Week 9 - May 11-16, 2020

Once again, I'm a day late. Things are getting more and more normal, as seen by the fact that this past weekend, despite the beginning of what is predicted to be a record-breaking heatwave, we went on not one, but two family picnics. On Friday we met up with ADC's siblings near Latrun, and I was finally able to give Z and S their birthday presents. Z was very pleased with his Juventus scarf, but quickly took it off and back in its bag. G, however, being only 4, refused to remove his "Dragon Legs" in the 35-degree heat until getting home and having a bath! As a result, his sister R has also requested "Dragon Arms". Maybe I can get away with another birthday present? This will give me until November to do them - I really didn't enjoy knitting the spikes.

On Saturday, we met my family in Eshtaol Forest, considerably higher up in the Judean hills, but also at midday rather than late afternoon. Temperatures hit 41 degrees there, and my parents arrived nearly an hour late, despite being sent the precise location once we had reached it. In the end J went to fetch them ... apart from that, it was great to see everybody again. We didn't hug or kiss (either time), but we did not really social distance either, apart from no one getting right up next to my parents. They are the only really vulnerable ones, and being outside was certainly the right choice: despite the heat, it was pleasant enough in the shade and our gazpacho was a great hit.

Going back to the beginning of the week, on Sunday I was depressed and spent the day reading fanfic. At the time I thought this was possibly due to watching La Haine on Saturday night, but yesterday I realised it was more likely to have been a spot of PMS. La Haine was S's choice, although it was a movie he knew nothing about, and it was excellent. One of the interesting things about it was the taken-for-granted friendship between a Muslim and a Jewish character, and the complete lack of radical Islam. Such a movie about life in the banlieux of Paris made today would have had to include a religious Muslim,

On Monday I bounced back, and began translating the last chapter of RE's book, all about expressions of affluence in the late Roman Republic. I couldn't face translating 27 pages, and tried a new method of editing Google Translate: instead of translating each sentence myself, I fed each paragraph into Google Translate, and edited the result. I've done this before when translating from Arabic to English, and it felt a bit like cheating when translating from Hebrew, but it did speed up the process a bit. As RE wants to get the book off to the press asap, I felt it was justified.

Tuesday marked Lag Ba-Omer, the 33rd day of the Counting of the Omer, the 49-day period between Pesach (Passover) and Shavuot (Pentecost; hence the name). This is traditionally Israel's Bonfire Night, despite being in the middle of heatwave → wildfire season. This year, of course, all such gatherings were banned but, equally of course, this was ignored by many ultra-Orthodox communities and the media was full of pictures of gatherings of over 20 people, none of them wearing masks. Ironically, one of the legends explaining why Lag Ba-Omer is a day of rejoicing in a period of mourning (it's a favourite date for weddings, as it's the only day observant Jews can get married in the spring) claims that on this day a plague that was killing many students of the the great 2nd-century CE rabbi, R. Akiva, stopped. We'll see if this works for COVID-19, but I am predicting a spike in cases in ultra-Orthodox neighbourhoods in two weeks' time.

Meanwhile, Wednesday was our first visit to Mahaneh Yehudah. Next week the market  will be open on Friday again, so we will really be able to resume our usual routine. Most of the places we usually go to were open, including the Iraqi Market, which has only stalls, and not proper shops - it had sounded like stalls would not be allowed to open. This is the best time of year for peaches and nectarines and we brought home two kinds of each, plus apricots. The fridge was very happy.

On Thursday the heatwave began. It was M's birthday, so we met her at the local ice cream parlour, Mousseline, and treated her to a cone. You had to go in individually (wearing a mask) and choose the flavours, and then the vendor would go into the back and prepare your cone or cup.  Very interesting - especially as as soon as we were outside, we then all pulled down our masks in order to eat the ice cream. There is definitely a theatrical element to this (especially if you wear a cloth mask coordinating with your top, as M  and I were doing. ADC has just one cloth mask at the moment, the least feminine of the 5 I bought last week). Continuing the "heat" theme, when we got home we watched In the Heat of the Night, still an excellent movie and deservedly a classic.

On Friday we finished our movie-watching week with another recommendation of S's, First Reformed, an eco-thriller featuring a priest who has lost his faith, played by Ethan Hawke. I'm too tired to properly do it justice now, but I'd never heard of this movie, and it was very good.

