Bibi And The Rhubarb Patch

Back in the good old Yorkshire, we spoke plain.
We called a spade a spade; we did more than that we called it a bloody shovel.
Back in Yorkshire, we didn’t have many shades or colours. Everything was either black or white; in between, there were a few shades of grey, but not many, mind.
We Yorkshireman hardly saw any colour, even in our allotments everything was muddy. Probably there were a few vegetables that somehow managed a different colour. But we didn’t have hues of colours or spectrums. It was all black and white with some grey in the middle.

Coming to Israel was hard. In Israel, there are many shades of different colours. And colour colours our language-both here and there.

In Yorkshire, we have a few sayings that more or less cover everything. We say, ‘Hear all, see all, say nowt. ‘That pretty much is what we would expect from a guy who was Prime Minister and Minister of Defence. So, when Bibi effects an attitude as if he knows things that we do not, as a Yorkshireman, I would say,’ I bloody well hope so.’
Unfortunately, for Bibi, the next part of the saying is, ‘Eat all, sup all, pay nowt. ‘Now that might sound very nice and even part of the defence brief Bibi might be using. But there’s another Yorkshire phrase, ‘You don’t get owt for nowt. ‘

What that means to us simple Yorkshire folk is that you can’t really expect somebody who is repeatedly giving you presents of great value, and by great value I mean over hundred thousand quids worth of value and think that the guy doesn’t want owt in return. To paraphrase Yorkshireman, ‘don’t be so bloody stupid. ‘

We would probably add to that, ‘Pull the other one, it’s got bells on it. ‘In other words, ‘you must be bloody joking. ‘

In Yorkshire, we don’t really like the police or lawyers. In our eyes, they were all a bunch of scoundrels.

But they are regarded as a necessary evil. Sure, we would like to do away with them-but not really. We knew that the two are part and parcel of society and without the pair, it would be a bit of a jungle. Of course, we expected somebody who was caught to scream blue, bloody murder. Pretty much like what our Bibi is doing just now. We’d probably shake our heads and say, ‘fair dos. ‘But we would never seriously expect somebody to suggest abolishing the Crown Courts because they had been caught.

As I said, back in Yorkshire we didn’t have much colour, maybe in our allotments.
In our allotments and back gardens, especially around the Leeds way, we had one speciality that we all grew. Leeds is famous for rhubarb. Part of south Leeds, Morley is the world centre for growing rhubarb.
And here’s the rub. We plain speaking, ‘likely lads’ from Yorkshire don’t bandy around with words. So, when we do want to blather we don’t have the vocabulary as we do in Hebrew. We would never be able to fill so many inches the newspaper of so much hot air about a guy who’d been caught doing something stupid.
In Yorkshire when you want to blather, and you have not got the vocabulary you use a word that sounds as if it means something and it doesn’t really. That word is rhubarb. If you want to fill the air with meaningless sounds, you say, ‘rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb. ‘

When I sit listening to the antics and explanations of Bibi, I miss the simplicity of good old Yorkshire. Rhubarb pie is quite tasty, by the way, as is Yorkshire pudding.