War

Saturday

Our Shabbat away, near one of my favourite stretches of beach where Eli and Mor live, was postponed because their baby had a temperature, so we stayed in Jerusalem. Shabbat is the only day to catch up on zeds, or zees as Americans no doubt say, so sleep and eat is what we slouchily did to make up for the tiring rush of the week. Shabbat went out, we lit seven Channuka candles, and once the computer was switched on, we realised Israel had bombed Hamas's infrastructure in Gaza. It surprised us as much as it must have surprised the Palestinians - the day before Israel had issued 'it's strongest warning yet' to Hamas to stop firing rockets into the south , but still we didn't expect a war to start as we were snoozing, reading and having a long walk to the park with the frisky hound. I suppose reactions to this type of situation vary - there will be people who say, 'Good. Serves them right. Yal-la,' the ones who say, 'Oh, man! What did they do that for?' and the ones who silently gulp, like me, which may well be the majority grouping.

Times of war and intifada mean every Israeli home with a TV (and that's not everyone as religious Jews don't have TVs) has it on all the time, with the same recurring images and interviews repeating in an endless circle of drama and mayhem until some other gruesome event comes to oust the previous images. TV and media, being what they are, fuel the human elements of the situation, which means they try to pull on the heartstrings or disgust you by showing injured kids, and the bias is shocking. In Israel they show women hysterically crying, screaming and praying as the sirens go off and the rockets start raining around them (I saw that standing in the doorway of someone's house as I went to pick up daughter number two from her friend). And in England they never go to Israeli homes and interview people, rarely show the damage or the fear instilled on this side, but show instead the damage Israel has done, and that reeks of propoganda.





Sunday

The kids are still on Channuka holidays and we have plans to go to the Western Wall, or Cottel, with the Korn family from England who made Aliyah (emigrated to Israel) from sunny Pinner in the summer. I need to pick up my older son from a sleepover at his cousins' house as the Korn's son was in his class in London and it would be rude if my boy didn't join us, but I have to threaten him as he doesn't want to have anything to do with us once he's at his cousins' house, but this is expected and my threats are good. But I can't get to him as the road to his cousins' house is blocked by police and soldiers, and we all know what this means without having to ask the police girl smoking a fag and waving cars away. Next to where the cousins live is an Arab village, the village the tractor killer came from, and they've been rioting. Later on, coming back, we pass the entrance to the village, still blocked by police and soldiers but just the village and not the whole road this time, and we see a huge skip-like bin on fire, hundreds of rocks on the road that were thrown at the police and soldiers and some dark smoke further in where something is smoldering.









The Arab village below my house, Beit Zafafa, is closed as well. Police and soldiers block all the entrances and exits to the village. Later, on my way back from a wonderful class on Jewish philosophy, where we refuted the Big Bang, pretty much wiped science off the table and considered the timelessness and instancy of the act of creation, the whole road near Beit Zafafa was blocked and I had to go the long way around, to the Bethlehem road, hoping that wasn't closed as well, so I could recapture my child from the Russians. Nice Russians, but it sounds cold-war-ish and exciting, so I'm leaving it in.




(Rocket being fired from Gaza into southern Israel)

Monday

I'm not the kind of person who wakes up and reads the news on the internet, but this is war and it's on my doorstep. Israel has bombed more Hamas compounds overnight and the death toll is rising. It's the last day of the holidays, it's rainy and there are six kids in the house chasing the dog and playing on the Wii. I manage to blag a press pass to cover Project Interchange, a group of US campus editors with an anti-Israel stance, who are coming (with perfect timing) to assess what the situation is really like, go to security fences, have lunch with IDF soldiers, meet Palestinian media and have talks from eminent professors about strategic environments and problems with investment in the Middle East. I put myself forward as a blogger (blagger, more like) for The Independent (which is in the pipeline but I've had no official go ahead yet) and a freelance journalist, so I get a place on the bus, lunches and to interview and cover the events. Thing is, I can't go with them to the north as I have to work, cook and be a mother, or to the Dead Sea and Massada as they're doing that on Shabbat. So I'm squeezing myself in where I can. It's fun, being a war correspondent. Not that I have any idea what a war correspondent does and I haven't yet left my rainy house or written anything about the war. But the idea is exciting.





Tuesday

It's raining heavily in Jerusalem; we wake up and the breathtakingly beautiful panoramic view we have of the city is a breathtaking panoramic view of thick white cloud and fog. I can't see the houses in Beit Zafafa below my garden. I'm locking doors, telling the kids to ask who it is before they open it, and in school yesterday the teachers talked to each class about what was going on in the country they'll one day have to fight for in the army. It's a bizarre reality to grow up in. I remember during the intifada, when suicide bombings of teenagers waiting to go into clubs, bus bombings, Arab drivers driving their buses into whole crowds of soldiers and civilians standing at bus stops were incidents happening every day, a little girl of five came to play with my little girl, who was also then five. It was the day after an incident when a mother of three was lying on her bed with her children, sleeping, and gunmen burst into her house and she could only grab two of them and pull them under the bed with her, and I was raw with emotion, knowing that the other one, who was shot dead, was the one she couldn't get to and how she must have felt about that. I heard the girls playing in the sitting room, and then it clicked what they were saying. 'There's been an incident,' (piguah) said the visiting child, 'and Daddy's been killed. The ambulance is coming soon and we have to run away.' 'Woah, woah,' I said running to them, 'What happened to playing with your dollies?'



(Israeli man surveys the damage to his home after it was hit by a kassam rocket.)

Mum calls.
'It's kicking off there.'
'Yep.'
'Make sure all your passports are ready.'
'Ok.'
'I hate this.'
'I know, Ma.'

Her only two daughters and her six grandchildren - her entire family apart from her siblings - are here. I know she's panicking. I don't tell her a bomb fell in Be'er Sheva yesterday, 40kms away from Gaza, which is very close to our friends with the horses and donkeys. I must call them and see how they are. The 43 year old Dad, who is rather beefy these days but is most cool - he lived in Jamaica for two years when he was seventeen and dances like a black man, which is with winding hips and tiny smooth movements - got called up as a reserve to fight in Lebanon during the last war. Hope he doesn't get called up again. They have three kids, one isn't a year old yet.

War isn't fun. People are tense and stress levels are high. Fear of reprisals and renewed suicide attacks are hanging over us like the shadow of the grim reaper, and Australia suddenly seems a very good option as an emigration destination. But here we are, getting on with our day, justifying Israel's actions and our existence to the rest of the world and our friends and famiy, who get shown a one-sided viewpoint on TV, hoping they'd see it another way if they had to live like this, wondering if these 'defenseless' people, as they were called yesterday, will stop trying to wipe the country out. Meanwhile, we wipe theirs out.

Sigh.

Fud

I'm so excited. It's the academic equivalent of reading Wanderlust from the comfort of your Tube seat and losing yourself down a vast dusty track in the outback, laden with rucksack and telescope, alone and intent on searching for the darkest skies on Earth from which to view supernovae. Or stomping through teeming undergrowth, swatting mozzies off your sweaty countenance as you trek in search of some endangered beast or long lost tribe. When you look up and you're on an old rickety train somewhere between Charing Cross and Embankment instead, the hit is no less energising. More so, in fact.

