Scale (why we fail to face up to crisis)

It began with tales of an exotic land where innumerable persons eat meats frowned upon by Western mores. Though more people live in Wuhan than London, there was little doubt which city had a greater claim to fame. 

So, when rumours arrived of a brutal disease ravaging the entrails of the lesser known city, its scale was felt like so many minor ‘stories’ in the 24-hour news cycle: - It was happening to Them, as SARS and MERS and so many other respiratory syndromes, to the other worlds of developing countries, and we would likely get away with doing little. It had served Us so well in the past.

Next in the story was Italy. All of a sudden the scale, the metrics, were of a slightly different tenor. We had been on holiday to Italy, or at least liked Italian food, and it was getting a little too familiar for comfort. The news cycle was feeding our brains with numbers that sounded worryingly large. The house of rumour feeds anxiety and depression about what might come next. We like to think of ourselves as rational, not herds; but behaviour was adapting irrationally – the stockpiling, the fitful use of cloth masks, the slow hollowing out of public venues. Should we be worried?

Other countries were acting fast. Why weren’t we? Were we somehow safe? Was the divine providence of our great, now secular nation proclaiming us set apart from other peoples? 

The picture was moving so fast – the scale of i in this surge of feeling, urging human beings, somewhat bewildered by the contradiction between our habitual modes of being and the steady crescendo of death knocking. (Behind the knock, the knack of the media for feeding our fear, by framing it in a familiar, consumable form.) 

When a friend explained it was doubling every three or four days, and if everyone was blasé about it, our elders and our weak would be consumed like nothing I had experienced before, finally it sort of clicked and the net of lockdown no longer seemed so full of dread.

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What shocks me still is how stupid I showed myself to be. I pride myself on my intellect, my skill at interpreting data and language; I berate Johnson and his crew for failing to read the numbers, to comprehend the scale that was to befall the country (there’s little doubt the fool in chief has made a fool of our country https://on.ft.com/2SwGZre and https://bit.ly/3b6dq66). But I didn’t take it seriously until far too late, and when I sift through the data in my head, i see i was not alone – the ego was not made to compute the indifference of the universe to its suffering and joys. Many in my social sphere also discounted the bad news as peripheral to the direction of their lives, until it was too blindingly obvious to ignore.

It bodes ill for our collective future.

Since my teenage years, I have been sympathetic to the environmental movement. In a city as bedazzling as London, vibrant with multisensorial entertainment on every night of the week, the environment is a nice thing for an educated liberal westerner to patronize, but remote from my everyday concerns. If everyone else is travelling to exotic lands, expanding their horizons while they have the chance, why shouldn’t I?

The scale of the environmental catastrophe is every bit as daunting as the scale of the economic and health catastrophe we are currently experiencing. The islands nation of Kiribati will disappear within 30 years. The elephants who once roamed most of sub-Saharan Africa 70 years ago have been either poached or herded into national parks for our pleasure and entertainment (https://bit.ly/2L0KotX); and these our earth’s most giant mammals are just the tip of an environmental iceberg – as at least with their enormous scale they are visible, the last of the pachyderms (which included mammoths and mastodons amongst others only 10,000 years ago - we may have been instrumental in wiping out the other pachyderms too). Over 50% of the world’s coral reefs have died in the last 30 years, and chances are that by the time I die, they will be all gone.

Yet it all seems very peripheral to the direction of my life. And when I contemplate whether by acting or not acting, I might make a difference – I don’t believe it; I just don’t learn fast enough.

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Some of my friends talk about the ‘Great Turning’, the visionary moment when human societies realise their energies are spent in killing their planet, and alter their nature-annihilating and carbon-fixated ways. Lockdown shows it is possible.

I say this is nonsense. The sad truth is that most behaviour will return much to the way it has before. Home working will go up, reducing driving to work; but some will swap public for private transport (fear of germs). Social contract theory runs deep in the Anglo-Saxon model of the state, and large segments of society have not signed up for an anti-capitalist eco-utopia; just look at the gilets jaunes, or the SUV-driving Midwesterner; no matter how much we may admire the evidence-based prosecution by Extinction Rebellion. The cost to the consumer, used to the dizzying gifts of technology, is too much, power says.

The oil-and-gas industry, the tourism industry and the construction industry (to name but a few) operate on a scale few of us can imagine – and they are on the back foot. They are desperately in need of a return to the status quo. Governments depend on them for tax revenue, and employing the voters, so will support them. (And on the other hand, what about the data industry in these times?) 

