning to drive is more complicated than when I was 17 and all you had to do in the test was drive round for half an hour. Even so, my hands shook so badly with nerves as I waited to be called that I couldn’t light my cigarette, to the amusement of the others in the waiting room. There were no roundabouts on the roads near my test centre, the nearest I got to one was showing on a diagram where I’d position my car (‘on the grey bit with the dotted line down the middle’).

Since 1996 you’ve had to pass a theory test as well, including questions like: You lose your way on a busy road. What is the best action to take? There are a number of possible answers provided, including ‘Shout to other drivers to ask them the way’ but not ‘if you are a man, do not ask for directions’.

The driving test was 75 years old last June and today there are nearly 30 million cars on the roads of the

every day. Last week the test was adapted to take account of the demands on today's motorists: now, candidates are asked to follow a route they will be shown in advance, or to follow signs to a destination. It’s meant to give a better indication of whether they are ready to drive unsupervised. Learners can still ask for reminders to help them remember the route, and that they won’t be failed for getting lost.

But there’s still no motorway driving in the tuition or test. This is a shame for my daughter, as motorways are in her blood. That’s because, at 9.30 am on 2^nd November 1959, I was the joint first person on the northbound M1.

My family and I were driving up the A5, at Slip End near Luton, when we reached a roadblock at the start of this new motorway thing. The Transport Minister, Ernest Marples, was just about to cut the ribbon (this is the closest I am likely to get to name dropping and I’m determined to do it). Snip – the policemen let us through - my father floored the accelerator of our chunky Rover 105S and, doing 80 mph, passed Mr Marples a few moments later (no speed limit in those days, or crash barriers or lighting). I was sitting in the front passenger seat and one of my earliest memories is of crowds of people leaning over the bridges high above waving to us. We have a newspaper photo of our car on a completely empty carriageway.

Of course, I hope Laura will continue this family tradition of firsts, and pass first time. But if she doesn’t, she can take consolation from a survey done by Continental Tyres showing that those who pass on their second attempt end up with fewer points on their licence and are less likely to suffer road rage or be stopped by the police.

When she does pass, I suppose we’ll have to think about getting another car. We’ll wait till next year when the Terrafugia should be available. This transforms from a petrol-driven vehicle you can drive on the road to a winged aircraft in 30 seconds and it can cover about 400 miles before it needs filling up.

That means we could get to

Israel

on about 6 tanks of petrol. I suppose it also means she’ll need to learn Israeli driving, although the only traffic law seems to be that no driver may ever be behind any other driver. So now I’m looking for an instructor who specialises in flashing his headlights at the car in front for it to get out of his way, while driving so close to its tail that its driver can tell what he’s saying on the mobile he’s holding by reading his lips. A few weeks ago, for the first time in this country, I saw a car with a Lammed on the back as well as an L-plate. Will the owner please get in touch?

Laugh? I nearly

2010-09-30T15:11:00.000-07:00

According to that song at the end of “Monty Python’s Life of Brian”, we should always look on the bright side of life. According to the Book of Proverbs, “a joyful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones”. I’ve been feeling crushed and dried up lately with all this care home megabucks distance hassle so, what with Brian and Proverbs, and Readers Digest’s telling us that laughter is the best medicine, I decided to find out if it was true.

That’s how I found myself in Jewish Care’s brand new centre in Golders Green, while a bunch of Jews (OK, you come up with a better collective noun) laughed for no reason. To warm up, we stood in a circle chanting “ho ho, ha-ha-ha, ho ho, ha-ha-ha” while looking left and right. After this we had to expel our breath in a laugh, but make it sound like a motorbike. Then we walked round the room shaking hands with each other and laughing, while pretending that our hands were charged with static electricity. The laughter started with a sense of enforced jollity, but soon everyone was laughing for real.

This wasn’t an acting class. I was at the first exclusively Jewish laughter yoga session in the country. This different take on yoga was started in 1995 in Mumbai by Dr Madan Kataria, who believes in the therapeutic power of laughter - even when there’s nothing to laugh at. In fact, he reckons it’s better when there isn’t. That’s because, at first, he invited people to come to a local park to tell jokes. But as more people joined in he found that some of the jokes offended some members of the group, so he came up with strategies to make them laugh at nothing. Now, laughter yoga has caught on in some 55 countries, especially Scandinavia – and you thought they were a bunch of miseries. It’s only just starting in the UK, and I knew we were a bunch of miseries.

The session I went to was run by Stephen Ison, a Community Support Practitioner for Jewish Care and qualified laughter yoga leader. He says that people laugh less the older they get and points out that there isn’t much fun in the workplace these days (as public sector workers will concur). He asked us what we do to reduce our own stress. “Sex!” came a yell from the back of the room, which got us all giggling. “Golf!” called someone else. “Holidays!” shouted a third person, who clearly doesn’t have a family like mine who can’t agree where to go in the first place.

But apparently, laughing is a better stress-buster than any of these measures. It’s said to release endorphins to give us a “feel-good factor” and to break down barriers between people. Others have found this too – the journalist Norman Cousins developed a treatment programme for his arthritis incorporating laughter induced by Marx Brothers films. He discovered that ten minutes of laughter would give him at least two hours of pain-free sleep. Then there’s the therapeutic clown movement, inspired by Patch Adams, and its Jewish version - Mitzvah Clowns.

The idea behind laughter yoga is to stay connected with each other by maintaining eye contact and to keep laughing. As the body doesn't know the difference between fake laughter and the real thing, the exercises benefit the body regardless. As Stephen told us, the motto of laughter yoga is "Fake it, fake it, till you make it." For some reason this caused more guffaws from the sexoholics at the back of the room.

After about half an hour of pretending to laugh into a mobile phone and drinking pretend milkshakes, we got to the yoga part of it: silent meditation. This took more than one attempt to get right because, this being a Jewish group, it was hard to get everyone to stop talking for more than a few moments. Laughing was allowed, though, and before long the room was filled with it.

Stephen recently held a session at a care home for adults with physical and sensory disabilities, and they liked it so much he’s been invited to come back and run more. He also wants to set up Jewish laughter clubs that we can all join. As well as doing exercises, the idea would be to talk about negative or awkward things that have happened to us over the past week, and to gain self confidence by responding to them with laughter. It’s worked for me – next time life gives me lemons, I’ll be slicing them into a vodka and tonic. Yeah, right.

Dance! Dance! Dance!

2010-09-22T14:45:00.000-07:00

Yom Kippur is nearly upon us. These days, it’s all I can do to stay upright once it’s over, but I used to be able to walk all the way to shul, stand up through Neilah, walk home in the rain, grab a bite and then dance the night away.

Thinking about my fitter, stronger days brings to mind the soul-searching question I always ask myself on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar: whatever happened to After the Fast Discos? If they still exist, a new development has come just in time to help male dancers find post-fast partners: a team of psychologists has identified the moves that separate good dancers from bad. It seems that what attracts the most female interest is central body motion (tough luck, guys, if you’re into Irish dancing with its focus on the legs), sending out primal signals of health, vigour and strength.

Dancing increases energy, improves strength, muscle tone and coordination and reduces stress – although maybe not among the spectators. The researchers think their recommended moves will work for anyone - saying that despite cultural variability in the way people dance, core body movements generate the same attraction. They can’t have been to the sort of simchas I have, where the men suddenly drop to the floor and do that sitting-down Russian dance. It’s hard to be attracted to someone bobbing up and down at knee-level.
Anyway, supposing you don’t want to attract women? And what about people like me, sufferers from late-onset pedal bisinistrality, or - for the non-medical reader- two left feet? Not only does it mess up dancing but the shoe-shops at Brent Cross never have the right stock. I used to be able to hold my head up at the Youth Club, bopping round my strobe-lit handbag to Deep Purple, and I even won a competition with the way I moved to “Feel the need in me” by the Detroit Emeralds - the prize was a haircut at Vidal Sassoon, Manchester. But I can't do it now.

This reversal of skill is down to a very ex-boyfriend and his idea of the ideal mystery date. I was excited – would it be a delicious meal, maybe on to a club, or even a romantic weekend away? We arrived at Cecil Sharpe House (me wearing stilettos, but at least they weren’t white) with an entire evening’s folk dancing ahead of us, and not one Israeli step in the place. Fair play to him, though, for coming up with such an original way to get himself dumped. It acted as aversion therapy, and now I agree with the hundreds of people (maybe me too, once this gets onto the web) credited with saying that one should try everything once, except for incest and folk dancing.

As if that wasn’t tricky enough, I can’t remember the dance steps I look so bad trying to do; I have to take notes during the Hokey Cokey. Things reached a low point for me and my amnesiac left feet at a disco at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in the nineteen-seventies. Sweaty bodies writhed round me in the semi-darkness of the desert-hot hall as I did a “my shoes are glued to the floor but look, I can move my arms” mum-dance, years too early.

Abruptly, the music stopped, the lights clicked on and my fellow-dancers grinned as they waited for the next track. Then several hundred students began dancing the Paso Doble to “Y Viva España”. Within half a minute I lost my balance and fell at the feet of the guy who had bravely offered to teach me the steps. This was the first and last time I threw myself at a man, and it took me years to find the courage to visit Spain.

Dads get stick too. Other research suggests that their cringeworthy ‘dad dancing’ may be an unconscious way for ageing males to repel the attention of young women, leaving the way clear for men at their peak. But I reckon they’re just meeting the obligation on all parents to embarrass their children whenever possible. I base this on observations of himself's dancing. He has two right feet, talk about beshert.

