Browned off

A common sight during summer in Nappy Valley is the Heath Robinson attempts by women wielding expensive buggies to shield their babies from the sun. On a hot day, the local mummies can be found desperately trying to veil their offspring from the rays under various shawls, muslins, tea-towels, umbrellas and random pieces of netting clipped to their prams.

Now, you would have thought that makers of designer prams et would have invented a workable sunshade option by now (especially since most of their customers must live in warmer climes than here). But, judging by this summer’s pram customisations, clearly they haven’t (for if it does exist, surely the locals here would have bought it?). Cheaper pushchairs, in contrast, seem to come with perfectly acceptable-looking covers.

Three years ago, when I was a new mother, the solution of choice for Bugaboo owners was to affix a muslin cloth across the hood with clothes pegs, thus protecting the baby’s face but handily ruining the stylish aspect of the buggy. The UV ‘parasol’ that you could buy as an accessory was fine if the sun was in a particular corner of the sky and you were walking in a particular direction at the time– but was otherwise utterly useless.

Today, the favoured option seems to be to drape the pram with a silk scarf (or perhaps last season’s pashmina?) thus enabling you to show off your fashion sense as well as your concern for the child’s skin.

While this works OK for newborns, who don’t particularly care about the view, it must be deeply frustrating for older babies. And toddlers like the Littleboys, of course, have no such truck with being shielded from the outside world. Their attitude to sunhats is also unsatisfactory; they either constantly remove them (Littleboy 2) or wear them obsessively whenever they don’t need them - in the house, in the bath, in bed - but not when you want them to (Littleboy 1) .

Short of buying them Victorian-style baby bonnets with strings (an option I have considered), the only thing to be done is to slather them in Factor 50 and hope for the best. But at least we are all avoiding the worst possible faux pas; one that says more about your social status these days than pierced ears or a mullet – a suntanned baby.