I've spent the last few weeks helping students with their applications for Harvard, Yale, Georgia Tech, Oxford etc by rewriting and editing personal statements and fixing CVs. Oooh, I thought. Harrrrvard. Mmmm. Oxxxxford. Yes, I said to the aeronautical engineer who wants to do Phd research on aeroplane engines that run on some kind of dangerous sounding explosion - go do it. The deadline might be a week's time and you only decided to apply last week, but don't give up: apply again next year if you fail the GRE and don't blame it on my teaching seeing as you only gave me a month to teach you the whole course and you're Russian.

Then other thoughts occurred. If these not particularly genius folk (the others, I mean - the Russian is pretty sharp) are applying to these wonderous places, and some of them are downright dim, what it means is, these places are filled with ordinary people and some of them are not even scarily clever...

So I spent last night in ac-lust. Academic lust. Searching for the perfect Phd, or fud, as I like to call it. I sent an email to a nice prof in Stanford's department of literary philosophy to tell him I was interested in the course he's thinking of running if he has enough interest. I found out that a comparative literature Phd at Harvard requires four languages, minimum, so I'm definitely not taking that, but other courses look delectable. I contemplated the 'The Centre for the Study of Rationality' at the Hebrew University, even though "Every student in the program must have a background in mathematics at least at the level required for admission to the University's Department of Statistics: this includes differential and integral calculus, and linear algebra. The student must also have an introductory course in statistics and probability and a course in game theory", the very idea of which made me come out in a nasty rash, but I have a good friend who's a maths teacher, so it's not impossible. But studying decision making is rather bloody ironic, considering, and not sure if it interests me fully anyway as the maths makes it all a bit, well, mathematical.




I think I found my doctorate course, anyway. I think I found funding and I think, seeing as they are 'actively seeking researchers in these fields' and I deemed those fields exactly right for my purposes of getting in, I'd definitely be in the running. The only problems are - one, the application deadline is in 2 weeks and I'd have to outline a whole research project including relevant reading done thus far and intended sources, which is expecting alot from the 'miracles happen during Chanuka' belief, and two, it's not in Israel and I am.

I won't apply now, obviously, even though one part of me is going 'Phduckit. Why not? Just to see if I could get in...' Maybe I'll spend the coming year reading and figuring out my line of research and apply for next year. I do feel guilty that my children's education is what I should be investing time in now and not my own, so even if I do it in like ten years time, it would be ok, I guess. A long wait, but then at least my children won't be illiterate ignoramuses. It made me so excited to even consider it and now nothing seems impossible. I did rule out most of the Ivy League and US universities, merely because I can't easily schlepp the tribe somewhere else after recently upheaving them (maybe that's not the right word - it sounds like I puked them out). But maybe. One day. Five years of the Phd is paid for in the US, as long as you teach a bit. Oooh.





So rather than read about trips to Antarctica and Chile, I'm getting my kicks from reading graduate programs and checking out the courses available in the world's top universities, and my hairs are on end. This is fun, man! I'm even considering studying astronomy, or anthropology, just for a little something in the meantime, until the kids get bigger, until the day comes when I can go off and become the leading professor in the philosophy of stellar-linked rationality in the emotional ethics of Irish Jewish Thai literature based on the absence/presence of the author and the literary techniques of ancient Jewish texts. (Maybe I'd be the only professor in that particular field, in fact, thinking about it.)

The world is my oyster. (Is that why they call a London travel pass an Oyster card?)

The other significant thing going on this week is a likkle day called Harismas on 25th, which is nothing at all here in the Holy City but a regular Thursday (or whatever). It never ceases to amaze me that a day so built up all over the world, with such an drawn-out, panicky, excitable countdown; a day that people travel all over the world to arrive before; that they take time out to buy things for, spend so much money on and over-eat and over-booze to such a remarkable extent doesn't even get a mention. It simply doesn't exist, full stop. Unless you go to Bethlehem or Nazarus, and as a Jew, that's illegal. But I know it does exist, which makes it feel kinda furtively exciting. I look around the streets at the very normal goings-on, and know what's happening in all the homes of my family and friends and it's like a weird movie where all the action is building up in certain scenes but keeps getting cut with scenes from a boring, ordinary day where things are moving really slowly. The things I miss most on that day are tastes - rich, alcoholic, over-indulgent. But I don't miss smoking, so that's mucho excellente.




Anyway.

What I'm trying to say is Seasons Greetings to all of you, whatever your leanings. Happy HeyZus-mas day, and Chag Sameach. May miracles abound.

Addictions

Monday morning I went on a school trip with Maayan's class to Park Canada, which isn't the small crappy park across the road from our house, as I'd previously thought, but a large and beautiful spot near Latrun where the Maccabees fought the Greeks in a big battle. This trip pertains to Hannuka (which I prefer spelled without a 'c', even though I've started adding that same 'c' to the English spelling of my surname as people were calling me Emma Seven) as steep inclines lead to 360 degree views and ruins of the guards' watchtower, which is living history and thus pretty cool. This was all wonderful stuff etc etc but the whole 5 hr shebang would have been significantly more enjoyable if there had been coffee in my bloodstream.

It was the first morning for as long as I could remember where coffee didn't play a part, and man, was I fucked up. Arrrggh, massive yawn, Arrggghhh massive yawn, arrggghhh massive yawn - whoop swallowed a rock, a child of eight, a teacher's scarf, my own face. Who, Maayan, is that constantly yawning, grey-skinned lump of near-life crouching with desperation near a rock? Oh, that's my Mummy. She's just dying of caffeine withdrawal. She'll be fine and if not we'll cart her body home in the bus. Leave her to die and let's war again.

I was flabberghasted to realise just how addicted I am to caffeine. Yesterday morning I had to have five cups of it to replenish the cellular deficit. This morning, pre-coffee, the yawns started again, the body was sluggish, half-alive, eyes streaming. Post-coffee and I could run across the Antarctic in my pj's and feel neither cold nor tired, merely wonder why there's no zenith to climb and how long I could stay in the icy waters before my heart gave way, and plop, here goes - start the stopwatch!

Dad used to tell us how sugar was 'the biggest poison known to man' and refuse to buy sweeties, cookies, chocolate and sweet cereal and I plotted that when I was older I'd have a whole row in my kitchen of all the cereals I wanted and no one would be able to stop me. Now, of course, I don't want them, I want Weetabix, which costs like eight quid a box of 24 so there's no way on earth. Anyway, we'd say, 'yeah, yeah Dad, give it a rest and pass the Smarties.' So I wonder if it was the sugar as much as anything that I put in my coffee, but whatever. I don't drink as much alcohol as I once did, I don't ram consciousness expanding drugs down my gullet (anymore), I let people cross at zebra crossings, unlike Israelis, and I work hard for almost no pay, so I figure I deserve a little poison.

Hannuka is about to begin, which means doughnuts and holidays and cold dark weather -except the weather hasn't got very cold and on the trip, we saw the flower rakefet, don't know what it's called in Anglit, which is an end of winter sort of flower, and the teacher reckons she saw blossoming almond trees, which is a sign that you need to start cleaning your house like a nut for Passover. It's all messed up. I like Hannuka. I like anything if I've drunk coffee that morning.

