We’re coming to the end of our son Avi’s bar mitzvah weekend. It’s an event that we faced with a certain amount of trepidation. Robbed of the ability to watch Avi sing his portion from the torah in synagogue, surrounded by family and friends, and unable to gather together afterwards in a confined space for an evening of sweaty dancing, emotional speeches and canapes, how could it possibly be the same?

This is the tale of a race with no finish line.

Ten years ago, my good pal Greg Swimer came to me with a vision – that we would build a very special 10k race. It was an idea that brought together key themes of our lives – the two of us were both running obsessives, sharing a bit of friendly racing rivalry to spur us on through the years, and each of us is a man who likes a project. Greg’s idea had a lovely twist – the race participants would select a neighbourhood to run for – N2 for East Finchley and N10 for Muswell Hill, introducing that same friendly rivalry on an inter-postcode basis. And so, Race the Neighbours was born…

This is a photo of my Grandpa Harold, along with his father and two of his brothers.

Our mum’s dad, by the time I knew him, he was a jovial older fellow (in fact, probably around my age – yikes). We bonded over computers and video games (he was ahead of his time on that front, I inherited many of my geekier tendencies from him). And we bonded over his storytelling – he loved to regale all his grandchildren with tales of his extraordinary experiences when he was younger.

Our Grandpa Harold had stories of adventure, of far away lands, straight out of a Boys Own annual, because Harold was a Desert Rat…

Written on 27th May 2020 at the height of the Dominic Cummings scandal

Two men who fed us snappy lines,

To hide the complicated.

“Take back control”, “get Brexit done”,

We swallowed whole, elated.

Odd couple in the thick of it,

A Downing Street sitcom,

PM dependent on his key adviser.

Classic Dom.

It was Kol Nidre, the eve of Yom Kippur, on Wednesday night. You know this by now.

I spent the final hour of the service on security duty. Standing at the front gate as folk departed, I found myself in the unusual position of bidding my entire community goodnight and well over the fast. There were plenty of jokes about their safety being in my hands - as we nodded to the security guards standing outside the gate, men who know what they’re doing and who do so much more to keep us safe. It’s a lovely, friendly community, and people departed to a convivial atmosphere. But we all know that synagogues are a target, and those of us on security fastened our protective vests a little tighter than usual.

When I was a kid, my dad and I would often talk antisemitism.

“What would we do,” I once asked him, “if the National Front came to power?”

“That’s easy,” he replied, “if they got a single MP into parliament, we’d be on the next plane to Israel.”

My name is Greg and I am a Jew.

By a quirk of fate, I was born into one of the easier periods of Jewish history. If you look back over the past couple of millennia, there have not been many comparable runs of stability for us Jews through the exiles, the pogroms and the genocide. This fortunate timing engenders an enormous sense of gratitude. But also a keen sense of history…