Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 3 March 2012

Car wars

issue 03 March 2012

How do you stop children fighting on long car journeys? With three boys aged six and under, not to mention an eight-year-old tomboy, it’s getting to be a serious problem. Every journey seems to end in the vehicular equivalent of a cage fight, in which all four frantically try to undo their seatbelts so they can pile into the mêlée. No quarter asked, no quarter given. The fights are getting so vicious that instead of breaking them up I’m tempted to start filming them on my iPhone. A greatest-hits compilation on YouTube would get a million hits in less than 24 hours.

My initial solution was to get a bigger car. I reasoned that the more space I had, the easier it would be to separate them. So I went from a Skoda Octavia to a Vauxhall Zafira to a VW Caravelle — all in vain. What I needed, I decided, was an eight-seater so I could stick all four in separate corners.

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