The Tribulations of Shopping With A Baby

My husband recently returned home from a shopping trip to Manchester with his very soul bloodied and bruised, a cowed wreck of the man who'd left the house hours (and I mean HOURS) before.

You'd think that visiting the aforementioned out-of-town shopping centre as often as I did, I'd spend a fortune, wouldn't you? Well no, you'd be wrong. 50% of the shops are impossible to navigate a pram round anyway, for fear of starting some sort of clothing-rack-domino disaster.

The reason? He'd taken the baby. To Market Street, of all places. The crazy, impetuous fool.

I could've told him, had he cared to ask, that taking a baby shopping, to a busy city centre, on your own, on a Saturday....well, that's just asking for trouble. That's just unnecessary risk-taking in my book, and where did it get him? Collapsed in the armchair in front of 'Total Wipeout' – a broken, husk of a man without the strength to pick up the tv remote and change channels.

The moral of this story, dear reader, is NEVER take a baby shopping into uncharted territories on your own.

Firstly, there's the parking issue. No shop or shopping centre that I have ever been to has enough mother and baby spaces. Five is about standard, any more than that and you've probably parked either at a school or a branch of Mothercare. Many people like to play fast and lose with the term 'parent& child' in relation to these parking spaces, and it raises my blood pressure. They are NOT designed for middle-aged businessmen who don't want to get their Aston Martin dinked by another car door, or mums on school runs with two fat twelve year olds in need of a Mars bar fix.

Park in a multi-storey in a city centre, however, and you'll be lucky to get out of the car alive yourself, never mind get the baby and all his gubbins out. Then there's the issue of getting the two of you out of the multi-storey without either getting lost or getting stuck in the Lift of Dubious Efficiency (usually located in the Land of No Lighting) and even more dubious odour.

No, the easiest thing is to consign city or town centre shopping to a baby-free day, and to trot off to your nearest out-of-town shopping centre at all other times. Hence, next time the job of tour guide comes up at the Trafford Centre, I'm there. I can tell you everything you need to know about that place – I used to trundle round it top to bottom, left to right, at least once a week for about 4 months. It's indoors, it's just off the motorway, and granted the mother & baby spaces are always gone, but I can at least get us out of the standard ones without losing a limb, and I know where the nearest toilets are at any given moment.

Toilets. A lone mother's nightmare. You can't go to normal women's (or men's) toilets because you can't leave Junior alone outside – someone might nick him, or you'll emerge to find some random old person has reported him and his pram to security on the grounds that he was 'ticking' (happened to a friend of mine once, I kid you not). In many places, you can't use the disabled facilities, which are the only ones large enough to get a pram in with you, because they're either padlocked or have keypad access. Needless to say, the Trafford Centre, like most of its modern, purpose-built brethren, has specific parent & child toilets.

Don't even get me started on the shops. You'd think that visiting the aforementioned out-of-town shopping centre as often as I did, I'd spend a fortune, wouldn't you? Well no, you'd be wrong. 50% of the shops are impossible to navigate a pram round anyway, for fear of starting some sort of clothing-rack-domino disaster.

Every way you turn, you ram the pram into the leg of a rack, or inadvertently dismantle a pyramid display of Easter eggs. In the unlikely event that you're able to manoeuvre around the shop and find something that you might actually like, you can't try it on because the changing rooms make telephone boxes look cavernous, and the 16 year old manning them will obviously suspect you of smuggling half the store out in Junior's nappy. Clearly, many retailers are intent on keeping anyone wider than Kate Moss, anyone in a wheelchair, or anyone With Child out of their stores; on-line shopping, anybody?

All of this knowledge, dear Reader, I would've passed on to my husband, had he asked. But we all know how that turned out...

Do you agree with Samantha Grimes? Is shopping with a kid, or venturing into town really as difficult as she describes? Shortly we’ll have a repost to this up on the site about how to make the most of the city centre with kids.