Quinny Longboardstroller: child-rearing and sport in one

Your kids will think they’re the boss while you hoon around the footpath recapturing your misspent youth.

In the skate park by the Thames on London’s South Bank there is consensus about my new pram: it is a pragmatic and logical advance on the concept and is to be applauded. “If I had a kid,” says Harry Leonard Labijyan, “I’d be riding this.”

Now, Labijyan seems in many ways a thoroughly excellent chap. But it is also 4.30pm on a Thursday and he has a bottle of cider in one hand, two cigarettes in the other, and he is trying to make my pram perform a jump. It is just conceivable that he may not be the best judge of parenting.

The new pram that so impressed him is less a pram at all, more a skateboard with a seat — and a moderately bemused toddler — attached.

This, says the pram company Quinny, is the Longboardstroller, a “seamless mobility solution” that “brings together the comfort of a traditional stroller with the excitement of longboarding”.

Of course. Child rearing and adventure sports, together at last. Is this really the future of prams?

Felix, my son, perhaps unaware that mobil­ity is something requiring a solution (seamless or otherwise), is initially suspicious. “No fast,” he says as I take him around the block. “Careful,” he instructs, as I bounce over the kerb. I didn’t even know he had that word. Then, for good measure, “No fast”. It is a little like taking a maiden aunt for a drive.

But, as with everything new and unusual in a life in which everything is new and unusual, he quickly acquiesces into sitting on the front of an oversized skateboard and adopts the nonplussed air of a toddler for whom novelty is the natural state of things. Which is fine. This pram was never for him, it was for me: and I am beginning to come around to Labijyan’s view of it.

When I’m on my skateboard pram, I’m not a suburban commuter drifting into comfortable mediocrity, I’m a daring nonconformist unwilling to let children define me. Rolling to the station, a teenager shouts that I’m “the coolest parent ever”. Getting on the train, two groups of primary school children stop to look, demanding a demonstration.

The fact, between these events, the men at the ticket barrier sized it up and agreed it “makes you look like a bit of a bellend” is but a minor criticism.

If a normal pram is a sturdy, practical, estate car, this is a sporty coupe. It is the sort of purchase your wife disapproves of, and others whisper is indicative of a wider, embarrassing, midlife crisis. And like most things that come from embarrassing midlife crises, it is deeply impractical. Going around 90-degree corners is impossible without physically lifting up the board’s back end. Maintaining a safe speed is difficult; maintaining an unsafe speed is, with your progeny as a crumple zone, inadvisable.

Yet, like most things that come from an embarrassing midlife crisis, that is also not really the point. The real point is, it is a lot of fun. Now I just have to convince my wife.

longboardstroller.com