Читать книгу Double Trouble: Twins and How to Survive Them - Emma Mahony - Страница 47

If you thought buying a car was difficult (am I a hatchback sort of person or a sports car kind of girl?), then the double buggy showroom will send you rushing to the nearest shrink. Double buggies seem to cost about as much as a car, need at least an O-level in engineering to put up and down, and generate very little interest in the male species. If you do have a man with strong opinions about what you should buy, think twice about doing as you’re told against your better judgment. Exactly how much pushing up and down the pavements and hills will he be doing with it? A Saturday stroll is quite different from a slog back from Sainsbury’s with the weekly shop.

One reason why the world of double buggies is so complicated is because manufacturers are always bringing out new pushchairs with fabrics and features that instantly make last year’s model look like stale buns. We have a video in our twins club library called Coping with Twins (don’t bother, it’s from the 1970s), which shows a mother trying to ram a new double buggy through her front door. Under the helpful banner of ‘make sure your double buggy can fit through an average door’, this poor woman is trying to negotiate a vehicle the size of two shopping trolleys up the front step. Meanwhile, her twins are lying down on their fronts in the buggy, with their heads bobbing up and down like nodding dogs.

In a recent local twins club survey, two mothers groaned about how the Mothercare Urban Detour model was 82 cms wide and didn’t fit through their front doors. The thought of unloading your twins in the rain, and taking the shopping off the back of the buggy while finding the keys in the bottom of your handbag is no small consideration, so don’t rely on manufacturers to build to standard-width doors. At the risk of making the book instantly out of date, because by the time you read this some company will have just brought out a model with a pump-action pellet gun to zap other buggies out of the way, let me offer the results of our own twins club survey a little later on (see pages 56–7). In defence of being yesterday’s news, note that manufacturers’ ‘new ranges’ tend to offer cosmetic changes, such as different fabrics, rather than radical design improvements.