Turning back to China, one of the best indicators of a return of economic activity was the rise of congestion in cities and the firing up of coal power plants. If we could only persuade this country that produces 28% of all carbon emissions to switch coal to gas and renewables, that would lower emissions substantially. Changes in consumer behaviour can reduce extinctions – Seven Continents, One Planet by David Attenborough was good on how palm oil is destroying Sumatran orangutans – so avoid palm oil if you can. And instead of investing in Shell, we can invest in projects like these - https://www.goldstandard.org .

It is the melancholy music of humanity that in times like these we can observe the peaceful, half-polluted skies and imagine a better world; then sigh turn our backs on it and resume the blind path we were on before. If there is one thing I want you to take away from this blog, it is that you will forget (if not this crisis, the next). So if you believe in change, schedule reminders that through small acts, we can steer a slightly better course.

The Human Family

The road to language is a more whimsical one than we remember. Take for instance: - 

a toddler waddled up to me in a Liverpudlian gallery, and said ‘Dada. 

And his mama wandered round the corner, and said ‘That’s not your dada, your dada is next door

And it made me wonder: did the boy know who dada was, or what dada meant, or neither? Where was the confusion?

For language flows into us from many different sources; inside and out. And if you’re anything like me, the leaders of that tribe who taught you language are your parents. Once you master the mapping of word on world for a few words, you soak up language by the dozen daily in a profusion never again experienced. 

To outsiders, the process is a magical mystery with somewhat arbitrary ebbs and flows; and even to yourself, so rapid that inevitably it is mostly forgotten. The leaders of that tribe are your parents and followed by teachers, schoolfriends, other family, books, and other word-generative technology. 

(Some say language itself is technology, writing evidently so.)

And it is through language and other media of expression, you get a sharper definition of the ‘tribe’ who cultivate you – parents, siblings, peers and educators. You are likely to identify more with those you grew up (unless you led an unusual early life) than people who exist outside the contours of that group, and particularly those who shaped the contours of your expectations, such as mum and dad. 

And even if you assumed a rebel identity somewhere along the road to adulthood, or struggle with verbal language and prefer the visual, kinetic or sonic, the language of those you grew up with will tint your perceptions like veiled lenses.

Some of my identities: Londoner, secular jew, liberal (aware of liberalism’s problems). I grew up with kids whose families were from many countries, many continents (for example, Somade whose parents were from Nigeria and was interested in Confusianism and Tao Buddhism; Tomik who was from Azerbaijan), as with my father’s family in the early 20^thcentury. With that background, I’m more likely to reach this phrase: we are all descended from Africans; we are all part of the human family.

If humanity goes back about 300,000 years, and you average the generations out at about one every 20 years, then each of us has about 60,000 generations till we reach mitochondrial Eve and the other tribes who ultimately became the 7.5 billion or so humans currently on this planet. 60,000 historical: 7.44 billion current – a ratio that I find very hard to come to terms with. We are separated from the rest of the living by less than we think – a large town of forebears.

That’s easier to feel in London and other liberal cities: - you split the world’s population in seven, you get 

one Chinese, 

one Indian,

one African, 

one south-east Asian, 

one other Asian (about a third Indian and a third Chinese), 

two-thirds of a Latin American, 

two-thirds of a European, 

one third of a North American, 

one third of an everyone else. You can see that on a London bus.

“The true born Englishman’s a contradiction,

In speech an irony, in fact a fiction (Daniel Defoe, Londoner, inventor of Crusoe)

“Exodus – movement of ja people (Bob Marley, Rastafarian on a jewish story)

“It is the same [story] told of all. Many. Miscegenations on miscegenations. […] They lived und laughed ant loved end left (James Joyce, anti-fascist)

We are all part of the human family; but this family is not all a happy family. Culture is embedded in social structures; social structures are often embedded in geographically stable groups; and the culture of those social structures (for locals) usually dictates that locals are higher up in the social hierarchy than foreigners. 

If you belong to the branch of the family that looks and acts like me, chances are that my gut instincts are going to be more comfortable with you. Even if I know that the group’s geographical stability is a result of historical forces that are well outside of my group’s control (something that Jews are particularly aware of). Take for example: -

A middle Eastern-looking woman sidled up to me during my lunch break on Holborn Viaduct and said, “I am desperately hungry. I have not had anything to eat. Please could you get me some food. Some money (but please enough for a meal) or some bread maybe?”

