There are about 1000000 seats in the shop. I ask for some help.
Child car safety seats are the things that most make me want to walk up to the gates of parliament and set myself on fire. (Apart from light bulbs). You are not allowed to put a child in a car without one of these, even if you are just going to the Village Shop, driving really slowly due to snow and ice etc.
Whereas when I was a little boy I was used to being happily driven down the motorway whilst standing up between the front seats, my head poking out of the sun roof. It is how I gained the knowledge of road conditions etc. that has served me so well as a driver. Plus, when I used to play football for the cubs, the manager would stuff the whole team into the back of his Hillman Imp estate. With the car seats law, there is only room for two children, meaning that 5.5 more car journeys are required; it thus logically follows that car seats actually cause 5.5 times more deaths on the road than before.
It is an example of our crazed lawmakers completely failing to think things through.
All the car seats seem very expensive. I ask the lady for advice.
“I am a bit unclear as to the law,” I say. “Is it the case that I could just sit her on some form of booster seat, or box, or whatever – or do I still have to buy one of the big padded things.”
She shakes her head sadly before her reply. “There has been some recent research that shows that children who do not sit in an expensive padded seat are 183475 times more likely to die or have a major disfiguring injury that will make you ashamed, should you have an accident. There are so-called ‘booster’ seats, but they are mainly made in Eastern Europe or by Toyota and they are likely to make the seat-belt garrotte the child. I believe that was the sort of seat used by dimwitted fake child-abductee mother Mrs Karen Matthews before her arrest,” she says. (I paraphrase).
“Oh,” I reply.
I study the features of the expensive chairs a bit more, before buying a black one, as it matches the paintwork. The Toddler seems happy with my choice. The lady seems happy with my choice. I drive home at excessive speed, because she is safe.
Hope you are not driving her in a toyota!
When I was a nipper, and my parents fancied a day at the seaside, my dad would take the tools and paint tins out the back of his transit from work, chuck in the couch cushions, and all us kids would sit back there while he barrelled down the A127 to Southend. The lightest tap on the brakes would have us all smooshed up against the front seats like pressed ham.
Nowadays they say that that sort of treatment would turn kids flabby and pathetic, or grim and hyper-critical, but we all turned out all right, didn’t we Jonny?
My boys had to take turns to sit in the front and we Mums drove with our left arms permanently extended to stop the little darlings from going through the windscreen should we have to brake suddenly. Worked quite well. Unlike Ivan we had a proper car so the one in the back stood hanging on to the back seat.
Or rather hanging on to the back of the front seat.
Four Yorkshiremen…
Technically the Healthiest & Saftiest option of them all would be to fit large metal spikes in the middle of the steering wheel so the constant threat of a impalement prevents anyone from going over 2.5mph.
The ability of large portions of the world to be happy in its inability to distinguish between what is possible and what is probable keeps me in my shed till all hours upgarding my jaw-floor retriever
I don’t believe Ivan. A light tap on the brakes in an old Transit actually slowed you down? I thought the favoured means of deceleration along the A127 was the car in front?
You should always drive carefully on the A127 due to the danger of a hair gel slick.
Hair gel slick? What wouldn’t we have given for a hair gel slick! Usually it was slithery piles of discarded condoms…
Booster seats versus car seats all depend on the height of your daughter.
But then, where were they when we were kids? I’m still alive after fighting off my 3 younger brothers in the back of the car….
I don’t get it. Why can’t you put her in a cardboard box and put the box in the boot, just like my parents used to use for me?
Over here (yonder? Thither? One of those places) it’s all done with a clever height-weight-cost ratio chart which, as one of my offspring is, shall we say, sizally deficient, would have left her in a booster seat until… last week, possibly, at an approximate cost of a billion dollars.
Kids nowadays are so swaddled and buckled and bubble-wrapped they’re going to grow up thinking that this world is one giant accident waiting to happen.
On the other hand, if your driving skills are anything like your cycling aptitude, I’d say that safety seat is a good investment. In fact, maybe look into getting a spare for the LTLP.
Ahh, the holidays in Cornwall. Seats down, mattress and kids chucked in the back of the Escort Estate with colouring books. No M5 so it took DAYS to get there (there being a caravan on some godforsaken site in the middle of nowhere). A week of rain then the same journey in reverse. I’m surprised we didn’t kill each other – although I do remember colouring my younger brother’s face with felt tip pens one year for which I got a bit of a smacking on arrival.
Them were the days.
We used to lay on the parcel shelf veeing up the vehicle behind.
I, a delicate tot, rode in the back of my father’s truck, from town to country, with the construction crew. I think I stood all the way, letting the wind blow my curly, long black hair. Ahh, childhood. Children today don’t have fun, what will they talk about when they grow up?
I’ll send you a copy of the car seat brochure I have just finished writing. It now includes several lines taken from this blog, including “drive home at excessive speed, because she is safe”. Cheers.