New work from The Little-Known University of Mill Hill has convinced me to change my attitude to dancing. Following their groundbreaking study on how Yom Kippur congregation size affects the passage of time that I mentioned earlier this year, they have turned their attention to dance. Their findings are that all age groups and both sexes rate their dance skills as better than average and, they tell us, that nobody cares if we can’t dance well anyway. So I say that we should believe our own publicity and just get on the floor. From now on, I’ll be the first one up, doing the Cha-Cha Slide. Especially when my kids are looking.

The painless Brazilians

2010-09-12T15:37:00.000-07:00

One way to describe Rosh Hashanah is the birthday of the world. Jewish time starts, not with the first ancestors of the Jewish people, Abraham and Sarah, but with the beginning of everything.

The view is that everything belongs to God and that we are to be stewards of the earth, starting when God placed Adam in the Garden of Eden to work it and watch it. That story ends with Adam being told that he will derive food from the earth with painful toil all the days of his life and being banished from the Garden to work the ground from which he was taken. Things don’t get any better for his sons Cain (who worked the soil) and Abel (a shepherd) either – after Cain murders Abel he is cursed so that the ground will no longer yield its crops.

Our religious calendar is linked to agriculture, and the Torah is full of agricultural references: forbidden fruit, fig leaves, lilies of the field. Trees as emblems of human life crop up (sorry) frequently in the Tanach: The upright man is compared in the Bible to the palm and to trees in general. The just man is likened to a tree in a clean place with a branch overhanging an unclean spot; the wicked man, to the reverse. The Jerusalem Talmud forbids us to live in a town with no greenery.

Rashbatz wrote, in the 14^th Century, that the growth of cucumbers should be furthered by blowing the shofar at the time of the setting of the fruit. This explains why, allegedly, if you type the word “tekiah” on an iphone, the spellchecker tries to correct it to “relish”. Maybe my shofars will work on the ones in our garden and sympathetic magic will make our cucumbers three feet long and curly.

Despite all that, the Woody Allens of this world take the view that Jews are strictly urban creatures and aren’t into all this nature stuff, just like we’re not supposed to be any good at DIY (I will hit the next person who says that with my appropriately named ball pane hammer). In fact there have been a number of prominent Jewish horticulturists, like Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild. The Princess Royal described him to her mother, Queen Victoria, as ‘an excellent gardener and a good botanist'. The gardens he designed when he had Waddesdon Manor, his Buckinghamshire house built, are still considered among the finest in the country.

We recently renovated our garden, with the help of three men from Brazil. We got several quotes but we went with the Brazilians on the basis that they must be good at clearing jungles, or at the very least in cutting things right back to leave a clear border. It took a long time, but now we’ve got plenty of room for new planting, starting with more fruit trees in November.

We’ve already got a part-Jewish garden. No, this doesn’t mean one that we hire someone to look after, I’m talking about growing foods that form part of the Festival rituals: we’ve got apples (but no honey or pomegranates), plus parsley and horseradish for Pesach. Some experts recommend creating a biblical garden with seven plots, to coincide with the creation story.

In Judaism the number seven represents God’s perfection. There are seven types of plants mentioned in the bible: grains, flowers, herbs and spices, vegetables, vines, water plants and trees. Of the seven species that Israel is blessed with, we’ve got a fig tree, and the fig has been compared with the Torah because, just as you can eat every part of a fig, all parts of the Torah provide sustenance. So we’ve only got grapes, pomegranates, olives, honey, wheat and barley to go, although I’m not sure if there’s enough room for the last two.

There’s a Torah reading that Reform Judaism includes among the texts for the High Holy Days, in which Moses climbs Mount Sinai for the first time. God tells him that he can’t see his face and live, he can only see his back. I don’t know what this very human language really means – I don’t suppose God does have a back. What it does remind me of is, when himeslf and I are gardening, we take a break and one will say to the other “Well, you can see where we’ve been”. I think this is what’s meant by God’s back – we can’t see him, but sometimes we can see where he has been. I wish you all a good and sweet 5771.

Thief of time

2010-08-23T14:27:00.000-07:00

We’re all doomed. According to last week’s health scare, a new superbug is heading our way. Before that came the alleged link between waist size and an early death followed by household cleaning chemicals as a cause of cancer. But it’s no use taking to your bed and pulling the duvet over your head, because now there’s a new condition to fret over: laziness. There’s a lot wrong with getting busy doing nothing, according leading public health experts. They say that physical inactivity should be classed as a disease in its own right, because the link between inactivity and poor health is so strong. There’s a connection between lack of exercise and obesity, and that’s already classified as a disease.

We Brits can be an idle lot. Last year a survey showed that one in six couch potatoes would rather watch a TV programme they didn’t like than get up to change the channel if their remote control was broken. A third of the adults said they would not run to catch a bus and more than half would rather take a lift than walk up two flights of stairs.

Other research says that the more physical activity we do, the less likely we are to suffer from poor mental health. The trouble is that illnesses like depression often cause a lack of energy. It’s hard to tell whether physical activity protects against poor mental health, or whether depressed people are simply less active.

But sometimes, even if you’re not depressed, it’s just so hard to get started. Newton’s first law of motion explains why, stating that an object in motion tends to remain in motion, and an object at rest tends to remain at rest. I reckon this law applies to people, whether an apple has just hit them on the head or not.

The Government are doing their bit to encourage us not to be lazy, by announcing plans to scrap the default retirement age of 65 from October next year so wannabe wage slaves will no longer have to retire then. At the same time, they plan a gradual raising of the official retirement age, at which you can claim a state pension, to 66. The last Government had proposed raising it to 68, by 2044. If the present lot take this on and keep going, eventually nobody will be old enough to retire. Even the dead will have to work (giving a new meaning to the expression “dead end job”) although a look round the average Tube carriage in the morning suggests this is already happening. I wonder what will happen to the money saved by not paying anyone a retirement pension. Will they have to pay it out as state zombie benefit instead?

I wasn’t surprised to find that world religions take a dim view of laziness, or “sloth” as they tend to call it, and they see it as more than simply lying down for an entire afternoon. In the original seven deadly sins sloth was sadness, often interpreted as wasting precious time, not doing enough to help the world and avoiding a rigorous spiritual journey. Honouring time, avoiding procrastination, and performing tasks at the proper time are all seen as ways of sanctifying life.

Jewish tradition teaches that time should be highly valued. Rabbi Hillel asked, “And if I am for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” The Proverbs also tell us not to waste time and be slothful: “Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.” In my house we do follow this advice from the scriptures and then we make with the ant powder.

Lazy people have narrowly missed being labelled as terrorists. The recently banned advert encouraging people to report suspected terrorists described keeping curtains closed as suspicious behaviour, so if you do sleep in you’d better leave yours open. This is typical of the undeserved bad press that laziness gets. Remember, public transport, not procrastination, is the thief of time. And progress isn’t made by early risers, but by lazy people trying to find easier ways to do things.

Not me, though, I’m not lazy – I just need to rest, to have time to reflect, so that I can be even more productive than ever. On the other hand, although it’s probably true that hard work never killed anyone, I don’t want to take that chance so I am going to pull a sickie from the day job. I can’t bring myself to tell my employers that obesity is the disease that is stopping me working, though, so I’ll have to ring in lazy instead. It has some odd symptoms that I might not mention, like an urge to waste time on the internet. Did you know that if you Google the word “laziness”, most of the results take you to posts by computer programmers saying what a virtue it is? I’m sure my boss will be sympathetic, especially if I tell him I’ve got an attack of indolence, it sounds more official that way. He might even send me a get-well card with the P45.

Magic jewellery

2010-08-11T03:46:00.000-07:00

because I have a dream too...

I wanted to mark the first time I got paid for something I wrote, in some way. I wanted to do more than just make a tiny, imperceptible dent in the overdraft, which would be obliterated the very next time I paid the milkman. I wanted something to remember it by.

So I bought a silver pendant bearing the word "dream". My dream.

And a silver bracelet made of links bearing inspirational words like success, celebrate, faith.

I am not superstitious and I don’t believe in luck or magic. But I wear them when I write. When my brain dries and extracting ideas is as easy as hauling a guinea worm out of a patient’s leg (wrapped round a pencil, writing gets in there, even) I look at them and remind myself that I can do it.

This post, while it might be finger down the throat material, I don’t think I’ve got the level of ponceyess right. So here it is again, fit for pseud’s corner:

You want to mark the first time you got paid for something you wrote, in some way. You want to do more than just make a tiny, imperceptible dent in the overdraft, which will be obliterated the very next time you pay the milkman. You want something to remember it by.
So you buy a silver pendant bearing the word "dream". Your dream.

And a silver bracelet made of links bearing inspirational words like success, celebrate, faith.

You are not superstitious and you don’t believe in luck or magic. But you wear them when you write. When your brain dries and extracting ideas is as easy as hauling a guinea worm out of a patient’s leg (wrapped round a pencil, writing gets in there, even) you look at them and remind yourself that you can do it.

Poetry (don't panic - it's not mine)

2010-08-10T15:55:00.000-07:00

I have finished and passed the Open University's Start Writing Fiction course, and entered the story we had to do for the last assignment for a magazine competition. In October I'll be starting the OU's Creative Writing course, it runs till July 2011. It involves a module on poetry - not an area of writing expertise of mine.

Rather than posting one of my sillies, here is one of my favourites. I used to think of it often when Ru was little and gasping for breath at 3 am, just me and her stuck in the arse-end of south London all alone, too much time away from anything like a support network (how's that for poetic language?).

A Child Ill

- John Betjeman

Oh little body, do not die.

The soul looks out through wide blue eyes

So questioningly into mine,

That my tormented soul replies

"Oh little body, do not die

You hold the soul that talks to me,

Although our conversation be

As wordless as the windy sky."

