Designer bicycles

We seem to have entered the age of the “designer” everything.  There are, I am told, designer prams, much admired and sought after by the rich, with names such as a Ferrari or a Mercedes pram, and thus presumably designed by these car manufacturers like racing cars.  Not only these, but today I noticed a snazzy bike at the front of the shop window of an upmarket handbag shop.  Presumably designer bikes will soon be, or are already, the next must-have for those with too much money to spend.

I remember the days when we wheeled our children in easy-foldable pushchairs which did not clutter up shops or buses as today’s indecently cumbersome prams with their large wheels do.  This was before the time when prams, and now bicycles apparently, demanded the attention of special designers to attract customers.  I don’t always think back nostalgically to the old days, but some things really did feel simpler then.  Perhaps we were still so shell-shocked from the war that we were delighted just with the simple possessions available after a time of great deprivation.  We certainly felt it was wrong to spend money on useless luxuries, even if these were available to us.  It is these that now fill our shops.