So Him Indoors said last night I was addicted to the computer - 'the world's greatest addiction' he called it. Yes, I've spent almost every minute on the effing thing since I got back and here I am again, but I WORK on it, was my reasoning. I feed from it, I connect with the world, I write and create. This is my medium. This is my sustenance and livelihood, my entertainment and my 'only connect' faculty. If it made me coffee I'd marry it.

So I guess I'm not as pure as pure can be. Not that purity was ever a goal, as such, but one wonders if I might be something worth thinking about. I'm too punk to be pure, but one day I might be rid of that and get zen on a cloud of purity.

No cigarettes, said the brain upon waking.

No cigarettes it's saying now.

Don't get up and go to the back door.

Don't do it.

Don't!

Londinium

People have been living in the London area for over 5,000 years, although, like Israel, it was once boggy marshland. I don't know what this means, this 5,000 years business: does it mean no one lived there beforehand because it was a swamp, or that that's when residential records started, or at that point the native folk got massacred by nice white people who stuck their flag in the earth?

The Romans established the town of Londinium in 43 BCE, about 7 years after their invasion of Britain. Around AD 60, it was sacked (what does that mean ?) by the Iceni and their fiesty queen Boudica, but then it grew until, get this, in the 2nd century, it replaced Colchester as the capital of Roman Britain (Britannia).

I repeat. Colchester. Imagine that being the capital of our mighty frozen land. Shudder.

Talking about shuddering, these pictures were taken at lunchtime, the warmest part of the day, on our convoluted way past Henley's fields and icy graveyards as we looked for the effing pub. It was around minus 5 that night. All of us went out for a smoke but no one was shivering quite as violently as I was.












Roman London had 60,000 residents, as opposed to the squashy 12 million today. They enjoyed the largest basilica (Roman public building) north of the Alps, a governor's palace, temples, bath houses, amphitheatre and a large fort for the city garrison, all which, sadly, are no longer down Streatham High Road. Political instability and recession- yes, credit crunchers, a 3rd century recession - led to a slow decline.

At some time between 190 and 225 AD the Romans built a huge, thick defensive wall around it, although I don't know where that is either. Also like Jerusalem, the city has survived fires, plagues, terrorist attacks, war, bombardment and invasion. Both have witnessed mass immigration and growth, until tiny hamlets a day's ride from London, like Pinner, got enclosed in its great zone 5 underground map, and it spread almost to, well, Colchester. Ironically.



Fuelled by this newfound interest in the place I was desperate to leave for most of my itchy youth, I got in touch with schools for the kids for next year to, as they say in Amerikee, cover my ass. If I was to decide to come back then the kids having places in schools would be a serious consideration, but if I left it, that would be it. No chance. No option. Stuck with a capital uck and a different first letter.

So I called the secondary school that has a thousand kids vying each year for 'only' 300 Year 7 places and discovered the deadline passed in October; that my kids aren't in the country which complicates the application by a millionfold or renders it impossible (depending on which local authority you speak to). The school committee would have to consider Tamar's Year 9 application with great weight and deliberation if she ever rose up the extensive waiting list, and we'd have to get clearance from the Beit Din. Barnet were the least pedantic and beaurocratic council - well, they were the only ones who didn't scream with laughter at my request, or slam the phone down with disgust, or shriek outright, 'No way on EARTH, you mad, deluded witch.' So in my application, as long as I use Valerie's address, move to Hendon or Golders Green if I do go back, which is fine by me, lie, cheat, steal and kill all those who are on the waiting list before us, we'll be in with a slim chance. Hey, I wasn't daunted. Massive headfucks are run of the mill - I'm getting used to them - and where there's a will there's a way and all that proverby stuff. Plus it will leave my options nice and open one way or another.

Feeling not so trapped or stuck or weighed down, Israel felt a better place to be. Boring, uncooth and uncivilized, yes. Decent people have to scrum through flying mud for the remainder of the pickings and feel grateful they have work at all, yes. But that may be just my inbred intellectual snobbery and my blue blood surfacing. I could blame alot on those regal genes - I should remember to. I'm a PRINCESS, for crying out loud. I'll have to get that printed on a t-shirt.

Once landed, I spent the last 2 days arched over a computer with stiff shoulders writing summaries for Newser, which means making sure headlines are direct and contain verbs, putting numerals before certain things eg 40 years but forty candidates, italicizing books and some sources but not others, and turning 'encyclopedia sounding sentences' like 'Other threats to coral reefs include pollution and natural disasters, like earthquakes, the Guardian reports' to snappy lines like 'The report also zeroed in on additional threats like pollution...'

The New York chick training me seems to think I'll get there in the end and the snappy line thing will just click, but right now I hate the news with a passion. Three of my summaries went on air yesterday, with editing, of course. Do I get paid for these two whole days? No. And the three days beforehand? No. And the two days next week? And the week after, ad impecunium? Don't ask.

I see it as skill building. Or slave labour, depending which day you get me on. A Penniless Royal (Oooh, Penny Royal was some kind of ancient contraceptive stuff. Good name for a book.)

Kate said, 'some things just don't belong. Like a cactus in the rainforest'.

Hmm. Well, the cactus is back in the rainforest after a much needed restorative break, wishing the friends she could rely one, the ones who are there for her and made her laugh, were just down the road. But something is better, and the thought of being here seems less enervating somehow.

And, AND, I woke up this morning and said, ' No cigarettes today. That's it.' And I didn't either. Just wish I hadn't bought a stick of 200 in duty free.

Dirty Old Town

ON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

William Wordsworth, Sept 3rd 1802



Tuesday 2 Dec
For more than a year, Luton Airport has been surrounded by roadworks, preventing people from getting home from the airport even after midnight, which is just what you need after a five hour flight. The taxi drivers huddle in each other's taxis for warmth, speaking Hindi or Urdu. You have to pay a quid to use a trolley for your bags, which is offensive. It's minus one. It feels like the most normal thing in the world to be home.

Wednesday
I wake up in a bed enveloped in Egyptian cotton sheets, lying on the softest pillows, looking at a pale, cool room. Mum's love of decent things even when there's not much food in the fridge means it's comfortable in bed and frost covers the roofs outside like snow so I don't rush to get up. I've been awake for hours, anyway. Thinking. The house is cosy: log fires and hot radiators; tweeting birds and proper tea. I really really hate Staines, but we take Maor to town to arrange an eye test, buy him new trainers and mooch about, looking at the toys. Maor doesn't want to come to Leonie's house so I go with a backpack and a book on the train; Leonie picks me up with Ella, Megan and Tullia in the back, grinning sweetly and wondering why Maor didn't come. The house smells of baking salmon and steaming dogs. Cats hang out on the kitchen counter and lick plates in the sink. Sean and Catia are there already, munching on hard crisps and looking smarter than I look. The house has evolved into a beautiful place - Leonie's canvases line the walls and one captures Grandma's expression perfectly, so I look at it for a long time. Being here is like walking into a warm corner of your heart. Dinner is eggplant soup with mint leaves and pine kernals dotted on top; salmon en croute with Thai paste and spinach on the side, and muesli crumble and custard for pud. I take Florence her dinner - she's babysitting next door. She got fifty quid for it. I'm in the wrong career.

