Rob's Life: January 2023

So that's that then. I'm back in the land of the ice and snow, and swimming in the sea and empty Shabbat streets are already turning into memory.

I have so psychologically prepared myself for the despair that was sure to accompany my return home that I think I've overshot, and I'm actually feeling pleasantly happy to be here. I've had that magical thing you get when you talk to a stranger in English for the first time and it's as easy as pie to understand and be understood. The weather is also playing its part in easing me back in: it's been relentlessly sunny, still and the kind of wild cold that's impossible to ignore, and which makes you feel like an explorer every time you leave the house. I'm writing this from a pub in North East London where I'm eating Monster Munch and drinking proper tea with milk and all suddenly feels familiar and sort of wonderful.

So this is the last blog entry until the next one. Thanks for reading along with me and my latest mid-life crisis. The picking up of the pieces can now begin in earnest. I've got choices to make, a new job to start, choirs to either join or create and a good Jewish woman to find and marry. I'd better get on with it.

Tea and Monster Munch prompt deep musings and sensations of belonging. As per usual...

It can now be announced officially as a finding of science: love really is all around.

My decision to stay at the world's oddest hostel in the world's oddest town seemed scientifically designed to test the theory that something worthwhile can come from anything, if you just make yourself available. Surely here, in this barren and often rainy dead end town, with it's poorly-lit hostel populated with religious nutcases and non-denominational plain old nutcases, the conditions were perfect for a pure science experiment of the hypothesis the good things came to those who hung around long enough.

And I really did think I'd found the counterexample, that all the fun had already been squeezed out of my roommates Vlad and Nikolai by experiences in the Russian and Belorussian armed forces. But after 10 days of low-octane routine, breakfast at 7.30am, painting rooms with Israeli radio blasting, coffee and snickers at 11am, sporadically trying and failing to persuade the beautiful receptionist to go for a drink with me, and going to bed with my Steinbeck at 8pm, a certain peace settled over me which was either acceptance in the prison-for-life sense, or acceptance in the fat merry Buddha sense, I couldn't tell which.

And then suddenly everything changed in two subsequent arrivals. A couple arrived from Haifa, he British of the Oxford PPE then Sandhurst variety, and she Aussie of the "I haven't really got much time for ya bullshit t'be honest mate" variety, and they were very much looking for many beers on the rooftop which is exactly what transpired. We were joined by a totally insane Israeli, who'd just come from 8 months living on the beach, and who's liberally shared joints were of psychosis-inducing strength, and we had an evening of energetic talk and total hilarity which kind of broke the ice of the entire hostel in a way that seems pretty hard for me now to quantify, justify or explain.

But suffice it to say that when that evening a new volunteer suddenly arrived as if from nowhere, a young American man with a mandolin and a sharp dry sense of humour, it no longer seemed like such an impossible place to find such a person.

When the couple was leaving, after a further night of rooftop beers, guitar renditions from the new American, and laughing about the previous night's nonsense, the British trainee-officer asked me if I'd leave with him to have a final night of debauchery in Tel Aviv at the dubiously named "Roger's House," and the Aussie insisted I give her my Instagram because I was "a very special person," which left me wondering how she'd be telling this same anecdote to her friends.

I ruminated on the offer of a final night out in Tel Aviv and eventually told Fleur, the Dutch 20 year-old volunteer, that I'd decided that it would only be laziness if I decided not to go, and that that was no reason for making a decision and that I would therefore be leaving that afternoon. She seemed genuinely devastated at this news and said such nice things about how they'd all miss me and how much fun we'd had that I changed my mind again and decided to stay for another night, and cook a farewell dinner for all the volunteers who now suddenly seemed transformed from fellow inmates, into my crew from whom I was about to take a sad departure.

So I bought food, cake and Challah and we had a Shabbat dinner. Fleur miraculously found candles from nowhere and made cookies and I did the blessings on the candles, bread and wine. Sean, the new American, played songs on the guitar after dinner which we all sang along with. We then retired to the pool table for more beers and music and good fellow-feeling, to such an extent that Vlad surprised us all by saying, as it was finally time for bed, that it had been an "unexpected and unforgettable evening".

With these words ringing in my ears, today was finally time to leave Tiberias for real and I went up to the roof where Sean and Fleur were smoking cigarettes in the rain. I asked for my guitar back and Sean said "before you go, let me just play you something I've been working on" and proceeded to play a fully formed and wonderfully fond song he'd written about me, called "The biggest fool in Gallilee."

As I sit here on the bus, speeding away from the purgatorial ending to my time in Israel and towards an unknown future back in frozen England, I still can't quite believe it happened. Love really is all around.