So looked my father at the last,

Right in my soul before he died,

Though words we spoke went heedless past

As London traffic-roar outside.

And now the same blue eyes I see

Look through me from a little son,

So questioningly, so searchingly

That youthfulness and age are one.

My father looked at me and died

Before my soul made full reply.

Lord, leave this other light alight

Oh little body, do not die.

Confession time

2010-08-06T00:28:00.000-07:00

Some things you shouldn’t own up to if you mind looking silly, like a belief in toxins as the cause of all evil, or in a flat earth. Other things you might admit to, if you don’t mind people calling you a heartless monster, like not thinking Tommy Cooper was funny or not understanding the hysteria after the Princess of Wales died. And then there are the thought crimes that, if you confess to them, make people throw stones – or worse. But I can’t keep it in any longer, so get your projectiles ready: I am not looking forward to the 2012 Olympics.

There. I said it. And since I have, let me go further: I wish we hadn’t “won” it in the first place. It’s such a waste of public money that could have been spent elsewhere. The original vision of the bid was meant to be to “use the power of sport to reconnect young people with sport” and to “regenerate one of the most deprived parts of east London”. It’s an expensive way to do either: why not spend the money directly on regeneration and improving sports facilities in schools? The biggest winners could turn out to be the Government. After a long stretch of austerity, they will be able to host a massive two-week party. With young British sportsmen and women on the podium, we should get to feel good about ourselves.

Last week there were reports that the costs of the Aquatics Centre, to be used for the Olympic events of swimming, diving, synchronised swimming and water polo final, had further increased. Apparently this was because the roof was harder to build than they’d anticipated. I am sure that, as they said, aquatics centres are always very difficult: one brick in the wrong place and all the water would run out. I’d find this disappointing because, as an unsynchronised swimmer, these are likely to be the only events I’ll actually watch.

Now, we’re being told that there are only two years to go, as though we can’t do arithmetic. Why two years? Can we expect regular countdown updates from now on? Sebastian Coe, Chief of the Organising Committee compares it to “the killing zone” - the final stretch of an 800-metre race where you can see the finish line but still have to work to get there - so I think the answer’s yes.

A quick Google search will turn up lots of hits (I was awfully tempted to add a letter to that) from those wanting to ban Israel from the 2012 Olympics. I think it’s probably too late to ban the UK from it and we can’t give the Olympics back either. Since it looks like I can’t beat them, I suppose I will have to find a way of joining them.

Maybe I should apply to become one of the 70,000 Olympic volunteers, or “Games Makers”, that they hope to recruit starting this September. The job title makes me think of children’s party entertainers like they used to be, getting the kids in a circle to do the hokey-cokey or sing “The farmer’s in his den”, although I don’t think that all jumping the bone is likely to be among the duties, whichever leg you put in. Jewish Games Makers will be offered the chance to wear an "Olympic kippah", possibly crocheted although designs aren’t firm yet, as part of their official uniform. They might be producing an Olympic snood too, so come on girls.

I sat in my car yesterday, inching past road works, with nothing to do but read text streaming round the Telecom tower reminding us that 2012-2010=2. To stop athletes, officials and the media also getting stuck in traffic and missing events, as happened at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, special "games lanes" will be created on key roads to help get them to and from Olympic venues. The rest of us will be fined £200 if we drive in them. There will also be an Olympic Route Network that will be kept roadwork-free and this will be good for those in Wembley, Central London, Stratford and Greenwich.

But at the moment, my road in Mill Hill is boxed in on all sides by temporary traffic lights so I hope the Olympic organisers will accept my suggestion to hold some of the events here. If they do, I promise to volunteer. I’ve already got my own kippah (and matching tallit) and as soon as I finish writing this I’ll be getting out the knitting needles to cast on a snood. In the Olympic colours, of course.

You'll ne-vah walk alone

2010-07-22T08:51:00.000-07:00

This year has seen a record decline in the number of trips abroad taken by UK residents: blame the recession, the weak pound, the volcanic ash cloud and the British Airways cabin crew strikes.

Our son is disabled so it’s hard for us to get away, but his residential school trip last week enabled me and my daughter to copy our fellow-Brits and have a two day “staycation” in the Holy Land. Not the one in the Middle East, but an area of Liverpool so called because of the street names: Moses, Isaac, Jacob, David. I’m a Liver Bird but, as I hadn’t been there since 1981, all my friends and close family having moved away, I decided to remind myself why my great-grandfather decided to settle there instead of New York. Today’s Liverpool Jewish Community numbers around 2000, only about twice the membership of my north west London synagogue.

Much of what I knew has been knocked down and rebuilt, like the “Welsh streets” (Madryn, Powis, Rhiwlas) near the Holy Land, home to the young Richard Starkey (Ringo Starr). Parts of Liverpool are still said to be among the most deprived in the country but, even so, it has everything I want and I’ve fallen in love with the place. It started when our taxi driver called me “gerl”, it’s a long time since that happened. The people are friendly, they talk to strangers like us. But I no longer sound like them.

The tourist literature describes Princes Road Synagogue, built in 1874 and where my parents married, as the most lavish High Victorian orientalist synagogue in England and a must-see, so I did. The Grade 1 listed building has a vaulted ceiling, turreted and gilded ark, marble bimah and enormous round stained glass windows. Mind you, I get inspiration in my London synagogue too - the curtains suspended and draped round our ark once gave me a great idea for a better shower rail.

We visited the house where I used to live. Here, I’d had so many laughs. Here I waited for the boy of the moment to phone (no texts or e mails in those days), as I did my homework by candle-light during yet another power strike. Happy times, till my mother died when I was 17. It looked the same size as when I was last there at the age of 24: it was the street that looked narrower.

A 10-minute walk from there took us to the Mersey, where we sat looking at the hills of North Wales on the horizon. On the way, a man asked us for directions, asking if we lived there. I wish I did. The cafe on the promenade where my grandparents bought me ice creams 50 years ago has gone but we found a van, charging the same for a 99 as you pay in Mill Hill in 2010.

There was a lot more we’d have done with more time, but Beatles tourism was low on my list. I don’t need it – I was there at the time, living it, as it happened. The bus (blue, not green like they used to be) to my old house went along the road where we once waited for the Beatles to drive past on their way from the airport. Paul stuck his head out on our side; the girls sang “We love you Bea-ea-tles” and cried. I did too –because I liked George and we were on the wrong side of the road.

Liverpool was European Capital of Culture in 2004 and its Maritime Mercantile City has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as a “supreme example of a commercial port at a time of

Britain

's greatest global influence”. We saw the whole of it from our ferry cruise. And yes, they really do play “Ferry across the Mersey” as you sail along.

You can never go home again. Once you grow up and have your own life, even if you physically return to your childhood house like I did, you can’t return to that place of innocence and safety – you’re a different person and it’s never “home” as it once was. So all the memories I have - of going to school, being with my friends, living with my family – are just that, memories that can’t be relived.

In the late 1970s, the government paid me to leave Liverpool. It was called the Employment Transfer Scheme, to encourage people to get on their bikes, and find work in less depressed areas. That was how I ended up staying in London. Liverpool doesn’t depress me now: I’d pay them if they could find a way for me to get back there and create some new memories. Just for now, though, I am going to have to settle for another mini-break, but I won’t leave it for another 29 years. And next time I have to fill in one of those “ethnic monitoring” forms, I’ll cross all the options out and, in their place, write SCOUSER.

Pictures of Liverpool

2010-07-18T23:11:00.000-07:00

Ferry across the Mersey

Prince's Road Synagogue

By the Mersey

The house that built me

Albert Dock, Anglican Cathedral in centre

Liver Building

The start of an OU effort

2010-07-10T16:16:00.000-07:00

We were given the first sentence and had to continue for about 250 words. Should I do more?

Laura was standing by the window. By 6 am the sun had woken her with its brightness, but now it was 2pm, the sky was solid grey and a gust of wind bent the branches of the trees in the garden into arcs. Bloody English weather, she thought, I won't miss it.

A sudden movement drew her eyes to the back wall that kept out the riff-raff from the council estate. A fat, sweaty man in his mid-sixties, wearing a stripy sweater with a mask over his eyes, was bent over a spade, burying a bag marked 'swag' under her precious apple tree. She banged on the window. 'Come in and have a drink when you've finished'.

Fred pulled his mask off and straightened up slowly, giving a squeal each time a muscle twinged. Pulling his sweater down over his paunch he stumped, stiff-legged, into the kitchen, stepping over the doormat and leaving a trail of muddy footprints as he went. He wiped a trail of sweat from his forehead with his sleeve and sat down next to Laura at the table. Wafting her hand in front of her nose, she leaned as far away from him as she could without falling off her chair and poured him a glass of lemonade, ice cubes plopping and cracking as she added them. Fred downed the lot at one draught and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. Leaning back, he tilted his chair so that it balanced on its back legs and rested his muddy-booted feet on the table.

'Something a bit stronger'd be nice, lady. What you got?'

'Well, that depends,' said Laura, fighting an urge to knock his feet off the table and him off his chair with a single swipe of her arm, 'have you done it?'

Blue remembered hills

2010-07-10T15:58:00.000-07:00

I went back to our former house in Liverpool, but I didn't knock on the door. After all, if someone knocked here and said they used to live here, I don't think I'd let them in - you never know what they might really be up to. But it would have been lovely to look round.

White Other

2010-07-02T15:25:00.000-07:00

I am tired, so tired. I wake in the morning and feel like I have weights attached to my limbs. Once I get up I can function, but in the afternoon I feel like my brain is itching and I can’t think, can’t see. I can’t get any work done. I can hardly speak.