Thursday
Flo(15) has tuba today and can't carry it to school so Leonie drives her in. Ella (13) has her saxophone grading so I listen to her practice after breakfast. She makes me (piss weak) tea - I add another tea bag- toast ('Shall I butter it for you? Yes, please Ella. Do you want some marmalade? Shall I cut it in half for you?) and makes the sweetest little 'oh' noise when she makes a mistake that if I was the teacher, I'd pass her just for that. We take her there - she's so nervous - I wish her luck and get on the train. I walk over the bridge and London hits me like an intravenous mainline shot of adrenaline.





Waiting for Kate on Embankment, I go into the National Theatre, a place I've never been to before. There are lots of these places - London is a city I'd like to get to know better. Upstairs is the 'Landscape Photography of the Year' exhibition so I float silently in front of large canvases of rough British seas, tangled, knotted woods and icy moors, enjoying (just as much as the exhibition) the dark oak floors, the heavy doors of the restrooms and their solid handles, the porcelain seat of the toilet and the thick tissue paper, wondering if that means I'm a snob. In the coffee shop beside the photographs people are quietly eating, sitting upright, drinking politely to the classical music in the placid cafe. In his eight chapters preceding Perkei Avot, Rambam, the King of Spain's physician, writes that just as a diseased body needs a certain cure, so the troubled soul needs to restore itself, and this is done by wandering around beautiful buildings and gardens. He's right, you know. Kate is restorative as well. She also grabs hold of the manuscript I'm about to lob into the Thames and, in a moment of focus and light, tells me exactly what's wrong and what's right. We have noodle soup in Wagamammas and take our cold ear shells off to meet the others in the pub, which was chilly. A crushing headache for hours and hours leaves me reeling. Good to see my writing comrades again.






Friday and Saturday
Maor and I get the train to Pinner and go to Moriah. In the playground, the thin minded, gossipy mothers I never liked anyway give sidelong looks and almost hellos; the ones I loved give hugs and kisses. Inside, the over-controlling teachers leave me with a sour taste in my mouth. Shabbat comes in early - 'I run and I run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking' to get to Chiswick on time. Dinner, champagne cocktails and wine with Mazzer, a spa and steam room in the morning and a wander by the river, watching the kayaking men in woolly hats, and a walk along Chiswick High Road where Jamaicans in a steel drum band play Jingle Bells to white shoppers with expensive beach strollers. A microcosm of society, this place - everyone here is a made-it professional, all the smart homes look the same inside the large, bare windows -it's lovely but it's not quite real. Not for me, anyway. Not yet. If ever. When Shabbat goes out we go to Justine and Pete's; Milly (5) had a temperature but said, ' You made me feel much better, Emma. Will you come back and live here, please?' I make soup for Jess, who's sick as a dog and in bed for a week already, and Justine does her usual trick of saying, 'Oooh, can you double up?', so I make soup for her as well. We deliver the soup and sit with Jess a while. As days go, this one's close to perfect.





Do I miss it here? Of course I do.
Do I want to come back? I do, actually. Kind of.
Will I? Hmm.
Good question.

Transcendence of the Ego

In his book of this name, Satre - a most interesting-looking dude - differentiates between actions like "driving the car" and "writing" (why he puts these in speech marks is unclear) and 'purely psychical actions, like doubting, reasoning, meditating, making a hypothesis...'

There is, he claims, active consciousness, and then there is reflection, which is directed onto the consciousness. Obviously, being Satre, he tries to complicate this idea as much as possible and tie his readers' minds up like a cat's cradle on inexperienced but enthusiastic little fingers. (A taster: 'To these moments correspond concrete, active consciousnesses, and the reflection which is directed on the consciousnesses apprehends the total action in an intuition which exhibits it as the transcendent unity of the active consciousnesses.' This is easily conveyed compared to some of the ideas, but for a real challenge you should try 'Being and Nothingness': there are sentences in there that would win first prize in a 'Most Incomprehensible Collection of Words Ever to Form a Sentence' competition. Perhaps that's why his eyes went a little skewhiff.)

'Simply to be and to be aware of itself are one and the same thing for consciousness; nothing can act on consciousness because it is cause of itself,' he says. But the Ego is an object, and thus is passive, which means it is capable of 'being affected. The me, as such, remains unknown to us...The only method for knowing it is observation, approximation, anticipation, experience.'




The me remains unknown to us, and, if I might debunk his theory somewhat, only seems to become more and more so despite the observations, the approximations, the anticipations and the experiences.

Moving to another country is a wonderful way to transcend one's Ego. 'Transcend' sounds elevated and stately; 'stamp on with big boots' might be more precise. Ballasts of former self are removed. You walk around in the same body but something has been scraped out; pitted, cored, taken to a lab to be examined. No one really knows you, and apart from the closest person, no one really cares - not really. Going to London next week feels like being a rock-star and leaping off the stage in a heady dive: a crowdful of arms are there to catch me, hold me aloft over their heads, know me, love me, talk to me, keep me up and hope I won't go back onto the stage because they want me to stay there suspended and laughing like a loony in their arms.

I foolishly thought the blasting of the Ego was something we went through in youth: we can walk out of the life presented as the only real option; we can change our beliefs, have life-affecting, soul-enlightening experiences of near-death serenity and feel the force of life in its fullest but we get older and still parts of us get stripped away. Like a snake, a once integral membrane of who we are, a sheath of wafer-thin skin, is left on the dusty ground as we slither off, slightly raw.





This is probably a good thing. The Ego can become something we hide behind because we don't know what else there would be of us if we stepped out from behind it. A friend of mine is going to a women's groupy thing and one of the women there said to her, 'Why are you hiding behind cool?' This struck me somewhat. Being cool, being clever or beautiful or nutty or reserved or angst-ridden - these are edifices we construct when we're young: we dress in a certain way, we become walking embodiments of something we consider to be 'me', experiences shape us into a form. But clothes that look good on a nineteen year old don't translate well onto a sixty year old, so some essential aspect has to remain fluid, open and pliable.

'The problem with women,' my darling said to me this week, 'is that they change. Men don't change.' He said it as if that was a splendid thing. Maybe it is. It helps, I suppose.

Anyway.

On the Jerusalem roads this week we watched a policeman driving whilst talking on his mobile phone; a police van drive as close as he could behind me, flashing (the usual signal when someone wants you to move out of their effing way), which meant forcing me to drive faster than the speed limit in order to pass the car parallel to me and let him pass; a car that had crashed into the back of a bus in Gilo as buses just pull out after bus stops and don't care if there's a car in the lane already; I nearly got run off the road by a religious guy because he wasn't going to let me filter in front of him when I got in the wrong lane - he'd rather have crashed into me than let me get one over by getting in front of him. Arse. Traffic lights become gridlocked as drivers don't think about flow or other drivers on the road and I had this great idea that everyone here should be taught chess at school in order to THINK IN ADVANCE and plan one step ahead and learn that elusive and sublime thing everyone lacks called PATIENCE. Ahhh. Driving here is a war of truculence and you need full armour on, to hold your sword aloft, to have the heat of battle ringing in your ears before you pull out of your parking space. Hell. It's hell.

But it's quite fun if you're in a black mood and are a dab hand at rally driving. As I am. But most of the time it just gets you down. Man's inhumanity to man is the most baffling of all the illogicalities on this earth - just look at what's happening in Mumbai. Time to put my combat gear on - going to get the kids now.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Jerusalem at large

(Dawn view from our balcony. Sunset and sunrise the whole place has a translucent glow)


I realised a while ago that this blog is more about the meanderings of my mind than my meanderings through this holy city. That's because, as English Justine yelled at me on the phone last week, 'There's NOTHING more boring than Middle Eastern Politics' and also because a city is a city is a city and the convolutions of my head follow me wherever I go. That said, perhaps living in Jerusalem may well be interesting to someone who's never been to Israel and wonders what Jerusalem is really like.

