Why children’s car seats should be fitted with straitjackets

It was a misty, gloomy morning and I fancied a trail run. Because it was a misty, gloomy morning, I thought I’d better wear a hi-vis t-shirt, as I needed to run down a pavement-less road for the first quarter of a mile and it was early and I would be there the same time as school-run-mums, although it did occur to me that hi-vis is no protection against school-run-mums as, in my experience, they are usually putting on their make-up or taking off last night’s make-up or painting their nails or brushing their hair or reading a book or writing a book or making a phone call or taking a phone call or playing on their iPhone or playing on their iPad or fiddling with the radio or fiddling with their hair or lighting a fag or smoking a fag or doing the washing or doing the ironing or doing ANYTHING except look at the road they’re driving Little Tommy and Little Lucy along to get them safely to school and you might have noticed that I missed off ‘turning round to stop the kids from killing each other in the back seat’ from my list, as that only ever happens on the television when the woman (it’s always a woman) turns round to stop Little Tommy from mutilating Little Lucy and while her eyes are off the road for that split second, she drives the car into an oncoming articulated lorry and then she’s WRACKED with grief and guilt and blames herself for the death of her beautiful (they’re always beautiful) children and her husband (who usually has enough hair to run his fingers through in agitated anxiety) does his best to reassure her and says it’s not her fault and it could happen to anyone and they’ll get through this together but then a few months later, wifey’s turned into an alcoholic and hubby’s had enough of wifey’s constant drinking and weeping and wracked-with-guiltness and buggers off with someone soberer, younger, blonder and less neurotic and if children’s car seats were fitted with straitjackets we would all be saved from such televisual clichés.

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