interfacing with commercialism and infants

We were in that John Lewis’s in Newcastle today, and waiting for an assistant to be free to tell us all about the latest news in PC speakers… I should explain that John Lewis’s is a proper shop, wherein the Sales Assistants are actually trained, polite and really do their job, which is telling you about stuff before you buy it.

Anyway, we noticed this fella, about our age, with a tiny baby in a really cool looking pram. So I ask him if the pram would later become a pushchair and he looked at me with a gleam in his eye. It’s a pram, a car seat with double strap, and later it’s a pushchair. Ages one to three. Then it turned into a real fellas’ kind of conversation.

He pointed out this vehicle’s tyres: ‘like a jeep of the pram world’, and I’m warming to this bloke by now. He showed me its disc brake at the front. And, the clincher for him, I could see, was that it was a rare pram in that it had a fully independent front wheel, which is really important around busy streets – it could clearly turn on a sixpence. From Pram World, Shields Road, Byker. Four hundred scoobie doos mind, but, this fella said, value for money in the long run.

The baby’s name was Tom, by the way. God bless the pair of them.

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