She looked shattered. I thought about it. 

“We could go to Sainsbury’s and we could get some bread.”

“OK – I will get you some bread.” My mind had a lunchtime plan and this was not in my mental autopilot plan, but it would be easy enough to get some bread.

“And can you also get some chicken for my children.” The tone of her voice irked me, shifting from pleading to something like demanding, and I turned and I said

“I’m sorry” and walked away

“A shame on you and your people!”

And I felt a mixture of anger at her arrogance and shame at not providing for her (but was it my responsibility?) and I decided to carry on. In retrospect I could have acted better. Probably made the wrong decision. Moneyless, hungry people are known to make poor decisions precisely because they are hungry. A couple of weeks later I signed up to donate regularly to Shelter. 

But I also wonder how it would have played out if she had been a born and bred Londoner, more aware of London manners and sensibilities. Perhaps it is because of our perceived coldness and (most of us) actual habit of relative coolness towards the masses of others in our city that you would rarely see such an attempt by a London woman rather than a man. It is well known among psychologists that city-dwellers  tend to show a reduction in empathy when walking past the homeless – those who are perceived not to be part of a dependable social structure with family and home.

At a broader structural level, the home office makes decisions like this every day – whether to be charitable to immigrants in need or not. Personally I find the current iteration of the home office cold and unwelcoming; but I recognize that my sentiments are not shared by much of the UK populace. And there are good arguments for and against immigration, as set out in this powerful piece by Yuval Noah Harari. I recognize that there is a danger of social structures built for stability by centuries of effort, collapsing under excess pressure from other cultures that do not want to integrate and adopt the local culture. To help your own family prosper, you need to draw a line somewhere. Sadly, drawing that line firmly requires a fortress mentality of a kind that in excess produces the hideous rise in homelessness and horrible immigration decisions we’ve seen in the past eight years. 

We live in an age where it is acceptable not to want to raise a family. Yet I realized that I’d never seriously questioned my desire for children until this year, the first year in which I’ve engaged with dating as an ongoing part of life. I’ve had the good fortune to date many brilliant women this year (sadly none where we’ve fallen for each other) and encountered views which challenged that mindset. For as my friend Anna points out, to choose to be a mother is to unchoose many other rewards in life. For example, the freedom to forge a career, artistic or professional, uninterrupted by the demands for a child.

When I look around at my friends, they seem to have gone down two trousers of time – the bulk have settled into long term relationships or marriages, several with kids on their way (or in tow); while the rest continue in the quest for love. Yet the primacy of love in our culture is not just a beautiful myth that encourages mutual celebration; it also functions to lead the way for the older myth that the true purpose of life is to procreate.

The chain of language in which we are immersed in our early life reinforces the sense that we too should carry on the family and build our branch of the tree. And while I still want to continue this desire, it has made me think more about alternative sources of meaning both in my life and in my potential love interests. For it is a horribly reductionist and stupid binary to put women in to say that either they are unimportant because they do not have children, or unimportant because their true importance lies in the child they raised. And there are many other sources of meaning to be found by all – whether writing books that expand people’s horizons (to name one art), founding initiatives that re-shape a portion of society or simply cherishing the present.

Whether or not we have children depends on serendipities and choices just as arbitrary as our road to language. So (where reasonable to do so) I say celebrate the strange turns and exigencies of life, the alternative ambitions and the impossibilities by today’s standards. Who knows what road will inspire you to achieve your next greatness.

Merkel, May and Clinton and the return of the angry white man

Last year looked like a breakout year for female leaders in the western world. In June, Theresa May became prime minister of the UK; in early October, Hilary Clinton was in the ascendant (she was widely viewed to have thrashed Trump in the televised debates and ahead by a considerable margin in the polls); and Angela Merkel's role as German Chancellor since 2005 seemed unshakeable, as the longest-serving leader in the EU and G7 since 2014.

Now the tide has reversed. In November 2016 Clinton loses to Trump. In June 2017 May is shocked to have lost her majority in government, relying on the DUP as a crutch. In November 2017 FDP leader Christian Lindner pulls out of negotiations to form a coalition with Merkel's CD/CSU party in an apparent attempt to humiliate and weaken her leadership. Across the Western world, female leaders are humbled and punished for the 'hubris' of leadership in a way that will be familiar to any woman who has tried their hand at authority in arenas dominated by men.