Well...let's see. Jerusalem lies almost a thousand meters above sea level (which results in two exciting days of snow in winter, a hot but cooler than the sweaty swamp of Tel Aviv summer) and is mountainous. This rules out one of my crucial criterion of utopian living, which is to inhabit a place where I can cruise around on a mountain bike. Obviously mountain bikes were designed for precisely such terrains, but bearing in mind the gradient and size of the summit leading up to my house, even friends with bikes don't bother risking the future of their knees.

A law in Jerusalem means all buildings, from the new Waldorf Astoria ('The Palace') under construction near the family shop all the way down to local apartment blocks have to be covered with Jerusalem stone, which is a dusty yellow colour. This makes Jerusalem far, far more attractive than almost any other city in the world although, presumably, this applies to the buildings that were built after the law, as there are some monstrosities below my house that are square and diarrhoea red, and man, they really spoil the view.




The roads are narrow and poky, there are too many cars, the people drive like their wife's waters have just broken on their cream leather seats and they're really not happy about it and if you don't let them ram in front of you, they'll shoot you in the head and run you off the road. And that's every single time you get in the car. In fact, that would be a valid enough reason: what makes it worse is that there IS no reason to behave or drive like that - as though they own this road so just move over. I hate the pervasive 'Who are you, anyway?' (Mi ata bichlal?) attitude, which said in the correct way with a hand turned offensively upwards in your face, means don't go thinking you're something because you're a lowly piece of sh** and you need to know it.

The majority (I'm estimating wildly here) of residents are religious: mostly Orthodox Jews, but there are Arab towns sitting snugly in every valley (there's one below our house) and so there are many Muslims, plus Christian nuns and monks living in retreats and monastaries, Armenian and Ethipoian dudes with groovy beards plus coachloads of tourists wearing crucifixes and brighter trousers than they'd ever wear at home. Most religious Jews don't keep domestic pets and so all of them, from father and mother to children, are ridiculously and hysterically terrified of small, cute dogs. The good thing is, religious neighbourhoods may house families each with ten to twelve kids squished into three room apartments, block after block, but there isn't dog mess on the street. Litter, yes. But no doggy doo doo, and that's nice. Don't get me started on litter, though: the shores of the Sea of Galilee look like a dumping ground. Environmental awareness is as rare as good customer service.



I saw this dustsleeve of Infidels when I was about eighteen and asked Dad where this dusty, ancient-looking city was. I stared at it for ages and vowed to one day go there. Serves me right, really

Being a new country means the landscape and the infrastructure change in the blink of an eye. Cranes poke into the skyline everywhere you look; dust is ubiquitous, ditto rubble, ditto killer tractors and rumbling noises. We used to look at tractors and say, 'ahh, lookee the big yellow digger!' -they were friendly over-sized toys and farmish looking - but after the two Arab drivers of huge diggers turned them on buses and upturned cars, killing people downtown a couple of months ago, when we see a tractor, deathly fear ripples over our spines and the kids shout, 'Mum! Get out of its way, quick!' Sad, really.

My other criteria for a perfect location to settle down were:

1) It had to be cold in winter; cold enough for real fires and big jumpers. Tick.
2) Hot in summer, tick.
3) Nice friendly people would smile and say 'Good morning', cross.
4) A sea or lake nearby, cross.
5) A proper autumn with a blaze of orange and red leaves, cross.
6) Good healthy air and a clean, pure atmosphere to feel alive in. Big cross.

On the plus side, you can buy kosher food without it being limited to one small section of the supermarket with an insulting display of pickled cucumbers and Passover matzos. Shabbat is something special here, not another shopping day. There are lots of other Jews so you don't need to explain why you need Friday afternoon off or why you can't even GET in a car, let alone drive, on a Friday night.

I'm off to London in two weeks, so I can happily see the benefits of being here as the excitement taints my lenses and everything appears groovy. Let's see what dark substance unravels after I get back.

Or maybe not.



Next time I intend to visit sites of interest and somehow interweave pictures of them into my dissecting of life with a scalpel. I feel much better now, knowing the problems I have in life are justifiable and normal. Dealing with them, however - doing something about them - is another matter entirely.

Right Foot Forward

(This is from a site called 'Post Secrets', where people anonymously send in postcards revealing their innermost thoughts. Lots of them are pretty suicidal and I thought the site was inadvertently romanticising suicide so I don't look there anymore, but some of the cards are great.)

Leonie, I love you deeply. Thank you for your comment. The fact that you're now a plane ride away causes me huge grief. Of all the uncountable people I've known over the course of my lifetime (thus far), why did not one of us have the foresight to become a pilot?

So rather than mope, this week was do-something-about-the-situation week. I resolved not to stay at home alone with my computer humming at me but to be out as much as possible, so I planned to visit Sara from Leighton Buzzard, a close friend and fellow English convert my age, now at home in Beitar Illit looking after baby number eight; Justine, fellow Brit and revered career-woman looking after baby number one somewhere near the satellite station; Ruth the journalist for the Jerusalem Post (although meetings with her are best conducted with beer) and Tamar Toyoko from Japan, who works at the university library buying books on Judaism in Japanese. I planned to write, obviously, taking my laptop to either at the uni library or a cafe in Emek Refaim. This week would be completely different. I'd be out in the world and ready to feel alive. Except none of those events materialised because Maor was at home sick.

Tant pis, as they say in France. There were things I could do from home: I called the one serious Ulpan to ask about their January course, joined an online writers in Israel email list forum thing asking if anyone was interested in creating a book group for writers in Jerusalem, got nine replies - two from Tel Aviv saying they were sad I didn't live there, and one from England - and our first meeting is on Sunday night. I got offered a big website writing job (30-40 pages!) for a post production company and wrote the pitch/proposal for that, which I hope to get, and learned wonderful things about my own language from one of my students, Yair. Like that regardless and irregardless mean the same thing - a word and it's opposite have the same meaning! And irregardless is a double negative, which is just dumb, hence the dictionary recommendation not to use it.




(I love these flowers and have no idea what they're called. Anyone know?)


Jerusalem voted for a new mayor this week, leaving the street strewn with propoganda pamphlets and banners. I didn't vote (don't tell Emmeline Pankhurst or Linda the ex-and-now- anti-Haredi woman at work) because of a you-didn't-tell-me-that-paper-was-a-voting-slip, yes-I-did type scenario I won't go into. I'm so not into politics despite having an A level in it. But now I might start writing a blog for The Independent, which will be news-based and on Jerusalem, so I guess I should start reading newspapers and keeping abreast of current events and political matters. Oh man, excuse me while I yawn.





Wow, that's such a weird picture, i think I'd better post one of me looking a bit less like Shrek.




This week my aim is to start yoga but Tai Chi is calling me too. I loved standing and watching the pensioners in Japan doing Tai Chi en-masse in the park early in the morning or on my way home in the evening - it was like they were moving in slow motion and I was walking at the wrong speed, so I'd stop and be transfixed by them for ages, all moving in synchronicity, a hundred people doing a beautiful slow hypnotic dance.