I hope everyone's life is beginning to go back to some kind of normal. On Thursday afternoon it was announced that grades 4-10 (i.e., including S) were to go back to school from Sunday. On Saturday night the headmaster of his school had a very reassuring Zoom meeting with parents (over 100 participants, meaning over half the parents of his grade) about the coming week. From Tuesday, all six grades at the school, 7-12, will go back to the pre-Corona timetable, but wearing masks and neither food nor water coolers available to them. I feel very sorry for them all in this heatwave, but S is looking forward to seeing his friends again and that's the main thing.

Stay safe, healthy and serene!

Week 8 - May 4-10, 2020

If I'm writing this late, it means that things are going back to a semblance of normality, right? Quite honestly, here in Israel this is in fact the case - on Monday, my cleaner returned. ADC was on campus, and S and I kept out of his way - he was wearing a mask all the time, which he did even before, due to his preference for non-eco cleaning materials - and we stayed at least 2 m away. He came on a different day from his usual, at last minute notice, because on Sunday morning A announced that he was being allowed home for a brief break before the boarding school reopened - so he would be home from whenever ADC could pick him up on Monday until Friday. I really wanted A to come home to a clean room, so the cleaner very kindly agreed to change his day.

Amazingly, my paranoid mother went on a day trip to the Sea of Galilee with my father. We have had a very long and wet winter (including a few unseasonable showers in late April and even now in May). After several years of drought, for the second year running  we have had more than average rainfall, and the pictures my parents sent showed them wearing masks on a backdrop of drowned treetops. We are hoping that our planned ADC's family get-together on the Sea of Galilee in three weeks time will indeed take place - although I have a feeling that curfews will be in place for all public holidays for some time.

A was home, as I said, for most of the week. I did a lot of laundry, he caught up on sleep, and we had a good time just all of us hanging out. We made all his favourite foods, some of which were enabled by the fact that on Thursday I had no less than three food deliveries - one from the supermarket (mainly staples, not fruit and veg), one from our greengrocer in the market (arrived slightly warm, but with minimal packing) and one from an organic direct seller (arrived in lots of un-recyclable black polystyrene trays and clingfilm. Not going to order from them again - in any case, the market has reopened since then). It was so great to eat good peaches and nectarines at a reasonable price for the first time! It feels like winter has been especially long this year, due to the lockdown.

This week was very productive and interesting work wise. I heard two seminars, one on Tuesday with the group, with a public health specialist-cum-historian of medicine, who is involved in formulating Israel's response to COVID-19, and one on Wednesday, at the National Library, about the catalogue of the Avraham Shalom Yahuda collection, that I was involved in translating some years ago. Also, I finally got hold of my co-editor on the Mamilla project, and we had a three-hour long phone meeting. He's disappeared again since then, but at least we did talk, and go over one chapter ...

Friday was a weird day: on the one hand, I finally had a haircut. Both the hairdresser and I wore masks, he applied alcogel between every stage, and sanitised the chairs between customers. On the other hand, on my way back I went to the neighbourhood seamstress and bought five cloth masks. Yes, in theory I could make my own, but I don't really have time for it, and I'd rather get it done by a professional - who probably needs the money more than I do. I've worn one so far, and it is actually quite a bit more comfortable than the disposable surgical masks. ADC bought another lot when A took the last of the ones we'd received right at the beginning of concerns from my father, and they are not as good, according to him.

On Saturday we went down to Omer to visit E. It was the first time we'd seen her in the flesh over two months, and it was very nice to sit outside under the pergola and admire the lilies and ice flowers - to say nothing of the newly painted bedrooms. She is moving into M and D's bedroom now, with an en suite. While A was there over Pesach, they started unpacking some of the boxes she brought back from the US around a decade ago. She found some really nice stuff of hers, and gave me some more unwanted sheets and table cloths to make clothes from.

We also spent part of the weekend watching the National Theatre At Home production of Antony and Cleopatra on YouTube. S was keen to watch it because of Ralph Fiennes, and quite enjoyed it. However, he wondered why Shakespeare is so often done in modern dress (as in the other National Theatre At Home production we saw, King Lear with Ian McKellen at the Jerusalem Cinematheque) rather than in the clothes of Shakespeare's day.