So I am taking the entire 5 days of next week off the day job. I can’t remember when I last took more than a day or two off, possibly last “summer”. I haven't had a break, actually been away from the house, since 2008, or is it 2007? So next week I will go swimming. I will write the story that forms the final assessment for my OU course. What next after it finishes at the end of July? Should I do the OU’s Creative Writing course? It’s a bit expensive – what if I find I have even less time than I do now? Or maybe the course I won 10% off in the writing competition? That one only lasts 6 weeks but it would involve taking an afternoon off work each week.

Tuesday is my mother’s Jahrzeit, the anniversary of her death, light a candle on Monday evening. On Saturday morning I will go to synagogue – her name will be included in the list of the week’s Jahrzeits. And I will try to remember her, but my memories of her are a seventeen year old’s. There are so many things I wish I could say to her. I wonder what she would think about the way things turned out for the rest of us, the ones she left behind. We didn’t go and live in Israel. Nothing worked out the way I hoped it would, the way I wanted it to. I must change the subject, before I start thinking of things that might have been, with people who might have been.

On Wednesday I am going to Liverpool, where I haven’t been since the day after I married Ruth’s father, in June 1981. I have had no reason to go back there because my close family and friends have scattered. But I remember it fondly, God knows why, I had some hellish times there after my mother died. But some good times too, before then, and I look back to then with a certain fondness that I can’t restrain, thinking of the days when all we had to worry about was how to get your homework done during the power cuts. It’s where I feel I am from, if I am from anywhere. It’s like the NHS forms ask: what is your origin?

I will take lots of photos and put them here.

Is there anybody there?

Blow your own

2010-07-01T14:58:00.000-07:00

To me, not following the football during the world cup is a bit like being Jewish at Christmas – I’m in a minority while all around me are completely preoccupied and there’s no escape wherever you look. It’s not that I don’t want to support England, but rather that I don’t dare. It’s all down to what my family and I call the Field Effect: shops, delis, restaurants invariably shut down after a few visits from us. In fact, I once closed a shop before it had actually opened, I peered in the window as they were moving in, they invited me to look round - after that the shutters were never raised again.

I’d forgotten how far this Jonah-like ability of ours extends till the World Cup started and I remembered that in 2006, right after I hung a tiny little three lions air freshener from my car’s rear-view mirror, England went out to Portugal and that was that. So should England have been knocked out again, by the time you read this (peh-peh-peh, bite your tongue), I’ll be taking requests: I’ll support the teams you all hate, bring your own flag. It’d be great if the team I really wanted to support won but, to rephrase Kylie Minogue, we should be so lucky.

What is luck anyway? One dictionary definition is “the chance happening of fortunate or adverse events”. But if you've ever wondered why your friend always picks the Grand National winner or finds their dream job falling into their lap, new research could have the answer.

According to psychologists, feeling lucky could all be in the mind. People who brush off disappointments and launch themselves straight into the next potentially winning situation are happier and more likely to achieve their goals. All too often, pessimists see an opportunity and then promptly think of 101 reasons why they shouldn't grasp it with both hands. Say yes, the psychologists tell us, and you never know what might happen.

That’s fine if you are lucky enough to find yourself in the right situation, but if you're struggling to find a winning streak, the research gives us a few pointers on how to change your fortune. It seems that that those who perceive themselves as lucky tend to describe themselves as extrovert. That means that they are more likely to make their own good luck by meeting lots of new people and keeping in touch with a large number of friends and acquaintances - you never know when that chance meeting might turn into a life-changing moment, after all. The researchers say that if you've already identified your ultimate goal and don’t get bogged down in the details and the more relaxed you are about the journey, the more likely you are to reach the destination.

I agree with that and I believe you make your own luck - up to a point - by spotting the opportunities and seizing the day, but apart from that it’s all down to chance. Take the lottery: statisticians tell us we’ve got as much chance of winning the jackpot using the last set of winning numbers as you do if you pick a completely new set. You could say there’s a Jewish take on that: in gematria, each Hebrew letter has a numerical value and the letters making up the word chai, meaning life, have the numerical value of 18. So things like charitable donations are sometimes given in multiples of 18 for good luck, and I suppose people might pick 18 and 36 in the lottery.

But not me. I’m not superstitious, even though the idea of the evil eye (an ancient version of the Field Effect) appears in the Talmud. There are a number of things you’re meant to be able to do to ward it off, like spitting three times (peh-peh-peh): unlucky for the person who catches some disease as a result. Even today some people, when praising others, add in Yiddish “keynenhora” (or sometimes “keyna hora”) meaning “let it be without the evil eye”. In Israel you’ll see lots of hand-shaped hamsa amulets dangling from car rear-view mirrors, ensuring that good fortune will follow those within the car. I probably should have tried one instead of the Engerland air freshener.

I am awfully tempted to watch the football – how can an ex-pat scouser do anything else? My eBay vuvuzela has arrived, it’s a piece of biltong for a shofar blower like me to sound and I promise I’ll only do it when England aren’t playing. The thing is, though, to rephrase Dirty Harry, I’ve got to ask myself one question: “Do I feel lucky?”

Yeah, right

2010-06-10T14:10:00.000-07:00

“How many trees had to die to print this tripe?” If you read a review like that, you’d probably work out that the critic was being sarcastic. Not that they’d be writing about an article of mine, of course. Yeah, right. You’d probably spot that as sarcastic too. But what if you read (rather than heard): “this invention is one of the most brilliant in the world”. Sarky or not?

If you can’t tell, look no further than Israel for help. Following the discovery there of how the brain processes sarcasm, Israeli scientists have devised a programme that enables computers to detect sarcasm and verbal irony in text. They call it SASI (short for Semi-Supervised Algorithm for Sarcasm) and it can recognise sarcastic comments more often than the average American - allegedly.Hhere life imitates art, because a sarcasm detector was featured in an episode of The Simpsons way back in 1989. Matt Groening, the creator, is American, but either is or isn’t Jewish, depending on what sort of website you consult.

The use of this technology might seem a bit obscure, but detecting sarcasm has a lot of commercial applications, including the assessment of internet reviews of products and services and opinions on a variety of subjects, from political to personal. It could help avoid confusion in a medium where there are usually few social cues. Which of us hasn’t had an internet post of ours taken the wrong way? I know I have.

We shouldn’t really be surprised that Israelis came up with the invention, because sarcasm and irony have always been a key part of Jewish humour. It’s even in the Bible. Just seven days after the exodus from Egypt, boxed in against the sea with nowhere to turn and Pharaoh's chariots bearing down on them, the Israelites cry out to Moses "Were there not enough graves in Egypt that you had to bring us to die in the desert?"

Of course, there were plenty of graves in Egypt, but instead of asking "Why did you bring us out of Egypt to die in the desert?" they spiced their complaint with a heavy measure of sarcasm, which probably began as a psychological defence mechanism. They were trapped, but instead of dissolving into helplessness, they channelled their bitterness into humorous aggression and vente their anger against the nearest target, poor Moses.

There’s another example in God’s comeback to Job's cries of frustration: "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?" In other words, "When you create your own world, then you can tell me how to run mine."

Humour is one of the most effective ways of confronting adversity and coping with difficult situations, especially ones over which we have little or no control. Much Jewish humour takes the form of self-deprecating comments on Jewish culture, acting as a shield against anti-Semitic stereotypes by exploiting them first. In the past few decades Jewish humour has become significant in mainstream popular culture, especially in the USA, through the comedy of Mel Brooks, Jerry Seinfeld, Rita Rudner: the list goes on.

There’s something special about Jewish humour - even the syntax is slightly different. Here’s just one example: the characteristic way of putting an adjective or noun first, to emphasise the irony, like in “an oil painting, she isn’t”. Actually, I think what I am talking about is “Ashkenazi” Jewish humour, I don’t know the Sephardi sort. Advice, please.

I’m not a sarcastic person, as anyone except those involved in “alternative” medicine, “touchy-feely” or “new age” stuff will tell you. I’ve heard it said that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit but the highest point of intelligence, so I’m following a course on the Sarcasm Society’s website. The Open University, it isn’t. But once I’ve finished, I should be Mill Hill’s answer to Sarah Silverman, so look out for me on the stand-up comedy circuit. Yeah, right.

I'm not asleep... but that doesn't mean I'm awake

2010-06-10T14:01:00.000-07:00

Elephants do it standing up, while humans spend a third of their lives at it. Margaret Thatcher got by on four hours a night, but Thomas Edison claimed it was waste of time. I’m talking about sleep, that sure sign of caffeine deprivation.

Benjamin Franklin said “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Fine if you’re a morning person, but apparently each of us has a genetically programmed biological clock preference so there’s nothing you can do if you prefer to get up later. Whenever you get round to doing it, if you still find it hard to keep your eyes open without using matchsticks you’re not alone. The average Briton goes to bed an hour later than they did three years ago, according to new research that blames money worries, long working hours and busy lifestyles for keeping us up longer.

Others say that fewer than six hours’ sleep increases the risk of dying early and that five hours isn’t enough for most people, regardless of what Mrs Thatcher did. It’s been shown that daytime drowsiness increases the risk of having an accident if you drive or operate dangerous machinery. But you can’t win – there’s also claimed to be an association between sleeping more than nine hours a night and premature death, probably because long sleeping can be a marker of serious underlying illness.