I still felt pretty shite all week, to tell the truth, but other factors were involved in that and resolutions don't fall in one's lap in a plop. Next week I'm out and about and aim to have more fun. Anyone free and in a good mood, welcome.

Testing Times

There's a fight going on in my psyche between composed rationality and something threatening my equlibrium that's causing me unprecedented feelings of heaviness. It's been a year-long process, this struggle, and there have been times I've felt like I'm cracking under the strain of trying to be strong and level-headed and yet feeling like I'm treading water and sinking, no matter how much effort I put into staying afloat. I don't know if there's a breaking point to this or if it dissolves into a state of serene beatitude, but a friend I work with is a clinical psychologist and on Friday afternoon she said, given a five minute summary of symptoms, that it sounded like depression and suggested a good therapist and a course of medication. I raised an eyebrow - well no - I would have if I could, but I can't raise only one: I've tried and tried, much to the kid's amusement. They can all do it. Must be genetic via their father. I had to raise both eyebrows.

Now this is a good friend and she's only 28, but she said she felt so bad when she moved to New York to do her Masters, had just split with someone and everyone she loved was in Israel, so she took a course of some dopamine stimulating pill for about nine months, felt much better and came off them herself.

I've always derided the state of the world, of humans needing something to fill them and turning to medication; was stunned to find out half the mothers I knew in London were on Prozac and couldn't figure out why someone with a loving husband, a big house, sweet kids and no real problems in their lives could need something to get them through the day. Why? I figured for ages that it had to do with a lack of spirituality or depth, of not being in tune with the needs of their soul, or maybe that they wanted life to be one way and it was another, but hey - there are so many people in the world living in heinous conditions, there was perspective and it needed to be accounted for.






So my friend's suggestion came as a surprise to me. This Shabbat I read 'Passages' a best-selling psychology book of the Seventies that Mum bought me, as it explained the 'predictable crises' throught the passages of adult life. According to the author, this is all perfectly normal for a woman my age who has been a caregiver for years but now needs her own authenticating thing and finds she's been left behind somewhat or doesn't know where to start.


This made me feel better. She also stated 'intellectual starvation' as a very serious problem for a thinking person, and I realised that was and has been my problem all year. The one person I met here who I could have decent conversations with went back to Chicago in June and I'm so hungry for mental stimulation that I wrote to my former teacher, the great Sean Gaston, to ask if he thought I could tailor make a PhD including topics x y and z. He very sweetly said my email reminded him I was 'a gifted writer and whatever you do, I hope you will not forget the difficult and demanding world of fiction ... It also sounds as if you are on the path to becoming a philosopher, and I think this venerable tradition of religious meditation and philosophy an excellent and important place to direct your questing mind.' I could do the PhD with more luck in the US, he thinks, but unless I can find a correspondence course and/or a grant, it's not going to happen soon. If at all.






Should we just move back to Londres? This has been the question we've pondered for the last month or two. So many lives to consider now, so many issues to take into account it gets boring. Where did sponteneity go? When you have kids life takes on a new tilt.

Friends came over this morning; they moved to Jerusalem from Sydney a few months ago and are finding it tough. Bondi - say no more. They plugged the virtues of Oz and I had to agree - we rented a pad in Bondi, lived there for nearly a year and it was one of the most exhilarating times of my happy hippy traveller existence. Not that we're about to jump to Sydney, although my husband was into it. Anything but London. At least the sun shines in Bondi.






Depression is such a depressing word, don't you think? Sounds like someone's sitting on your head. Someone really overweight. I don't know what it is, this thing sitting on my happiness, but unless I find some friends to rap with, I'm going to have to make an appointment to see that shrink.

Big Foot

This week I decided that working in Israel will, at this rate, only make me enough money to last half the month if I'm outrageously tightfisted (which I'm not and hate being) so the only way to go is to make dollars and pounds abroad and spend them here.

Obviously this is optimism in its most pure and unadulterated form, but they claim in every new-age video and enlightening change-your-life-forever books that all you have to do to become the person you want to be is to think positively and make it happen because you are in charge of your destiny etc etc. This, I realised this week, is utter pants because (as yet) my lifetime's efforts of unmitigated positive thinking plus all the hard work and late nights in the world mean my one dream remains unfulfilled and I'm left wondering why exactly that is. I think I'm doing something wrong, but I'm not sure what. I'm either on the wrong path and the right one will disclose itself at some stage (like maybe I'm supposed to be a philosophy professor and write academic works and fiction isn't my path at all), or I'm being too egotistical in my tone, or maybe I'm destined to save elephants instead or become my worst nightmare - a bank clerk - and I'm kidding myself otherwise. But that's negative and negativity will have no place in this blog, thank you.






So, I spent all week scouring the web for writing work, pitching myself (literally: 'Writer for sale' in the subject heading, then 'Well, for rent anyway'), flouting my talents and my experiences, tapping on keys and attaching samples of articles and essays and personal narratives on e.g. eyeliner and mothers in law to companies, magazines, online magazines, web profiles for creative freelance people, answering ads and offering every kind of service a girl can offer except the one that involves a red light and standing in a window in my undies.

Actually, in an unplanned digression, when we went to Amsterdam a few years ago (The Damage, as we fondly call it), our hotel room was opposite just such a window with a woman dressed scantily within it, so we couldn't help but check it out. She was pretty, the girl, and the window was huge; all kinds of people walked by - mothers with kids, old women, tourists chuckling, pointing cameras and staring, but she just behaved as though it was the most normal thing in the universe to stand in a large window in a bra, pants and heels in the middle of the afternoon, and I suppose in The Damage it is. She seemed vaguely bored, so she sat on a high stool and read a magazine from time to time or reapplied her make up. A guy would come along, scale the steps and knock on the door. He'd be let in and she'd go off for a few seconds and then reappear in the window. We figured she was the bait, the lure, and some old, hideous beast was inside, but once the men were in, the door was locked and they had to make do with whatever they were given or they'd be clubbed to death with a baseball bat. It was only a theory but what else could have been going on in there? Sometimes she went 'out back' but I think it was for a long awaited cup of tea and a visit to the bathroom. Not that I was looking that closely, obviously.

Back to the point of my story. And no, Amsterdam isn't worth visiting anymore - too many tourists and English beer drinkers and seventeen year old kids getting stoned in coffee shops, which was great when I was seventeen but a less attractive way to while away my time aged thirty five when I'm supposed to be mature and interested in other things. Maybe the museums are awesome but the queue is always so excruciatingly long, I gave up both times I visited and returned to the coffee shop. I mean, the guest house.

So, the point of my yarn today is actually the environment, believe it or not, because I did three more sample articles for Newser.com, the website that condenses articles to 120 words, and one of my offerings was, in a nutshell, this:

Twin Earth: In one generation we will need “two planets” to live on if we continue depleting resources at the current rate, according to the latest report by the WWF. The effects of pollution and deforestation along with world consumption levels ‘outstripping renewal’ threaten the planet’s future prosperity and will result in increased food, water and energy costs, writes Laura McInnis of Reuters.