In each case, who is the prime cause of this humbling? An angry white man. It may come as a surprise but the Donald, Jeremy Corbyn and Christian Lindner have two things in common: they use charisma to marshal anger at traditional modes of leadership; and they are men in a role traditionally occupied by men.

This combination has proved immensely damaging to female leaders, alongside declining privileges for white male populations, rising inequality, polarisation on the causes of declining privilege and an outraged sense of economic unfairness. For some portions of the electorate, whether consciously or unconsciously, it's a counter-revolt against the fruits of the feminist advance that has taken place since the 1960s.

Many perceived weaknesses of May (much as I dislike her e.g. for, among other things, her anti-immigrant values) and Clinton are amplified by a sense that they neither fit the iron lady role of past Anglo-Saxon female leaders nor the caring humane role traditionally desired in women; and that in walking the tightrope of a public persona they lack the charisma of their male opponents.

But I think it goes deeper than that to activity going on in the prefrontal cortex. Male privileges over female do not exist just in the human kingdom, but also in the kingdom of the great apes - and particularly our nearest ancestors, the chimpanzees. (I highly recommend Jane to everyone reading this; an astonishing film if you don't know the Jane Goodall story.) In the book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson show how male chimpanzees engage in intra-group hierarchical violence, violence against females and extra-group murdering raids. The most senior women rank below the least senior men. And just as in human beings, their behaviour is influenced by both logic and prefrontal cortex-mediated emotion.

So when many of us in the electorate are feeling emotional and want to pin the blame on others for things not going our way, naturally we point at the women at the top, unnaturally usurping traditional male authority. Sometimes they've got to power due to intra-group violence in the males of their party - witness May's easy path to power following the Johnson-Gove fiasco. And since the election in June this year, May has increasingly become a shield for the men advancing Brexit. She takes the flack so they don't get hit.

Why have these angry white men returned? 
1. The credit crunch, austerity, intra-EU tensions caused by state debt crises, and a general sense of malaise at the uneven gains of the past decade have all created a huge amount of anger. All of these issues seem to be caused by some remote logic, which makes sense enough to the technocratic governing classes, but little sense to the man in the street. Canny political actors have channeled this anger against the status quo.

2. Angry men are much more enchanting than angry women to the public at large. Angry men have figured out what's wrong with the big picture and they will forge a new path forward round the traditional thinking that sidesteps the technocracy seemingly at root of the malaise. Angry women are emotional and volatile and shouldn't be selected as leaders. Or so perception dictates. When sensible pragmatic, yet mutter Merkel becomes too much of a mutter and opens the border to immigrants, that's a step too far in caringness and must be stopped.

3. The internet has led to polarisation and media segmentation. The herd reactions, so brilliantly, sickeningly observed by Burke, are much easier to manipulate with micro-targeting. It shows in instant media online exactly who you should be angry with and who against. Stirring videos show the glorious angry white man in all his silverback glory telling it like it is; while the woman (excluding Merkel) robotically repeats worn political cliches that allow her to pass in the political sphere without being labelled emotional. And this polarisation plays both to the angry men of the radical left (Corbyn), right (Trump, Farage, AfD, Davis) and centre (Macron).

4. Traditional white male privileges are perceived as threatened. In the US, Trump says the threat is China, Mexico, North Korea - it's the yellow men, the olive men, the brown men. In the UK, it's nostalgia for the days of economic imperialism laissez-faireism when Britannia ruled the waves and never never never shall be slaves. In Germany, UK and the US it's the immigrants stupid. And this threat to the white order has parallels with threats to the masculinist order, parallels that tend to be exploited by the angry white men.

So when will we next see the political ladies in the ascendant? Not for a good long while, I'd guess, though Merkel may pull off the unexpected in the next few months. The political world of 2017 looks more like me and I'm angry about it.

Fragments of Feeling

A married friend, whose husband had months before asked for their divorce, once told me that she had never felt a sense of intimacy with him. But she still loved him.

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Is it wrong to write about someone else's feelings? I don't know.

-Feelings are real, her words.

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From encounters, I have learned that other cultures have a different dynamics of emotion from my own. An example at the broader level: shame is more prominent than guilt as an emotional driver in many Japanese cultures. But even entering the space of another family, one can feel sometimes the push and pull of repeated emotional positions, forces that have shaped the personalities of the family for years.

