Bicester Village: giant creche for the unnannied middle classes

The perfect Bicester family: beautiful when frozen in time, horrendous

when simultaneously throwing lattes at you and feeding organic carrots to the offspring.

So I stumbled across this in the paper last week...Bicester Village being the place I slave my summer away in serving the aforementioned rich tourists and middle class folk.
What the article fails to mention, however, is the huge abundance of small children that people decide to bring shopping in designer boutiques.

Because, you know, and I've always thought this too, that people who love sticky fingers, screaming, and running in and out of changing rooms are totally the best kind to appreciate cashmere and labels that say £300.

I've developed a very low intolerance to small human beings in places where I can't be bothered to have fun with them since they decided to plague our means of transport in Eastern Europe. Although pretty much every sticky, hot, bumpy and seemingly never ending train ride had noisy things on it, being woken up on a night train by a fang-toothed, whooping, large pupil-ed mini-person really did convince me temporarily that self-sterilisation was a good idea.

Thankfully, as the toilets in Serbian trains don't even have a flush, let alone any kind of surgical equipment, it wasn't the time nor the place.

However, the sentiment still returns when placed in similarly stressful situations. For example, when a three year old thought it immensely amusing to tip over her buggy, again, and again, taking most of the display I'd lovingly created with it. This is a pretty common occurrence, which makes me wonder why, when the brats are large enough to destroy their own personal transport, are they still being accompanied by it?

Similar rhetorical questions arise when designer toddler, complete with mini designer carrier bag, is cooed at by her designer parents for trampling on the designer stock. Are those Gucci sunglasses just completely black inside, or is love really that blind?

When these giant, grand-and-a-half buggies aren't being knocked over, they're taking up shitloads of room in Pret a Manger, which in Bicester Village may as well be a creche. The idea of having a quiet coffee over a pretentious novel is certainly not part of that branch's marketing strategy.

I'm sure once I've spawned my own tiny humans I'll be just as crap at disciplining them, but in the meantime, I'm allowed to be bitter to the point of my Father questioning the whereabouts of my maternal instinct. My secret love of the abundance of Pret Kids cheese baguettes is entirely unrelated...