Top Gear Team Challenge

2 April 2008

Dear Top Gear Team

I have a deliciously different challenge for you three motor musketeers.

I challenge you to actually take two bantam weight kiddies, a supermarket trolley and actually get buy some meaningful shopping in one of the major supermarkets, without blowing a gasket!

Having tried unsuccessfully to get two small kids into a supermarket trolley at a major (orange coloured) supermarket, I can tell you its no walk in a lily scented park.

You could undertake the perils of the dreaded understeer (great for toning abs!) as the wayward trolley hurtles randomly out of control. The experience of pivoting on one leg, the other extended outwards as you lunge into your trolley to desperately retrieve a pack of small raisins (that you just cannot reach!), whilst bored shoppers mutter for you to hurry up is certainly not to be missed. The piste de resistance will definitely be your role equivalent to a UN peacemaker, when the small child starts pulling the hair of the larger child, due to the seating positions. Things escalate and French sticks are used as batons, fromage frais as a weapon of mass destruction. By the time you reach the cashier you realise that you don’t actually have any produce in tact.

The supermarket invariably gets its own back. Their CCTV cameras are probably all trained onto the carpark, revelling in the fact that kiddie trollies have no brakes, the carpark is on a slope and you have to make a snap decision on what you save, the children, the car (from being smashed into by the trolley) or the trolleyfull of mushed food.

Given the fact that you can tell us how many bags of shopping a beige people carrier can hold, I thought it would be a different angle for you three to explore.

In actual fact, if you come down to my local orange supermarket, then I would not only lend you the kids but would teach my son to say “Clarkson for Prime Minister”.

Yours truly