I wanted to share with you a bizarre experience that I had this week, but first – since this is the season of party games – a quiz question. (Actually, of course, that isn’t quite as true of Chanukah among our circles as I half-remember, half-fantasize, it used to be in the Dickensian semi-mythical Christmases of our early married life in Wales. However, as a hook to hang the following paragraphs on, it will do.)

So, on our drive up to Zichron on Sunday this week, we passed a lorry. Technically, we passed many lorries, but this was the only one that was interesting to read. Well of course I read lorries? Doesn’t everyone? I’m the person who, as a child, could recite the complete text to be found on the back of breakfast cereal packets by heart, and who, for several decades, remembered the patent number of the World Dryer Manufacturing Company hand-dryers ubiquitously installed in 1960s and ’70s motorway service stations in Britain. Yes, I know it’s a disability, but it’s my disability, so mind your own beeswax.

Anyway, as I was saying, this particular lorry was carrying baby strollers/buggies/agolot. (These have, by the way, in case you’ve been looking in the other direction for the last 40 years, evolved beyond all recognition. I’m not sure that the early Mercury space capsules of the 1950s employed technology half as sophisticated as a modern integrated baby transporter system. But I’d better stop there; I suspect there might be enough meat on that topic for an entire post!)

The lorry carried a strange advertising slogan: ‘O.K. strollers. Oh, mama!’ In itself, ‘O.K.’ seems a slightly bizarre choice of name for a product. What self-respecting parent or grandparent of an adored newborn would be tempted to buy a stroller that described itself as ‘O.K.’? I would expect to be drawn to strollers that call themselves ‘Magnifico’, ‘Splendiferous’, and so on, rather than ‘Alright, I suppose’ or ‘Not so bad’.

Actually, I have just googled stroller brand names, and I see that they are considerably more wide-ranging in their appeal than that. On one website’s selection of the 22 best brands, I found ones that appear to:

• Advertise their country of manufacture (or, these days, probably their country of initiating outsourcing to manufacturers in China): Britax, Teutonia, Inglesina – that last being a company, by the way, that hints at coupling baby-centric Italian culture with British reliability, but is actually American).
• Go all cooey and cutesy: Bugaboo, Dream On Me, BumbleRide, Baby Jogger, Mamas And Papas.
• Target the first-time parent who must now sell the two-seater sports car and buy a sensible family car: Maclaren, Aston Martin, Grand Touring Baby,
• State clearly their priority: Safety 1^st
• Go utterly prosaic: Dorel Industries Inc, Phil & Teds
• Aim, apparently, to appeal to the parents of an unwanted child: Uppu Baby

Anyway, this lorry! The slogan was, I remind you: O.K. strollers. Oh, mama! What attracted my attention was that the designers of the slogan had decided that what it was lacking was an apostrophe, and had inserted one somewhere. Your quiz question is: Where exactly do you think they had inserted the apostrophe?

Bernice, who was driving, had not read the lorry, and so I asked her. She very shrewdly suggested: O.K. stroller’s. Oh, mama, favouring what is known in Britain as the greengrocer’s apostrophe, so named because, in the good old days when greengrocers marked up their prices every day on chalkboards, they tending to add an apostrophe before the final ‘s’ of any word in the plural.

These days, of course, most street market stalls with chalkboard pricing are staffed by PhDs who grow artisan vegetables on their smallholding, and whose mastery of the vagaries of grammar and punctuation is matched only by the excellence of their calligraphy.

Well, have you made your guess? The answer is: ‘O.K. strollers. Oh, m’ama!’ I can only imagine that someone thought that it would sound very French and sophisticated if they pretended that ‘ama’ was a form of a transitive verb, preceded by a direct object pronoun.

If I have, by this stage, completely lost you, fear not. We are now going to undergo so complete a change of subject that I cannot think of anything remotely resembling a segue, and so I shall resort to my least favourite purveyors of fine comedy: Monty Python.

And now for something completely different.

Let me tell you what happened to me last motzei shabbat.

Because of the desirability of lighting the Chanukah lights as close to the earliest permitted time as possible, I arranged with Bernice that she should collect me by car from shul after the Saturday evening service so that I would get home earlier. We had some discussion about whether she should come if the weather was good, or only if it was raining. Anyway, after the service finished, I left shul, to discover that the evening was cloudy but dry.

Bernice wasn’t waiting for me outside. I had a good look at the parked cars, but none had their lights on or engine running, and none looked like ours. This wasn’t surprising, because it was still only a couple of minutes after Shabbat had finished, and I knew that she would be setting up the lights in the chanukiyot and setting out the tray for Havdalah before she came to pick me up, if, that is, she decided to pick me up even though it wasn’t raining. I decided to save a couple of minutes by starting to walk home. I made sure to walk at the edge of the kerb, so that she would spot me as she was driving up. A couple of minutes from shul, I saw a car approach that might have been ours. However, because of the dark, and the car’s headlights, I could not be absolutely sure. The car didn’t stop, so I took a closer look as it passed. It was certainly our make and model and the same colour and, sure enough, the last three digits of the number-plate were 702, matching ours. As a clincher, the car turned right into the street where the shul is, so I turned around and started walking back towards shul.

As I turned the corner of the street, I could see the same car driving back down the street toward me, Bernice having presumably discovered that I had already left shul, As it stopped at the corner, I opened the door and jumped in. “I’m so sorry!”, I said, a little breathlessly. “I thought you would spot me as you were driving up. I…”

At this point, I looked at the dashboard, and noted, with interest, that Bernice seemed to have replaced our media screen with a less modern radio-player. Turning my gaze to the driver, I saw a bespectacled man, about my age, who said, very guardedly, in heavily accented English, struggling to keep his voice calm: “What do you want?!”

Realising that a coherent explanation would take far more time than I had, and would also involve confessing my stupidity to a complete stranger, I simply apologised profusely, opened the door and left the car as quickly as possible. The idea of asking him whether he was going my way and would mind giving me a lift didn’t actually occur to me.

Since then, I am finding it difficult to get the image of his face out of my mind. His expression was somewhere between the first trace of doubt that might pass across a person’s face as he is suddenly struck by a suspicion that the man who has befriended him in the pub might actually be a cold-blooded murderer, and the moment, much later in the story, when his last doubts are removed and he acknowledges, with absolute certainty and in a state of terror, that this ‘friend’ is planning to kill him. In the eyes of that poor driver, I could read his very real fear that he was trapped in a car with a deranged axe murderer.

I was, of course, absolutely mortified, and I wish that I could find this man again and apologise to him for disturbing him so deeply. At the same time, there was a certain thrill in seeing the trace of terror in his eyes.… I think I’d better stop here, don’t you?

When I eventually arrived home, Bernice confirmed that we had in fact agreed that if it wasn’t raining there was no need for her to pick me up. I decided not to tell her what had happened, preferring to wait and see the expression on her face when she read this week’s post pre-publication. I can confirm that it was worth the wait.

Meanwhile, in Penamacor, Ollie is perfecting his Superman.

If you need an explanation of the title of this week’s post, click the link (but only if you have a strong stomach).