Behaving like financial institutions, we seek ‘immediate gratification’ without considering the consequences, which are “even graver than the current economic meltdown,” and the WWF presses world leaders to treat the ‘ecological credit crunch’ with the same urgency. But there is hope: “If humanity has the will,” the report states, “it has the ways to live within the means of the planet.”

(Whether I get this job for Newser or not remains to be seen, but, as they say so eloquently in California, whatEVER.)






This coincided with an article I read on Shabbat in The New Yorker about our carbon footprint, which, interesting as it was, didn't leave me any the wiser as to how to be a better earth citizen. Tesco, Britain's superpower supermarket, wants to label all its food so consumers can see if it was flown in or how much energy was used in its production, which Tesco admitted was a naive task to set itself and was proving mightily difficult to measure and implement. Roses grown in Kenya and lamb from New Zealand actually damage the planet considerably less than roses from Holland or British baa-lambs due to the costs of heating and fertilizers respectively, so assuming locally produced goods are more sound is, actually, unsound. The New Oxford American Dictionary named 'localvore' the 2007 word of the year due to the hugely popular phenomenon of eating food from down the road.

Entering the stage, meet the ex-economics professors devising schemes for businesses to 'buy and sell the right to pollute' through reducing CO2 emissions in exchange for allowances they can then buy and sell, because businesses can't, apparently, understand anything unless it involves monetary gain. But the real problem are the forests - they're disappearing with such incredible speed that one of the two essential carbon sponges of the earth (the other being the ocean) will be lost in the time it takes to shout, 'Timber!' And when that happens, ecosystems will disintegrate, the atmosphere will lose its equilibrium and we'll all die of suffocation and starvation, so I suppose worrying about furthering my non-existent career is pointless and I may as well crack open a beer and enjoy the last traces of oxygen with my trusty hound.








'Put another way', says Michael Specter, who wrote the article, 'according to one recent calculation, during the next twenty-four hours the effect of losing forests in Brazil and Indonesia will be the same as if eight million people boarded airplanes at Heathrow Airport and flew en masse to New York.'

I was particularly outraged by Australia debating an additional tax on parents with more than two children - like it isn't expensive enough to have a gaggle of kids - all this coming from the land that, in order to boost its population, was instigating a baby boom when I was last there in 1993/4 by plastering cutesy pictures of babies on every ad to encourage broodiness. Doubledeckerbustardos.

So what can we do? Watching a plasma TV for three hours a day adds 250kg of carbon to the atmosphere every year - double that of an LCD TV, but apart chucking out the telly there was no real clue. We can reduce energy by insulating our homes, buying a new boiler and turning down the fridge, but unless governments pay farmers NOT to destroy their forests, buying local potatoes will be like sticking a band aid over a severed torso.

In England, I go to the supermarket armed with my 'Kosher Nosh Guide', then once I know something is kosher - and if I forget my guide this is a painfully long process of reading every label and calling an equally frum friend - I check how much sugar and fat it contains. Galit came over from New Zealand last year with a chart of E numbers to avoid and checked every ice cream before we ate it to see if it contained the nasties, and all the tastiest ones did, and now we need to be aware of how far food has flown or if it's production methods are going to destroy this beautiful world we're casually annihilating before my grandchildren have a chance to visit Niagra Falls or Masada. If shopping continues becoming this complicated, an hour in the supermarket is never going to cut it. If you're ever looking for me, I'm hunched over my trolley checking labels, and at this rate, I'll be in there for a while.

(For all of you who claim you want to leave a comment but don't know how, the way to do it is by clicking on the 0 comments in blue and just freeing your thoughts into the little box. As Jonathan Safran Foer says about writing: 'What's to know? You just let it out.' Go on. Make my day.)

Alternatives

(Not a tree but a giant cactus on Kibbutz Yoav)


Continuing with our theme of dwellings, although this action-packed week involved dismantling our Sukka and returning to the warm security of the house, two events brought it home to me (excuse the pun) that there isn't only one way to live. We may be conditioned since birth to live the way everyone else in the Western world lives, but it's important to remember there are other options and they're not as cuckoo as they may at first appear, one just has to be open minded.

On the eve of the second holiday of Sukkot (Monday, basically) we did something I haven’t done for years but did every autumn without fail when I was a likkle girl. We went to the circus! Oh, the thrills of the big top, the clowns, the drum rolls, the sawdust on the floor (there wasn’t any, but I’m imagining). I can’t tell you who was more excited but as Natan, aged five, had to tell me to sit properly on my seat and stop dancing about, whooping and clapping, the answer to that may not be surprising.

When I was a girl (back in 1875) with pigtails and gappy teeth, the big difference was that circuses had animals. I can’t remember seeing lion’s mouths engulfing a ringmaster’s head but I do recall the glittering ladies with feathers on their hats doing balancing acts on cantering horses; dogs jumping through hoops and a sad old elephant circling the ring with a walking stick hooked around his ear. That, actually, was the last time I saw an animal at a circus and it was so sickening that by the time I left the tent, wiping my stinging eyes, I’d resolved to rescue him that night and bring him to live in our garden. I didn’t care how much I’d have to feed him or that he’d trample over Ma’s flowers: the only thing that stopped me was the frustrating realisation that he would no way fit behind me on the elongated seat of my Raleigh Chopper.





Monday was Dorolla Circus’s last show in Israel after eight months of touring the country. Nothing, nothing can compare to the incredible Archaos, a troupe of French punks and crusties whose show comprised of blowing cars up, juggling chain saws, breathing and juggling fire, the Wall of Death and other mind-bending feats during the late eighties and early nineties. They had so many acrobats and odd-looking mohican-ed, tattooed people climbing above you, running down the aisles wielding dangerous weapons and flying on trapezes in the coolest costumes, you didn’t know where to look first. Yes, yes; obviously I wanted to run away and join them – not only did I look like them with my unconventional dress sense, my defiant spray of dreadlocks and any cartilage that stayed still long enough pierced with silver rings, but man, I could juggle fire clubs! I was bendy enough to do back flips, I could handle a mouthful of oily kerosene to spit in a flame and I’d have happily learned other types of juggling if only they’d handed me three buzzing chainsaws to practise with. Dammit. Missed my calling.





Dorolla's was good, though: highly skilled Chinese acrobats and gymnasts performing feats of impressive flexibility involving the kind of danger that caused Maayan to cry, petrified she'd see twisted bones and death when she came to see fun. It was insanely hot under the big top with no air conditioning, no fans and no open tent flaps, but the reason the mothers were fanning themselves had more to do with the troupe of strapping African dudes with zebra-skinned loincloths, perky dreadlocks and the most acutely defined stomach and arm muscles I think I’ve ever had the pleasure of witnessing. The old couple doing their ‘split second change of her outfit under a flag’ routine made me wonder if I’d flicked the channel to ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ by accident, but nonetheless, the kids loved it and munched delightedly on candy floss bigger than their heads that made me want to call the dentist, give her my credit card number and just pay her by direct debit for the rest of my life.