Babies sometimes sleep with their eyes open, it’s scary the first time you see it. Nobody knows why they do it, and they grow out of it. I don’t know why people talk about sleeping like a baby as though that was a good thing – waking up every few hours and screaming? Someone has worked out that having a new baby typically results in up to 750 hours lost sleep for parents in the first year and that adds up to over 31 days. Despite what today’s long-suffering parents might think, the world record for the longest period without sleep has stood unbeaten since 1964. It stands at 11 days, and was set by a 17 year old American high school student, who began hallucinating that he was a famous footballer. Could this explain why many of today’s footballers seem to act like they’re sleepwalking?

Shavuot is next week, and there’s a tradition of spending the entire first night of the festival studying, as a symbol of dedication to a Jewish life. The custom comes from a midrash that the Israelites fell asleep the night before they received the Torah at Sinai and Moses had to wake them up the next morning. To make up for it, Kabbalist rabbis in the 16th century came up with the idea of the all-night study session known as a Tikkun Leil Shavuot: repairing the night of Shavuot.

There is a ritual of washing your hands when you get up and one explanation for it is that during sleep an unclean spirit rests on the body. It leaves when you wake up but it leaves a residue on the fingernails and to remove this, the hands have to be washed. Judaism views the gift of sleep as a Godly blessing and Maimonides recommended that people should get eight hours’ sleep per night. The Talmud says that sleep has a minute taste of death in it, because the soul is returned to its Creator during sleep and is restored when one wakes up, although I need the help of three cups of weapons-grade coffee till I feel that I’ve got mine back.

What sleep researchers all seem to agree on is that the amount of sleep we actually need is whatever it takes not to be sleepy in the daytime. Remember what James Thurber said: “Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead”, so hit that snooze button and give yourself an extra ten minutes. Sweet dreams!

Ambisinistrous

2010-06-10T13:55:00.000-07:00

Here’s a little quiz. What do Jimi Hendrix, Barack Obama, David Cameron, Paul McCartney and I have in common? No, we’re not all Scousers, we’re left-handed. As I wouldn’t describe any of us as disadvantaged I was surprised to read, last week, that Malvern College is planning a conference about the problems of being left-handed in education and how the exam system could be changed to put all children on a level footing. For example, left-handers struggle to write, the Headmaster says, because their pen tends to dig into the paper and they smudge what they’ve just written. He suggests that left-handed pupils should be allowed to use laptops in exams instead of writing and that, since left-handers are more articulate then right-handers), they could be tested orally in all subjects not just foreign languages.

People haven’t always been this enlightened and there has been a lot of prejudice against left-handers down the years. The Latin word for right, dexter, means able and appears in words like “dextrous”. On the other hand (sorry), the Latin word for left, sinestra, translates into English as sinister. An early theory was that disease is caused by a demon (a bit like the way certain people blame everything on “toxins” or problems with “energy” today). For the average right-hander the left hand does not work very well and primitive people reckoned that must be because of a demon, so everyone who is left-handed must be in league with the devil. Even as recently as the nineteen-fifties, parents and teachers would spend time trying to convert left-handed youngsters into right-handers.

Being left-handed can have advantages. Apparently, there are more left-handed bowlers in cricket because of the different angle they can bring to bear and left-handed opening batsmen do well because of the difficulty of bowling to them. When it comes to driving, left-handers have a natural advantage, according to the AA Driving School, and they are more likely to pass their driving test first time. They say this might be because we pick up clutch control and gear changing more easily. So for us, a right-hand drive car is better.

Jewish left-handers belong to a double minority. For us, it’s easier to write Hebrew than English because our hand is always in front of what we’re writing when going from right to left. The ritual side of things can be confusing, though – some actions are the same for right- and left handers but not all, for example tefillin are to be worn on the left arm but a Sefer Torah is to be carried on the right. Judaism has its own set of prejudices, Maimonides included left-handedness among the list of blemishes that disqualified a priest from serving in the temple.

Our ancestors were sometimes glad of the services of left-handers, though. In the book of Judges, left-handed Ehud takes gifts to the king of Moab, who had conquered the Israelites. Ehud pulls out a dagger with his left hand and kills the king, allowing the Israelites to regain their land. The guards assume Ehud is right-handed and didn’t check for a weapon on the other side.

Now I think I should own up to taking an online test of “handedness”, which explained why I only passed my driving test at the second go. It turns out that, apart from writing and using a computer mouse, I do everything either ambidextrously or using my right hand. This is called cross-dominance: take my advice and prepare for the unexpected if you Google this. I hope it won’t exclude me from celebrating International Left Handers Day on August 13th, a Friday this year. It’s lucky I’m not superstitious, but just to make sure I stay lucky, I plan stay at home all that day armed with a big bag of salt to throw, in case the devil really is planning to peep over my left shoulder.

A mini story I did for my homework

2010-06-05T16:17:00.000-07:00

Teacher’s rest, mother’s pest

At the end of the first day of half term she squirmed in bed, trying to sleep. A mob of problems whirling round her mind, when she finished worrying about them all they each took another turn. She imagined herself standing in the middle as they danced round her time after time, each pulling at her with one hand while holding out the other one in front, demanding a piece of her, in higher and higher pitched voices till her ears rang and her head throbbed. Bills – work – kids. Leaky roof – overdraft – husband. Frail elderly parent – disabled child – price of food. Bills. Da capo. Tiredness saturated her bones, kept her awake.

She thought about the day just gone, that she just about survived. It’s years since she had a break, she tried to book a few days in a hotel in the town where she was born. The confirmation e mail told that her that she’d used the wrong dates, an online check confirmed that the right ones weren’t available. Her son waited to be taken to the play scheme that allowed her to work during the school holidays. In 5 minutes they had to leave but he hadn’t brushed his teeth. He couldn’t get into the bathroom because the builder was outside the door, did she dare risk an autistic tantrum by telling him to do his teeth in the kitchen? The clock told her that whatever she now did, she would be late for work. But first, call the hotel people before the entire town’s booked. A crash from upstairs drowned their reply, although her teenage daughter slept through it. She put the phone down.

I asked the builder about the noise. He spoke only Bulgarian. Français, Deutsch? No, only Bulgarian - and Russian. Her single year’s Russian course wouldn’t help, she had no need to tell him I’d lost her bag or that she was a student from Kiev who liked ice cream. She took her son out, ignoring the ringing mobile phone, hoping they would leave a message; she really needed the extra work. Lunch box, glasses, bus pass, money for bowling. But no shoes. Back to the house.

At work, she rang her husband and told him about the lack of a common language. She hoped to relax, anticipating his amusement. She felt a band tighten around her head and something hot rising in her gullet as he replied that she shouldn’t leave the builder and their daughter in the house alone, he knows what These People are like - and she doesn’t. And, he trusted, the builder wouldn’t be here when he got back, he hates having workmen in the house. She told him that was odd because she really liked it, and slammed the phone down.

As the sun rose she fell asleep, dreaming she was a skittle in a bowling alley. She teetered, fell, woke up to the sound of the radio, someone talking about greedy working mothers who want it all, who should stay at home when their children are young.

Yay! My OU tutor liked this

2010-05-24T09:10:00.000-07:00

This is my thing - we were told to do about 300 words:

Write a 300 word scene in which a character is unhappy in his or her surroundings. For example, he or she might be

• shy

• frightened

• disgusted

• trapped

• homesick

Show the feelings through the descriptions of the place, rather than by naming the feelings.

So I done this:

Jake opened the door. The house was unlit. He stepped inside, wiping his boots. He wouldn't put it past Michelle to drag the silent treatment through to New Year if he made a mess. He switched on the hall light. Where was she? Her car was outside. “Chelle?” No answer. Probably gone to the shops, or to have a gab with her mate. But her coat was still hanging up and her bag was on the table.

Jake pushed the living room door, it swung open to reveal darkness. He moved inside, his feet making no sound on the thick pile of the carpet, and switched on the white Christmas tree lights. Coloured ones were common, Michelle said. He closed the curtains against the chill of the snow falling outside. He shivered – she'd turned the heating off, fine bloody welcome. Might as well get a coffee. A smell of old bacon hung in the air of the kitchen, and the breakfast dishes were still in the sink. A tap dripped into a plate, drops adding to the inches of greasy water that had collected. An empty 1 litre whisky bottle stood on the counter. Frank picked up a cloth and a bottle of bleach. Hope Michelle made it to the bathroom before throwing up.

The note on the stairs read “Jake. Don't go upstairs. Call the police”. And tell them what? That my partner's drunk herself stupid again? “Michelle!” he called again. He banged his shin on something on the floor of the darkened landing “You stupid cow! At least you could have switched the bloody lights on.” He groped for the switch – a kitchen stool lay on its side. He stood it up and moved towards the next staircase and reached for the switch. Something blocked the light coming down, blobbing shadows onto the floor. A rope hung from the loft entrance above the stairs.

My tutor said "This is a well worked piece from the outset and moves along at the right pace. You use 'show' at the expense of 'tell' to put your chosen atmosphere across, and I liked very much your engagement of the senses.

Well, they do say write about what you know. I must go and thaw out some sausages for himself and herself, despite the alleged 30º C temp outside. When I suggested that wasn't really hot weather food (and I am not eating the bastard stuff anyway so I've got no fecking axe to grind) I got my ears ripped off, what did I suggest then? We seem to have a lot of ear-ripping about food one way or the other, last time because I said how much I hate cooking. That drew the response along the lines of "well we'll never have anything to f***ing eat ever again then". The next OU exercise is to write a scene in which 2 characters are quarrelling about the setting. One wants to stay and the other wants to leave. I had thought about writing about me and Jack in the swimming pool, à la Parklife II, but now maybe I will do something closer to home. Such rich pickings here. They don't call it “kitchen sink drama” for nothing.