This is most evidently true for the very young, who depend day-by-day on their parent's or carer's favour. Each of us is born with some emotions more than others; but the particular emotions we have are shaped interpersonally.

If I write of someone else's feelings, I also write about how other's feelings have shaped myself and how my feelings have shaped others.

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I encountered a Czech couple in a hostel in Budapest once.

After a brief discussion with the Czech man, his partner said "I thought you weren't going to speak English on this trip." I had violated an unspoken rule.

I can't remember the context, but ironically I was telling him about Wordsworth - how in The Prelude, Wordsworth had been alienated by the city state and saw reconnecting with nature as the means to heal the violations of reason, and in particular, the kind of city violence unleashed by the French Revolution. This violence had caused a severe crisis in Wordsworth's personal life.

The Czech man replied that there were few such refuges, far from the urbanised world, in Europe anymore.

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I love cities. When I was young, I could not connect with Seamus Heaney and other nature poets I associated with the dominant poetic style of the 1990s. I have changed; but when the English countryside votes Brexit, tears rise in my heart.

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I don't know if I have ever met a person who accepts everyone. There are lines that cannot be crossed. 

If this is true for everyone, then we can say that each of us operates an unspoken set of rules. We have personal laws. We become angry or panic or react negatively when our laws are broken. 

Emily wanted a fairly predictable life. This summer I couldn't, or didn't, offer it to her.

Foolishly I presumed she would put up with the volatility.

Of the powers outside our control, there were three chief catalysts: the weather, my work and a seething anti-immigrant popular mood. May and June were the most miserable months of the year, weather-wise. My room flooded five times. My work hours went up and down like a yo-yo (mostly they were up). Then Brexit, and the appointment of Theresa May by default, our least favourite politician whose immigration policies had mostly kept us apart for more than ten months.

There were other big problems too, but I would rather not get into them. Suffice to say, the story I had been telling her and she had been telling herself about how moving to London would be better for her manifestly broke down when confronted with reality (a reality that could hardly be more badly timed).

I kept trying to make Emily happier, despite what was going wrong, by doing fun things on the weekend, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. But in doing so, I kept falling behind on practical decisions - wedding-related, or other aspects of personal life. And in between all this, I lost sight of the intimate side of our relationship, the world between us that had kept us together for five years.

That was the most frightening thing  - the sense that the various pressures around me had removed an essential part of myself, and which Emily would at one point confirm was the person she had fallen in love with. Then in July the most frightening thing was the breakup of our relationship.

Emily was faced with moving away from her country, her friends and her family. That's a lot of emotional bonds, and in retrospect I completely ignored this huge part of her emotional reality. I reasoned she was an intelligent woman who had made an intelligent decision and was blind to the fact that she was losing a lot of what made her feel great.

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Love needs vision to succeed.

A lover needs to recognise their lover's emotional realities, and even maintain some of their lover's fictions, or lose the loving bond. A marriage is no mere contract; a good husband or wife keeps their spouse's love in play and prioritises their lover's emotions. And, in different ways, I and Emily gave up before we got there.

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I came to emphasise in my mind that human beings have emotional realities, not easily sensible from their physical selves, while tutoring Keats' narrative poems. Keats plays tricks with both his characters and his reader's emotions in such a way as to reveal 

how the emotional reality of a person can be massively at variance with how physically they appear or seem; 

how interdependent our perceptions are with our emotions; and 

how manipulable our emotions and perceptions are. 

For our emotions are full of fictions - even, perhaps especially, the person who considers themself a 'realist'.

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The memory of Emily's love is falling away now. Mostly the past six months have been kind to me - family and friends gathered to support me, a few weeks after our breakup I went on a delightful holiday, then came back and joined a team at work that I greatly enjoy working with, I've been to lots of fun events - parties, gigs, plays, etc.

When I remember the source of my loneliness, it can bring sudden pangs of grief, but these seem to happen less and less now. I'm writing this piece partly so that I have something to look back at, to remember not to forget next time: -  that I only see fragments of feelings in others, which especially needs to be remembered for those I are most close to.

I feel ready to move on.

Family History 7: The Windmill

To be human is to be creative. Every day we must actively engage with a reality recalcitrant to our dreams and desires. Reconciling reality with our desires requires imagination and effort. Furthermore we must deal with others whose dreams may find the reality of your actions and opinions inconvenient.