Speaking of S, on Sunday morning we received his report for the second term (not including the lockdown period, which for him is still very much ongoing. It remains unclear when 10th-graders will return to school). He is doing very well, including in his new main subject of literature (to which he transferred from biology), although "could do better if he spent less time talking to his friends" was a repeated motif throughout. That's really what he's missing the most - talking to his friends, to the extent that he has joined Fortnite in order to talk to them. On Sunday evening, we had a parent-teacher meeting via Zoom. We sat in our usual constellation of ADC and me on either side of S, on the couch in front of the desktop, and his class teacher was amused at how protective we looked. AR, the teacher, is a very nice guy, although he seems absurdly young at times - turns out that he is a friend of one of ADC's graduate students! He mainly asked about how S was coping, and asked him to be more present (i.e., with video on) at the class meetings. These are usually first thing in the morning, and S is not a morning person. I wake him up several times - when I get up, after I exercise, after I shower - and I'm not surprised to hear that he is not very responsive during the first class of the day! I wish he would get out and see his friends, but he is still resistant to that. We've been sending him on errands instead - going to pick up parcels from the post office, taking down trash and so on.

That's it for this week. Stay safe, healthy and serene!

Week 7 - April 27 - May 3, 2020

This week went by really fast! This was partly because there was a "weekend" in the middle, as Tuesday and Wednesday were Memorial Day and Independence Day here in Israel respectively. This meant a low-key flypast above various hospitals (we saw the four training planes go by from our balcony, but the actual aerobatics, and drawing a heart over the local hospital with the jet streams was in a blind spot) and lot of Israeli movies - Waltz with Bashir (about the 1982 Lebanon War) on Tuesday night, The Unofficial Ones (הבלתי רשמיים - a fictionalised retelling of the founding of Shas, the political party of the Sephardi ultra-Orthodox Jews) on Wednesday night and Aviya's Summer (הקיץ של אביה - a classic from the 80s, about a little girl in 1950s Israel who comes home from school for the summer, while her Holocaust-survivor mother is between nervous breakdowns. It is based on the autobiography of the actress who plays the mother, Gila Almagor, who is mostly seen these days advertising very upmarket old age homes. It was odd to see her as she was 30 years ago).  S watched the first and last movies with us (he skipped the second to work on a home exam in history) and found them both interesting. Each movie sparked a discussion about its subject - the Lebanon War seems so long ago now. Operation Peace for Galilee started the summer after we came to Israel, and I remember coming back from our first family trip to the Kinneret, and noticing the tank carriers rolling north, but not understanding the significance at all. What a mess it was, truly Israel's Vietnam, and in retrospect the beginning of the loss of faith of ordinary people that the "high ups" meant well, even if things didn't always work out.

Knitting continues apace - I've completed one and three-quarters of the dragon leggings for G - the leggings were done last week, and I've done 6 out of 8 spikes. Extremely fiddly work, those spikes - each one takes half an hour and I can't do anything else while working on them, as they require extreme concentration. But they'll be done by Friday, G's 4th birthday (definitely the reason for 4 spike, why do you ask?).  LR's top is going well, I've finished a sleeve and started the second one. The body will probably only be completed after we're allowed to meet again, as she'll need to try it on to decide on the length.

The continuing adventures of getting vegetables: we are having a very hard time with the price and quality of fruit and vegetables available in our neighbourhood. We ordered a box direct from growers,  but the choice was either organic or extra kosher certification - so the prices were still quite high and the selection was limited, as its a single farm (although the quality was good). That was on Monday. On Tuesday ADC decided that he wanted to check whether shops along Jaffa Road in the market area had reopened. He triumphantly bought a variety of spices, herbs and loose teas - and discovered that one of the greengrocers whose regulars we are was open, too, despite being in the market proper. He came home with extra loquats and somewhat squishy peaches, all he could carry by bike - and KH's brother came round later with a wreath of green garlic. This made us very happy. By then we had also heard about a company that sells directly to consumers from the wholesalers who normally sell to the market stalls. We took a look at the website and were impressed. We ordered on Wednesday and got a large quantity of fruit and vegetables on Thursday, including our first broccolis and cauliflowers in a month. Much rejoicing here!

Staying with the food theme, on Thursday S's class made Death by Chocolate cookies. They came out very well, considering his lack of experience, and on Friday I met M in the line for the supermarket and gave her 2. We actually saw her again on the weekend, all of us, as we went to the far recycling, that includes cans, and we have to go by her house for that. S came with on the walk, to return comics. On our way, most people were wearing masks, but one elderly woman was sitting in her yard with the mask around her chin, and two younger people (adult grandchildren?) were sitting with her without any masks at all. On our way back we saw them get into a car and rive off, so they probably don't live with her. This kind of thing makes me worry about a second wave ...

Fittingly for the times, the movies on the weekend were The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeouisie, which is officially surreal, and the 1966 Batman movie with Adam West.

That's it for this week. Stay safe, healthy and serene!