A morning off work

2010-05-19T14:49:00.000-07:00

I'm a student now. The Open University don't seem to have a scarf so I will have to dig my old London one out and then go off and do some madcap student pranks all on my own.

I wish the school transport would come so that I can concentrate on the writing and not have to keep telling Jack he isn't getting his hair cut (he keeps saying things like "Give your mouth a talk" and "mouth doesn't help" and "I just wanted to try your mouth again", this last one being after I have lost my temper for the umpteenth time, followed by "boys tell their mums to talk and YOU DO"). I have up to half an hour more of this and I am getting really fed up.

Autistic 13 year olds, eh?

Slight pause while I fix Tiny Clanger's fingers. Some time ago I knitted a Clanger for Jack, it looks exactly like the ones on the tv did, and the fingers are made of pipe cleaners. I had some left so it only took me about 5 minutes to put right, thank goodness. Sometimes it's like living in a mad edition of Blue Peter.

Bus still not here, this has the usual laxative effect. Someone should market it, only I am not sure that isn't actually due to the gut-clenching effects of having to put up with Jack.

Bus comes.

Write article, find Elgar's 2nd symphony most efficacious in making this happen.

Go to synagogue for Shavuot service, lovely music, but all I can think of was the dross I will have to deal with when I get back.

Oh well, tomorrow is another day, promising

9 am Take Jack to dentist

9.15 am Take Jack to orthoptist (in same place)

11.30 pull own head off.

Chag sameach.

Here's one I made earlier

2010-05-01T15:50:00.000-07:00

This is my latest JN article, I pinched bits from one I did here a while ago. It appeared in a week where nearly every other article seemed to be about the election. All I have to do now is predict what's going to be topical the week after next so that I can start now while I have a moment. Easy.

Sunny weather means summer clothes, and mine have shrunk since I stashed them away last year. The answer: less eating. And more swimming, it’s a good way to get low-impact exercise - if you do it properly.

I’d swim every day if I could. I go early and try to do a kilometre, although sometimes it’s more like a mile by the time I’ve gone round the chatting, shower-capped ladies (swimming isn't good for you unless you actually move) and folk who do nothing but wade. If the children of Israel had had mess about like this to cross the Red Sea they’d have got fed up and found another route.

Once I do get going I relax and consider life’s unanswered questions. Why do so many people swim with as much of their body out of the water as possible? Doesn’t that, added to their frantic jerky limb movements, take more effort than doing it properly? Why don’t child swimmers look where they’re going? Why is it that you can’t get past someone two feet wide in a pool fifteen times the width?

My son and I used to go to a very crowded pool. Jack loved it but I was less keen, especially after a kid kicked me so hard I thought my arm was broken. The pool had a wave machine, three times an hour a siren would sound and hundreds of us would be chucked about like lottery balls before the draw. Once a swimmer succumbed to sea-sickness and everyone else won gold medals for the fastest pool exit: an event not represented at the Olympics to date.

Jewish swimmers have done their bit in the Olympics. Mark Spitz won seven gold medals for the USA at the 1972 Munich Olympics , an achievement surpassed only by Michael Phelps (not Jewish, as far as I know, unless it’s really Feldstein) who won eight golds in 2008 at Beijing. Ben Wildman-Tobriner and Garrett Weber-Gale were part of the US men’s swimming team in 2008, where they were known as “the hyphenated Jew crew”. But the Olympic spirit was in short supply when an Iranian swimmer refused to compete against an Israeli and pulled out of their event.

According to the Talmud, parents must teach their children to swim. This protects the child from drowning but also acts as a metaphor for preparation for independent life. So teaching to swim, in this context, means teaching about limits and risk taking, lessons on knowing where the seashore is and how to return to a place of safety in order to venture out again on another day.

I’d have preferred to run to a place of safety instead of swimming with my Liverpool primary school in the nineteen-sixties, every week in the local Corporation swimming bath. I couldn’t swim and dreaded the cold air, cold water, tiles on the walls, changing cubicles on the pool side, the smell of the chlorine, the feel of the metal pipe rail around the side that I had to force my fingers to release. We used to sing the same songs on the bus to the pool each week, I have never heard them since, but just thinking about them brings the panic back.

I finally got the hang of swimming in Israel: beautiful open air pool, blues skies, sun, two months before the Six Day War. And talking of Israel, last time I had a swim I saw something on the bottom of the pool that seemed to be written in Hebrew. On closer inspection it seemed to be saying “dfdch”, not a word I know, and it turned out to be a bit of randomly-shaped tinfoil. I am going to have to be more selective in what I pick up in swimming pools, a good policy for all of us to follow. I’m going now, to pick up some prescription swimming goggles?

To Infinity and Beyond!

2010-04-22T00:18:00.000-07:00

I want to go into space, and not just because I’d be weightless. As an amateur astronomer, I want to get closer to the places I see through my telescope. Now maybe I’ll be able to, because on the 1st of April the UK Space Agency was established. It aims to improve coordination of UK efforts in Earth science, telecoms and space exploration, and is leading the science team for the CryoSat-2 mission. This Earth-observation satellite, launched last week, will help to find out whether the arctic ice masses are thinning. The Agency wants to add 32,000 jobs to the UK space industry over the next 20 years, so I’ll be watching the appointments ads.

I won’t be the first Jewish astronaut – that was Judy Resnick. She was mission specialist on the maiden voyage of the Space Shuttle Discovery and she died when the Challenger shuttle broke apart shortly after lift-off. The first Jewish man in space was Jeffrey Hoffman, who read from a Torah scroll during his during his 1996 mission on the Space Shuttle Columbia.

Another Jewish astronaut, David Wolf, was in orbit during Chanukah and, although he couldn’t light candles because of the fire hazard of the oxygen-rich atmosphere, the zero gravity meant that when he gave his dreidel a twirl, it kept spinning for an hour and a half.

Gary Reisman was the first Jewish astronaut to live on the International Space Station. He left Earth just before Pesach and wanted to bring matzah with him, but mission control thought the crumbs would be uncontainable. I agree – it’s hard enough trying to keep them off the carpet. Another American Jewish astronaut, Gregory Chamitoff, took bagels to the International Space Station to share with his Russian colleagues, and rocket-shaped mezuzot for the door post near his bunk bed.

Ilan Ramon was the first Israeli astronaut, and took with him a picture of the Earth as seen from the moon, drawn by a Jewish boy in a concentration camp. He was the payload specialist on the Space Shuttle Columbia, was the first astronaut to ask for kosher food in space and to consult a rabbi about how to keep shabbat while in orbit. He wasn’t particularly observant but he asked because he felt he represented all Jews and all Israelis. As you might expect, there were as many different answers as there were rabbis consulted, but he ended up linking himself to local time in Houston where a day lasts 24 hours, even though he actually saw the sun rise every 90 minutes, each time he orbited the Earth. He died when the Columbia shuttle disintegrated during re-entry.

My problem is that, although the British space programme promotes our participation in the international market for satellite launches and construction, it has never been government policy to create a British astronaut corps. But the personal vision of Lord Drayson, the Science Minister, is to see human beings on Mars and he says that it’s likely that the first human being who will step on the planet is a teenager today. It won’t have escaped sharp-eyed readers that this has come too late for me, so I’m not going to be “my daughter the first British Jewish astronaut”. Space tourism is only going to get off the ground (maybe that should that read launch) for those who have many hundreds of thousand pounds to spare, so I don’t think my friend and I will get our holiday on the moon as we agreed at the age of 11. I’ll have to make do with watching endless repeats of Star Trek instead. I think it’s beginning to have an effect because, at our seder, Himself declared that my Hebrew sounds like Klingon. There were no bug-eyed monsters waiting when we opened the front door for Elijah, so no close encounters of a Mill Hill kind for us this year. Live long and prosper!

Raisins today!

2010-04-08T13:01:00.000-07:00

Rozhinkes mit mandlen, almonds and raisins. A yiddish lullaby that my father once sang me. There are many translations out there. A mother tells her son

And when you become rich…Remind yourself of this lullaby. Raisins and almonds. This will be your calling…

Some people have taken the meaning literally, saying that the mother tells her son that when he grows up he will become a seller of almonds and raisins, that is his destiny. But I think it refers to the bitterness and sweetness that life can bring.

Today my first news feature article appeared.

So for me, today has definitely been a day of raisins.

You'd better watch out, you'd better take care, Albert says that e=mc squared

2010-04-01T05:40:00.000-07:00

Hooray, break out the sun cream and the sandals, summer is here again. You hadn’t noticed? Well, last Sunday was the official start of British Summer Time. It’s said that it puts the body clock out of sorts for weeks afterwards and I’m not surprised, I am nowhere near recovered from the shock of having to get up in the dark all over again.

British Summer Time was introduced in 1916 shifts our clocks forward an hour for seven months of the year. It was originally geared to agricultural priorities, allowing farmers to work later on the harvest in daylight, and also saved fuel for the war effort. Most other countries change their clocks as well, and in Israel in 1999 the switch away from daylight saving time turned the tables on a group of terrorists who planned to set off time bombs, without noting that Israel had switched back to standard time. The bombs were prepared in a Palestine-controlled area, and set on daylight saving time. They were handed over to terrorists based in Israel who had already switched to standard time, and the bombs detonated one hour early, as they were being planted.

Under recent UK Government proposals British Summer Time could be extended indefinitely, with the aim of boosting tourism and cutting deaths on the roads. The evidence backing these proposals comes from a UK experiment with year-round summer time for three years in the late nineteen-sixties. Opposition from Northerners, farmers and others led to the end of it, even though some studies showed decreases in road accidents and energy costs. One suggestion is to move the clocks forward by an hour as a one-off and stay one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) all year, not just during the summer months. Another idea is, after that, for the clocks to go forward by an extra hour in the summer, so the winter would be GMT+1 hour and the summer GMT+2. Both would reduce the need for lighting and save carbon emissions. The Orthodox community has opposed the plans. They say that it would mean not being able to say prayers before 8am in winter, which would make people late for work and cause hardship for those who conform to religiously prescribed prayer times.