The most celebrated embodiment of this contradiction in Western literature is Don Quixote, the knight of La Mancha who decided to imagine his reality as if it were his dream chivalric vision. [I confess to having only read a few passages.] Most famously, he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants.

For most of us this is just comic entertainment, just part of our European mental furniture about idealism and reality. But for some, this stirs greater imaginative feats… as it did for my grandfather (my dad’s father). In his book, The Long Winding Path, he wrote:

“One day he came across the biography of Miguel de Cervantes and on the front page of the book was a windmill.  Well, thought the boy, maybe the ironic windmill, of Don Quixote, can be put to such practical use as the production of electricity for such down to earth purposes as the lighting of homes and streets and making industrial production.  He discussed his ideas with his tutor, the engineer, and they came to the conclusion that the only way to demonstrate the idea was for the boy to put it all on paper, both in memoranda as well as in the design of the windmill, with detailed drawings.  The engineer promised to check both and voice his frank criticism as well as, if merited, his approval.  The project however, should be entirely the boy’s – from concept to execution, first on paper and, if possible later in erection of at least one such windmill.  They went into the project with the enthusiasm that the young possess. He wrote feverishly the memorandum based on climatic and meteorological data he found in that well stocked library.  This data was not too extensive.  In the Land of Israel, just recently taken over by the British, their predecessors hardly kept any such information.  Next, he went into the design of his windmill.  He has never done anything of this sort.  He therefore, did what actually amounted to pencil sketches, at first of what he conceived as the main parts and then the windmill as a whole.  When he was done, he showed it to his friend, the engineer, who examined it very carefully.  “Well”, he said, “this will not pass an engineering test, but it has all the elements for working drawings and for erection instruction” and he looked with admiring amusement at this fourteen year old.  “I suggest that you now show it to our new neighbour, the one on the other side of your plot.  He is a high school Principal and he may have some comments of his own”.”

In my imagination, what happens next is that the high school Principal encourages my grandfather to actually build the windmill, and they do. But when I return to the text, I realize that my imagination has erred,       - though what really happens is just as revolutionary for my family’s fortunes as if the windmill had been built.

Having shown his plans to the Principal, the Principal decides to take my grandfather out of agricultural school (he works on a farm with my great-grandmother; his father having died 5 years or more earlier in Alexandria). He offers my grandfather a full scholarship, as the school is far beyond my family’s means. My grandfather goes to the Principal’s Commercial high school where he receives a much better education. This education prepares my grandfather with the practical skills he would use throughout the varied entrepreneurial ventures that he would later undertake. Thus a better education radically improves his prospects.

The critic in me sees another important theme emerging in this passage. On the one hand, I see the emergent interest in engineering, electricity and power generation. Slightly earlier he writes

“And then he came across works on electricity.  He couldn’t comprehend it all…. after a couple of months he knew enough [from talking with his engineer neighbor] to imagine something about electricity and electric motors In the course of these discussions, he discovered the fact of the “prevailing winds” and their constancy, and he concluded that these winds, very reliable in that country, could be harnessed to create electricity if only a method could be adopted.  These thoughts kept at him constantly.”

After high school he would work for the Electric Power Corporation as a trainee to “help plan and construct electric power facilities.” Later in life, he would own and run a factory that produced the batteries that powered aircraft.

On the other hand, I see his interest in climate and meteorology – the invisible forces that govern the air around us. During the Second World War, he would fly aircraft to help the US government work out the weather when undertaking air missions.

Both of these powerful, seen-at-second-hand forces – electricity and air movements – would thus shape his life. He could merge the palpable and the impalpable to generate practical, tangible projects; make the visible from the invisible; and imagine some of the practical and yet historical forces necessary to make his family’s desire for a Zion in British Palestine a reality.

But his life was also littered with failures – from failing to secure funds in the US for a navy for the Haganah in his late teens/early twenties; to losing his entire business on a promise given by an Israeli minister; to filing for bankruptcy on a later entrepreneurial project involving construction late on in his life.

Part 3 to come – the windmill- the boom and bust of the risk-taker, the spinning fortunes of the ambitious; the cycles of family history.

“I have no reason to live” said David one Saturday afternoon when they met on the beach.  “Well, ‘create’ a reason” said the boy.  “You must aim for the ‘impossible’ and you make it possible.  That will give you reason to live until the end of your days”.