After Judy Garland received the nasty bump on the head that led her to the ‘Land of Oz’ whilst trying to get back home during a dustbowl tornado in 1939, she encountered a world of oh so familiar people in very different guises. Eventually, as we all know, after many adventures in the company of the Lion, the Scarecrow and the Tin Man, she came to her senses and woke up declaring ‘There’s no place like home’.

I’ve been back in England for the last two weeks and to Leeds, the place I called home for the first forty years of my life. But now Leeds is no longer my home; Zichron Yaakov in Israel is very much the place where I lay my hat, (as Paul Young so famously declared in the 1980’s song), and strangely, revisiting the place of my birth, adolescence and subsequent adulthood seems more like returning to an alien environment than to the northern city to which I am inextricably linked due to family ties and close friendships.

I left Israel during a spring heatwave with the temperature sizzling at around 35 degrees. Six hours later I emerged into the Manchester night to the shock of the cold that is 2 degrees above freezing – and this is the middle of May! For the first three or four days in Leeds I felt terribly cold and old friends and family thought I was exaggerating when I insisted that I really was feeling miserable in the winter-like chill. It was only when I pointed out that the drop to even a mid-day high of 14 degrees was like them suddenly descending to minus 5 in the space of a few hours that they accepted that maybe I was feeling a bit on the nippy side.

Of course, what for me is a spring break in leafy England is for everyone else just another week of work and family commitments. It is unreasonable for me to expect everyone to suddenly cancel their business meetings or decide not to take the kids swimming or to dance classes just so they can sit around drinking coffee with me and reminisce about old times. Life goes on as normal, just as it does when visitors come to Israel, and it’s a case of trying to fit in with the routine and find a few hours here and there for some ‘quality time’.

I headed into Leeds for a bit of shopping. With the pound now incredibly weak due to the economic hardships being experienced in England, (and sure to get much worse over the next few years), buying clothes and gifts here is pleasantly affordable. The shekel goes a long way these days and I looked forward to spending up. Leeds is a fairly cosmopolitan and prosperous city, or at least it had been until the last few years where signs of recession are visible on every street with empty shops, all-year-long sales and discount stores occupying main high street positions where once stood elegant classy department stores and quality retail outlets.

‘Times is ‘ard’, as they say in these parts. People are worried about their jobs. Genuine fears of redundancy or enforced pay cuts loom for an alarming number of my friends and there is no doubt that people are cutting back and preparing for the major tax rises that are certain to come in next month’s emergency budget of the new Liberal/Conservative coalition government.

Maybe it was the weather, but people look as grey as the leaden skies, there is an astounding rise in obesity among the general population, and I strongly felt an atmosphere of gloom hanging over the place. Israel has its problems, many and complicated, but at least we are able to face them against a background of sunshine, beaches and a comparatively thriving economy. All of a sudden, the challenges faced back home seem that much more bearable – well, at least from afar!.

Just a minute – where is home? Is home the place I grew up, where my parents, childhood friends and many former colleagues are, or is home where I now live with my wife and children, my new friends and new colleagues? In Israel, I am still often referred to as ‘the English guy’ whilst in England I am thought of as ‘Israeli Paul’.

As well as missing Paz and my daughters Tami and Maya, I’m missing the Israeli food. Trying to get a decent salad over here is only marginally less of a challenge than Indiana Jones found when looking for the ‘Lost Ark’. Being gluten free these days rules out 9/10ths of the British diet – no pies, pasties, sandwiches, pizza, pasta, fish and chips, Indian food, you name it. I did find a Tesco sushi one lunchtime and that kept me going, and had some excellent, succulent Yorkshire roast lamb one evening, but overall, despite a definite improvement in the last decade, eating out in Britain falls a long way short of the standards I’ve become used to in Israel.

Driving in Britain though is an absolute delight. I’d almost forgotten what it is like for people to keep their distance, not use their horn, signal where they are going, and to top it all, stop and give way to let you into the traffic – with a smile and a cheery wave. Wonderful!

After a week of leaden skies and temperatures well below seasonal norm, the weather has taken a significant turn for the better. As I write to you, Britain is ‘sweltering’ in temperatures around 28 degrees – ‘Phew! What a scorcher’, The Sun newspaper is no doubt reporting. And when the sun does eventually shine, Britain is stunningly beautiful. The Yorkshire countryside close by is truly breathtaking when the skies are blue, the sheep and cattle graze in immaculately tended fields, and country villages filled with old stone cottages and a dazzling array of flower baskets look like images on top of those quaint old toffee tins you find at Betty’s Tea House in elegant, majestic Harrogate.

It won’t last though. Tomorrow I fly home and am taking the warm weather with me. It’s forecast to fall back to 15 degrees maximum temperatures and the greyness will return. The great unwashed, (I know that’s the case having endured a fortnight travelling on local buses, especially during the mini-heatwave), will repopulate the streets, the shops will be shuttered at 5pm to save them from being smashed up from drunken yobos during the night, and very soon Prime Minister Cameron will deal a financial blow to the populous that will make life even tougher here.

Last night I visited friends who were watching the final of a talent show chaired by Sir Andrew Lloyd-Webber in which the winning contestant will play Dorothy in his new stage version of ‘The Wizard of Oz’. As I mentioned earlier, Judy Garland’s last line of the movie has become a Hollywood classic. Tomorrow morning, courtesy of the Jet2 budget airlines service from Manchester to Tel Aviv, I’m flying back over the rainbow to be with my merry band of friends and loved ones. There really is ‘no place like home’.

 
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