Sometimes prayer can stop time. It’s recorded in the Bible that in the middle of battle, Joshua prayed that the sun would stand still until Israel could vanquish her enemy. His request was granted: “The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day.” This must be the first recorded example of Jewish Mean Time (JMT), the excuse usually given for Jewish people’s genetic tendency to arrive fashionably late. It’s like GMT but much less accurate, and it can often be GMT+ anything up to two hours, even more during British Summer Time.

Prayer slows time for us today. On Yom Kippur, the hours seem to tick by more and more gradually as the day goes on, till you think your watch has broken. Research at the University of Mill Hill has found that this is no illusion, time really does go slower on Yom Kippur and it’s nothing to do with fasting. It’s all down to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which states that time passes more slowly in higher gravitational fields, so the closer a watch is to the centre of a massive object, the slower it runs. As more and more people turn up at the end of the day for Neilah, the larger the congregation becomes and, therefore, the greater its mass and the slower time passes. Think about it – if enough people came, time would stand still. We might never get to break our fast but, on the other hand, we’d never get any older. I can see the ads now: “Come to shul, live forever. If not now, when?”

KCMG

2010-03-17T09:05:00.000-07:00

Given names and their meanings fascinate me. My research tells me that the most popular names for Jewish babies born in 2009 were Sophie and Joshua, with Olivia and Jacob a close second. “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” says Juliet (451st most popular name, nationally). If she’s right, there must be a lot of sweet smelling Jewish babies, because Rose is the most popular other name for girls.

Choosing a name can be a hard decision fraught with lists, negotiations, and the all-important question of what it might be shortened to. Some names seem to come from nowhere- would there be so many Amelies and Harrys if it weren’t for films and books? Researchers have found that the quicker a name catches on, the quicker it fades, while names that catch on slower stick around for longer.

In Judaism, one’s name is very important, and it’s said that the crown of a good name (meaning a good reputation) exceeds the crowns of learning, priesthood and royalty. In biblical times a parent sometimes chose a name from the circumstances of conception (like Isaac) or the delivery (Jacob). Or they might go for names connected with divine attributes or acts (ones with el and ya). Others chose names from nature, like Deborah (bee) and Jonah (dove).

During the Middle Ages in eastern Europe, Jewish parents began to give their children two names: a secular name for use in day-to-day life and a Hebrew name for religious purposes. The association between names and people led to the belief that changing a name would ward off evil spirits because the angel of death would not recognize the person. A child might get a nickname like Alte (Old One) or Chaim (Life), to try to deceive the evil one. Even today, many people don’t reveal a baby boy’s name till after the brit, although they may not realise this superstition has its origins in stopping the evil one identifying and taking the baby.

The custom arose of naming a child after a deceased relative in the hope that the child would take on the namesake’s virtues and that continues today, although parents often choose a sound-alike name or one beginning with the same letter. Babies were not named after the living because the angel might mistake the infant for the adult and take the wrong one.
Sephardim take a different view and usually name their children after a grandparent, either living or dead. The first son and daughter are traditionally named after the paternal grandparents, then the maternal grandparents’ names are next, followed by uncles, aunts and so on. They sometimes derive a name from the birth circumstances, so that a boy born during Chanukah is called Nissim (miracles).

Today, though, parents probably choose names because they like the way they sound. That’s unless they are followers of something called the Kabalarian philosophy, who say that when you are named your destiny is created and your personal strengths and weaknesses are defined. They reckon that only one in many thousands of people has the right name, but also that you can change your fate by changing your name from the one your parents unwittingly lumbered you with at birth.

According to them, the name Judith creates a self-expressive and artistic urge, an emotional intensity that is difficult to control and weakness in the liver – probably because of “toxins”, those modern-day equivalents to the angel of death. I’d like a new destiny, but I’ve decided against going with the 2009 flow and calling myself Sophie, because it seems that’s bad for something called “the elimination system”. Instead I’ve chosen one that will give me energy, drive, and ambition, a strong-willed and independent nature and that will make me creative, inventive, and ingenious in practical matters. From now on, kindly call me Gladys.

On Ada Lovelace Day: A Tribute to Dorothy Hodgkin (1910-1994)

2010-03-16T06:14:00.000-07:00

Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron, and she wrote a program for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine; she is considered the first computer programmer.

In honour of Ada Lovelace Day on March 24th over 1500 bloggers and others have pledged to write about a woman in technology that they admire. We feel that it is important for all of us to have female role models to admire in the technical fields. I have chosen to write about Dorothy Hodgkin, Nobel Prize-winning chemist and crystallographer.

" I was captured for life by chemistry and by crystals"

In 1933 Dorothy Hodgkin became the first scientist to make an X-ray diffraction photograph of a protein, a technique she then used to define the structure of penicillin (1942-9). Subsequently she tackled two increasingly complex structures: those of vitamin B12 (1964) and insulin (1969). Understanding the structure of these substances means that we can begin to understand how they work and to synthesise them and improve on them.

She was the first woman since Florence Nightingale to become a member of the Order of Merit and was closely involved with Pugwash, an international movement of scientists working for peace.

Maggi Hambling painted this portrait at Dorothy's house in Warwickshire in February 1985. In the upstairs study, the scientist is surrounded by the paraphernalia of her work and lit by the reflected snowy light from outside. In the foreground is a model of four molecules of insulin. Dorothy's famously arthritic hands (which were drawn in the 1970s by Henry Moore, below)

have been rendered in duplicate as though to show the incessant activity of the Dorothy's mind. The artist was deeply impressed by her sitter: "she's one of the most important and genuinely enlightened people of our time, and I wanted to convey this sense of her. It's almost as though she were an ancient alchemist, making magic."

"She will be remembered as a great chemist, a saintly gentle and tolerant lover of people, and a devoted protagonist of world peace."

Max F Perutz, molecular biologist and Nobel prizewinner

Old, talentless and white

2010-03-11T00:48:00.001-08:00

Wo yeah, I have another 15 minutes coming up, starting on Thursday 18th March.

I wrote a first draft of an article yesterday, started editing it during Younger Daughter’s maths class. Had to stop when I realised she had come out and flounced straight past me – she isn’t speaking to us at the moment on account of the rejection of her unfeasible business case she recently presented to us in her usual drip-fed back to front way.

Started editing again later, interrupted by arrival of delicious Indian Takeaway meal.

Loaded dishwasher.

Did phone interview for news feature scheduled for end of month.

“Wow, he wouldn’t stop talking” I said to Himself. “More fool you, you shouldn’t do it” he replied. Thanks for the support.

Finish editing at about 11.30, after which I find Jack had fallen asleep on his own. Whoopee – I got to go to sleep in my own bed. Where I stayed asleep till woken up by Himself because I was snoring. Allegedly.

Start rewriting at 7.30 am while waiting for school transport to arrive. Younger daughter slummocks out.

“I’m not having another haircut”.

“No”.

Cut. Paste.

“I’m not having another haircut”.

“No, you’re not.”

Get idea for rewording –

“Don’t tell my Daddy. There are no more haircuts”.

“No, there isn’t”.

“No, say ‘no there’s not’”.

“NO THERE’S NOT”.

Idea? What idea? Cut.

"No haircuts for Jack".

"NO"

“Why did you look at my head?”

“I DIDN’T. I AM TRYING TO LOOK AT THE COMPUTER. NOW BE QUIET. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”

“Yes sir”.

Guilt does not help the creative process.

Sit down at laptop again. School bus arrives and within nanosecond driver toots horn. Get up. Jack’s coat sleeves are inside out.

Sit down at laptop again. Doorbell rings. Younger daughter, suddenly recovered power of speech, asking for a lift.

Sit in traffic, switch on “Young gifted and black” CD. “I’m in the mood for love” sings Prince Buster. Which reminds me, Himself is off work today...I bet JK Rowling doesn’t have this trouble.

And the winner is...

2010-03-02T02:35:00.000-08:00

Peter from New York, for getting one of two possible correct answers:

1. Sibelius' 7th Symphony

2. You iron HANDKERCHIEVES??!!

I can't do it

2010-02-19T06:57:00.000-08:00

Pretentious writing's the order of the day. Yes, it certainly looks that way. To quote Trollope on Daniel Deronda, "Not only is the oil flavoured in every page, (which is a great fault) - but with the smell of the oil comes so little of the brilliance which the oil should give! She is always striving for effects which she does not produce.

To quote Loudon Wainwright III, I’m a dud-fire cracker I ain’t got any fuse I ain’t got no inspiration since I lost my muse I’m a table with two legs, I’m a spider with five I’m going down slow muse when will you arrive... I’m a flattened out wave I ain’t got any curl I’m an empty old oyster I ain’t got any pearl.

Sod it, let's listen to some music.

A prize goes to the first person to identify the piece this trombone solo comes from. A bit of a clue - the whole piece lasted more or less as long as it took me to iron 5 shirts and two handkerchieves.

I want another 15 minutes

2010-02-04T09:45:00.000-08:00

So look out, editors, query e mails will be coming YOUR way. Meanwhile, I couldn't help sneaking a look at "my" former slot...found this music playing deep inside my head, where my ears used to work...ah well.