We reconsidered one of our old plans of training the children and creating a circus of our own to tour India and South America with, but at the mention of walking tight-ropes, doing contortion and handling snakes, they backed off. Kids these days have no inner drive, no sense of adventure. Mind you, wanting to run off and join the circus appeals to me less these days – I’m rusty at club juggling, I lost my fire sticks in Japan, I’m still bendy but I’m not fearless enough: risk and danger are for people who don't have kids like Natan who wants convoluted bedtime stories made up on the spot, which involve being alive in order to tell them. I’ve been on the open road and I’d go again at the drop of a plane ticket but I’d rather watch the circus than join it. Unless, of course, Archaos re-form; then, sod it, I'm off.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXTUK4VbvZo


I’ve just come back from a birthday treat of a night away without the children, the scratching dog or the incessent needs of the house, which all mothers should do as frequently as possible. Without the husband is also a splendid treat but we went together to try to remember whose clothes they are taking up the other half of the wardrobe. We rarely cross paths now we have to work like normal people for the first time in our lives. It sucks, by the way, this working malarkey. Now I know why I ran away from it successfully until now. It doesn't make any sense, running around all week to make money to hand to landlords and electricity companies when you can live for free on a beach. There's more to life than working - there's a whole planet to explore! But then you have kids and they need schools, friends, stability and that means the rucksack gets relegated to the storeroom. Regular life is expensive, which is one of the reasons, I suppose, why the early European settlers in Israel in the fifties built kibbutzes.





Imagine, ladies, if you will: you don't do laundry any more - you take it to the laundry room and someone else does it and gives it back clean. You see your kids once a day and maybe at weekends because they're looked after and educated in the kids dorms before being given a little house of their own at fourteen. You don't cook, you eat in the dining rooms, and you don't pay rent or bills. You have your job and you do it - maybe in the fields, maybe in the kitchen - and everyone has the same as you, so there's no race to get ahead. It's extremely laid back on the kibbutz; its members are safe and supported - like being in a bubble. Clearly, a life like this isn't for everyone. I love my kids (most of the time) and I want to see them and be instrumental in brainwashing them into thinking how I want them to think, even though it's never going to work out as planned. When we used to say to people in Israel that we had four kids, they'd say, 'Col ha Kavod!', which, roughly translated, means 'Well bloody done!' In England, mothers said to me, 'What? Why? Are you a glutton for punishment? I'd rather hang myself.' The difference in mentality is startling - why do restaurants have to state that they're 'child friendly'? Landlords in England want young professionals in their houses, not families. The prejudice is shocking. Don't get me wrong - I'm elated to have a break from the noisy brats from time to time, but it doesn't mean I'm willing to hand them over to be brought up by others.

As for kibbutz life, whenever hardship came our way, Ma used to tell us her overused, favourite story about an endangered species of deer that were given an enclosure and protected from the dangers of the wild, but then started dying one by one from boredom as they had no thrill or risk to keep them on their hooves. I think it was her way of saying, 'Yes, convent school girls can be utter bitches at times and yes, they may have smashed your ankle with a hockey stick and called you a lesbian but be grateful - you'd die of boredom if everyone was nice to you'.

Maybe she's right, though; maybe having everything done for you depletes one's enthusiasm and drive, but then again, that might be my conditioning speaking. I think I'd be bored senseless on a kibbutz because I crave action and variety, but most people are normal, feel content with continuity and security and are happy to live ordinary, comfortable lives.






(The wonderfully named Mother-in-law's seat.)


The lure of this otherwise not very exciting kibbutz (Yoav, between Kiryat Gat and Ashkelon) was the thermal hot springs. Despite it looking like an old cow shed (aestheticism is replaced by functionality in kibbutzes, it appears) we soaked in the sulphur-smelling, 39 degree thermal mineral pools, sat in the jacuzzi (sadly chlorinated) and had a waterfall-esque massage under the super-high-pressured jets, but the best part was the sauna and steam room and the reason the sauna was so good was because I met two huge Russian ladies in there. They ignored me to begin with, as you do when you're only in a swimming costume in a tiny, roasting wooden room inches away from complete strangers, but then they did the most bizarre thing: they opened a pot of honey, poured it onto their hands and started rubbing it on their faces. Eeuuw, I thought- how thick and sticky is that? And then one of them, noting the horrified look in my eyes, turned to me and offered me some.
'Umm...What does it do?' I asked.
'What can it not do? It's honey!'
'But isn't it sticky?'
'Try!'
She poured a large dollop into my hands and I tentatively rubbed it on my face, wincing, then on my arms and legs, wondering how I'd get to the shower without sticking to the bench. But to my surprise, it wasn't thick and gooey once I rubbed it into my sweaty face and the crystallised bits acted like skin peel. In fact, it completely disappeared, leaving no trace of stickiness whatsoever.
'Mmm,' I said, thrilled by the surprise of it actually being wonderful. 'In England, the Indian women put oil on their skin in the sauna,' I told her, 'but I've never seen anyone putting honey before.'
'In Russia, we put honey,' she said matter-of-factly, holding out the jar so I could add more to my thighs, 'sometimes with salt inside.'
'But honey's quite expensive,' I said, meaning, how the hell did you get hold of honey in the USSR?
'Never mind, I'm in Israel now,' she said. 'I came here in 1985 and went back to Moscow last year for the first time in twenty-five years. What a difference! Some of my friends live in houses with a lift inside and three floors - some people got very rich- and others live in a tiny room with no microwave, no washing machine and when I went to buy food they were so grateful. When it was communism, life was easy. No bills, no rent. Now life is very hard, but it used to be easy.'
'But didn't you have to queue for food for hours? The only communist country I've been to is China and if you want to buy a doll, there's only one in the shop, or one toy, or one kind of cloth.'
'Yes, of course, I wear this dress, so does she and so does she, but I told my friends they should have kept hold of that country as it was.'

So maybe what she was saying was that kibbutz life was good after all, or at least the communist ideal behind it was a good one, anyway. Most kibbutzes are anti-religious, however, so I'm not moving to one but I can see the plus sides. The kids would love it - the freedom that is, not the separation from Mummy - although I think these days they can come home at night and at weekends, which sounds fine by me. The mountain of washing subsides, there is no food to cook, everything is taken care of...

We cooked fish on the barbeque and talked about our days of absolute freedom and how it felt to give up everything, surrendering yourself to another possibility of life. Husband now wants to sell the car, buy a donkey, take the kids out of school and live in a tent forever, roaming the land like a Bedouin (I take back all I said about him having no ambition) and in order to sell this idea to me, he said, 'think of how many stories you'd have!'

Hmm.

I bought a pot of honey on the way home. I didn't tell him I have other ideas - not a family tent experience, which I imagine would be an unparalleled disaster, has no internet access and sounds far too much like hard work, but creating a utopia of a house: one with a roomful of cushions and bean bags; a study where no other people are allowed to enter and peer over my shoulder as I type; an amazing garden full of jasmine flowers and interesting cacti, and a sauna where I'll go and smooth honey with rock salt on myself when it gets cold outside. Communism didn't rub off on me, clearly, despite it being an admirable idea - but layers of skin did. My skin is so silky (I mean, more so than normal) but don't come too close -the whiff of sulphur is still detectable beneath my glowing epidermis.

Lastly, this is the concluding day of me being in my thirties, a place I've dwelled happily within for the last ten years. Maybe my utopia will materialise in this next decade - in fact, I'm resolute that it will and focusing on making it happen with all my might. One day, Please G-d, you'll be able to come and visit me, sit in the sauna and discover for yourself the wonders of a honey rub. I might be living in a tent on a dusty patch of scrub, or I might find my utopia, but whatever transpires over the next few years, I'll do my best to ensure it has a sauna attached.