Buggy Etiquette

Yeah, this doesn’t exist.

It’s a buggy eat buggy world, plough into or be ploughed upon.  I used to be one of those people who said “What makes parents think that they own the road?  I deserve some pavement too!” but Oh, I have been turned. Well kind of.

If you don’t make room for an oncoming buggy with a precious little bundle in it, that must mean you are a devil-worshipping, baby-killing, no-morals family-hater. In mummy-brains, there is nothing more important than a small dependent child, and they need the pavement much more than you.  Hell, not only that, but imagine, you’re steering the thing with one carpal tunnelled hand (you get that when preggers you know), have bags of shopping cutting into the other hand, you’re so sleep deprived and malnourished that you can’t actually see, and some young leisure centre attendant can’t be arsed to move out of the way because he might scuff his patent lime converses and not be able to wear them to “Bodypopping class” tonight. Oh for fuck’s sake.

Oops, sounded a bit old then. But you catch my drift. I have crossed over to the other side, and to quote the inimitable Louis CK, “if you don’t have kids, it doesn’t really matter if you die. Your mum might cry, blah blah blah, but really, it doesn’t matter.” Or something like that.

Ok I’m not really THAT bitter, but it is a hell of a lot easier for a person to move if they DON’T have a buggy. Just like you give way to lorries on hills and all that bollocks. 

Starting to sound a bit like my cynical other half now so I might enlighten you (younger, smoother skinned Nic) on the more fun side of buggies!

    

•  You can carry loads of crap everywhere, yay! Except actually you need lots of crap everywhere, so Boo.
• You can hide behind it.
• You get sexy security guards following you because of your stunning good looks (or extra capacity to thieve?)
• Your baby will love to nap in it so you get some peace. Until that old lady from down the road decides to “walk with you” and admire your “little boy’s lovely pink dress".
• If you bought a second hand one, you get to whip your battered buggy out of the boot and erect it in seconds, while your mate across the car park with the new-fangled spangled mango pushchair pulls various muscles and gets a black eye from the complicated, stiff new mechanism.

I used “erect” and “stiff” in the same sentence. Which brings me to my final point, just because you have a baby, does not mean you automatically grow up. Well, you grow up in the sense that you have MAHOOOOOOSIVE responsibilities, but you might regress in other ways.  So yeah, we’ve been known to let the buggy go down a hill to see how fast it goes…

Just one last thing Nic, maybe take the baby out first…