I'll be back...I hope

2010-01-29T16:02:00.001-08:00

My 15 minutes of fame have come to an end, but I hope to have 15 more in the Jewish News in March. All I have to do in the meantime is think of a way to keep the writing momentum going. In the words of Spike Milligan, "What are we going to do now?"

Here are the last of my 15 minutes...

Let me introduce another member of my family, Leo the cat, who appeared in our garden and decided to move in. Having an animal living with you is odd, really, even though half the households in the UK do it. Someone once said they supposed we had a cat because “you people aren’t allowed dogs”. Now, “you people” is one of my pet hates so I’ll ignore that part of it. But what about the rest?

There is no law, Jewish or otherwise, against our keeping any sort of pet, although the Talmud does say that it is forbidden to keep animals that will scare other people. It describes how God chose Moses for Jewish leadership based on his tender care for flocks of sheep. The Torah tells us that our ancestors kept camels, donkeys, horses and other animals, and perhaps our shepherd patriarchs used herding dogs, even if there is no mention of Moses saying “come by”. The Torah stresses compassion to animals and it’s considered a mitzvah to help a stray dog, because the dogs of ancient Egypt did not bark or snarl at the Jews during the Exodus. But many Charedi people seem to have an aversion to dogs that almost verges on fear. Does it come from our time in Eastern Europe, where peasants would set their dogs on Jews?

Some people say that we should not bring non-kosher animals into our homes. But cats were common in stetl households and there would be one in the village synagogue stopping the mice eating the leather-bound books. There are other issues that could make pet-keeping difficult, like rules about not handling animals on Shabbat, and against neutering them. I think the main problem could be that, as well as the pets not being kosher, their food might not be either, although as far as I can tell, we can feed them non-kosher food as long as we don’t eat it ourselves (cat food? Feh). Further problems arise at Pesach. Not only are we not meant to have any chametz in the house, we can’t derive any benefit from it either, including feeding it to our pets. We would have to find cat or dog food with 100% meat, and food without forbidden grains for the herbivores.

It’s worth persevering, though, because human-animal bond is good for us and it’s even been suggested that a few minutes alone with a pet cat or dog might do more to help stress than talking about our troubles with our best friends or spouses. Doctors in the USA prescribe pets as treatment for depression and they used therapeutic animals to help children recover from the trauma of the 9/11 attacks and the Columbine school shootings. Here, friendly dogs and cats are taken into hospitals, hospices, care homes and special needs schools for therapeutic visits. It’s not new, Florence Nightingale spoke highly of the benefits of companion animals for chronically sick people.

Some people take things too far, though. In the USA, some owners celebrate their dog’s “bark mitzvah” when it reaches 13. Sometimes it’s done for Purim entertainment, to raise money, or just for fun. Others see it as a celebration of the spiritual connection they feel with their dog and of the divine spark in animals, our equivalent of the Catholic blessing of animals on the Feast of St Francis.

Blessing animals is one thing, but some people take it to the extent of dressing their dog a dog in a kippah and tallit. In my view that shows a lack of respect for Judaism, and also of the memory of those who were persecuted for the right to wear them. So, no cat mitzvah for you, Leo. Anyway, you’re at least 60 human years old so it’s too late. But could there be a way for you to qualify for a state pension?

Light a single candle

2010-01-26T08:51:00.001-08:00

There seem to have been a lot of power cuts around here recently. Actually, I’ve been trying to think of a better collective noun than “lot”. Perhaps a darkness. A swear? I think my family should call it a “why?” of power cuts, or a “remember”.

We have our own why/remember power cut ritual. First, someone asks why this is still happening, in the 21st century. Then out with the hurricane lamps, oil and gas lamps and the candles.

Although no electricity is being generated, memories are, as we sit hunched round the open fireplace which I still know how to lay. It warms our fronts while our backs freeze, reminding us of the pre-central heating era. Himself recalls his childhood spent in a farm cottage. Hurricane lamps meant that his father had had to go out during the night to deliver a calf. For me, it’s the candles. It seems odd to light them without saying a blessing. Festivals, Chanukah, Shabbat, Havdalah – candle lighting is a big part of Judaism. Why? What is it about candles, about light?

Oil used to be considered a more appropriate fuel to use, because candles tended to be made from ritually unclean animals. But by the Middle Ages, candles were used and they had a practical function on Shabbat, to enhance the enjoyment of the day by improving visibility. Domestic peace would be reduced if members of the household were falling over one another in the darkness, and I can confirm that’s right – there’s certainly not a lot of peace round our place till we get the lights back on. Although it was a social act and not a religious one, lighting the candles is mentioned in the Talmud, including details of what they should be made of, to make sure there would be a pleasant smell in the house.

Now there’s electricity (power companies permitting), candle lighting is more ceremonial than functional, but the ritual of the lighting is as important in creating a Shabbat atmosphere as the functional aspect used to be. Keeping the ritual reminds us that the primary role of Shabbat is celebratory, with both physical and spiritual refreshment the order of the day.
Lighting Shabbat candles is a women’s mitzvah. We usually light two, but some women, if they forget to light them once, add an extra candle forever. I wonder if they add a further one if they forget again? That could lead to vast numbers building up for repeat offenders. Other women add a candle on the birth of each child. Whether we use eco-candles made from soya beans or ordinary ones, once they are lit, a change takes place. Now there’s nothing to do. What’s done is done, what isn’t isn’t, and Shabbat is here.

Havdalah recognises the separation of Shabbat from the rush of the normal week, using the plaited candle that burns with a single flame. It’s said by some to represent interweaving and interdependence of the family, the Jewish people, and humanity. Why do we look at the reflection of a havdalah candle in our fingernails? Some say that it’s to make sure that the light is bright enough, others that nails are a sign of blessing because they are constantly growing. The explanation I like best is that we show that our fingernails are clean, so we haven’t been working.

Then there’s the light of a Yahrzeit candle, a symbol of the flame of the human soul which is never extinguished and which continues to burn brightly. I light a candle for my mother and I remember the person who inspired me to write. The flame of a Yahrzeit candle flickers and eventually fades away completely. But I believe that by remembering our loved ones, thinking about them and talking about them, they live on.

The lights come back on and normal life is resumed. Until the next time.

Resolutions shmesolutions

2010-01-10T14:25:00.000-08:00

New Year’s Eve gets some odd names. In Scotland it’s Hogmanay, but isn’t that a bit treif? In Israel it’s called Sylvester, after the saint not the cartoon cat. But as far as New Year resolutions are concerned we might as well call the day Mickey Mouse, because researchers at the University of Hertfordshire have found that 88% of people fail to keep theirs for a whole year.

Why bother? Maybe because the New Year often feels like a fresh start, an opportunity to eliminate bad habits and establish new routines that will help us grow. But we seem to set ourselves up to fail by choosing unfeasibly high-flying resolutions, pledging to change lifelong habits or to set up dramatic self-improvements. The research found that we’re more likely to keep New Year resolutions if we choose a realistic goal and pick just one resolution, start with small steps, and avoid repeating past failures.

This is something I should bear in mind. Each year, I promise to lose 2 stone, get more exercise and tidy up my home office. This condemns me to what would normally, by now, have been a tough first week of January, followed by a discouraging second week, then by yo-yo dieting, a treadmill gathering dust and a desk covered in a melange of confidential papers, downloaded knitting patterns and synagogue newsletters, for the rest of the year.

Not any longer. It turns out that there are actually four Jewish New Years and my family and I are going to take advantage of these extra opportunities and spread our resolutions over them, instead. It might keep the inspiration alive and let us join the 12% who manage to sustain that change for the better.

First comes Tu Bishvat on 30th January, the New Year for trees. I love growing fruit, we get lots of apples and it’s great to be able to walk out of the door and step on a decomposing pear whenever I like. In Israel, by Tu Bishvat, most of the winter rain has fallen and the trees have started to bud. But in a Mill Hill garden (Ronnie Ronalde’s less successful follow-up to “In a Monastery Garden”), not so. I will resolve to stay indoors and find better organic gardening solutions than swearing at the wasps. It will be worth it when the countless weekends I’ve devoted to our very small orchard result in a harvest of about £5 worth of pears and two figs.

Next is the 1st of Nissan, on 16th March. As this is the New Year for counting the reign of kings, my father will resolve to write to the Queen suggesting that, to mark her anniversary and in the name of diversity, all one-day public holidays in the UK diaspora get extended to two. And my daughter will resolve to ask her to change the name of Mother’s Day to Jewish Mother’s Day.

After that comes 1st of Ellul, on 11th August, the cut-off date for tithing cattle. I will resolve to leave my car at home and, instead, join the stampede on the Northern Line. Good for the environment, if not my temper. Which reminds me - the 1st of Ellul is the day when my neighbours will start to comment on the noises coming through the party wall. That’ll be me, practising the shofar, ready for…

Rosh Hashanah, on September 10th. The birthday of the only world we’ve got. A time to focus on spirituality, look back at the mistakes of the past year and plan for the future. I will resolve to remember that change is a process and to keep working on the goal of changing for the better. The Hertfordshire research found that 100% of people who wrote their resolutions down had achieved them – after one week. I resolve to keep the ones I write for Rosh Hashanah. At least, till next Sylvester.

Now it can be told: protectsia-free zone

2009-12-30T00:32:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of 2009, I made a new year resolution to get something that I'd written published this year. I quickly realised how unrealistic that was.

I admit, I have been getting very despondent about writing, and every bad critique has made me feel worse about it, for example:

"this might be OK after a re-write" (but no suggestions about what needs it)

"the various strands of the story didn't seem organic" (whatever that means).

I was all set to pack it in when lo, I did get a series of articles commissioned by the Jewish News.

Me. All by myself. With nobody's help.

Yes I can.