Have you noticed the increasing number of 4×4 vehicles clogging the roads these days?
These “gas-guzzling” SUVs are generally driven, it has to be said, by a mother, with her child strapped safely in the back seat.
It is a curious phenomenon. In the past six months, I have been to a number of wild places: the Scottish Highlands, the Lake District, Snowdonia and the French/Swiss Alps. Remarkably, I have seen a greater proportion of 4x4s on the streets of Maidenhead than in the great mountains of Europe.
What is going on? I can think of two reasons accounting for the growing trend. One, these cars are “must have” toys for yummy mummies and young professionals. They are a status symbol (and screw the environment). The second reason is that parents want to protect their kids. We are living in an age of fear. People are afraid of paedophiles, yobs and bad drivers. So children don’t walk to school anymore. They are ferried in these supertankers of the high street with guaranteed protection.
I think that parents are being overprotective. Kids should walk to school (like I used to). It is good exercise, better for the environment and it lessens the amount of traffic on the road. Most importantly, children should be allowed to confront the outside world and to deal with it in their own way.
Amusingly, there is a movement against 4x4s in towns and cities named Alliance Against Urban 4x4s. On their website, they state:
Our goals are to make driving a big 4×4 in town as socially unacceptable as drink-driving…
A tad extreme, perhaps. Click here to visit their site.
To celebrate a friend’s birthday, I went to The Oracle’s Yellow River Cafe, a pan-Asian restaurant, for a Saturday night meal (before hitting the town’s bars for drinks). The five of us (myself, birthday boy Matt, Steve, Mike and his partner Natalie) arrived at 7.30pm to find the restaurant buzzing. The place had real energy.