Recently I heard about “fast lane, slow lane” walkways introduced in a Yorkshire shopping mall, allowing briskly-paced shoppers to steam ahead and leaving more casual browsers to wander at their leisure.

Sounds like a sensible idea. If you’re in a rush, with limited time in your lunchbreak, say, it’s irritating to be stuck behind someone moving at a snail’s pace. Often these plodders move in packs, making them difficult to overtake.

When it comes to shopping contraflow, I’d go even further and introduce lanes for pushchairs.

It appears to be the law that anyone pushing a buggy with a child strapped into it has the right of way to barge through crowds and clog up the aisles of shops. Some pushchairs are enormous – ridiculous 4X4s of the pram world – and steered like tanks. I often find myself having to swerve an oncoming pushchair heading towards me at speed – very rarely are they moved out of the way of other shoppers.

I once tried to pass a buggy blocking an aisle in a department store and the mother glared at me as if I’d just snatched her toddler’s cuddly rabbit. The message was etched onto her face in tight-lipped defiance: "Don’t even attempt to get past. I have a pram – you will lose."

Surely people don’t always need to take pushchairs with them to town, supermarkets or busy retail centres. Can’t arrangements be made for babies or toddlers to be looked after elsewhere for a few hours, instead of subjecting them to noisy crowds around stuffy, overheated shops? It can’t be much fun for the children, which is presumably why so many are bawling their heads off as they’re pushed around like battering-rams.

I already feel like I’m being told off whenever I’m behind a car with a “Child on Board” sticker in the back window – the message is “drive carefully because I have reproduced, which elevates me to a VIP class of driver” – and even on foot I have to make way for other people’s children.

Since we live in a society where adding to the world’s population is something to be rewarded, why not allow parents their own shopping aisles? They already have their own parking spaces in supermarket car parks, so surely an aisle for prams and pushchairs wouldn’t be much of a stretch.

Pram-pushers would be free to clog up their aisles, while the rest of us could shop in peace without leaping out of the way of a screeching tot.

And if pushchair aisles had time restrictions, maybe some parents wouldn’t trail children around 24-hour supermarkets late at night – always a depressing sight.