IF Nicole Kidman had been running butt-naked down Davygate shouting "touch me, touch me, touch me", there would have been less of a crowd.

And if a few stragglers had turned up to watch the Hollywood megastar's nether regions zipping past Debenhams there would almost certainly have been less tutting and eyebrow raising.

All I did was take my daughter shopping. How was I supposed to know we were going to end up at the centre of a crowd of gawpers?

Anyone would think they had never seen a kid having a tantrum before.

If I had been trying to manhandle the Elephant Man into the buggy I could have understood their open-mouthed interest. But all I was trying to do - unsuccessfully, as it turned out - was encourage a 22-month-old girl to sit down in the relative comfort of her buggy instead of screaming like a banshee while energetically smearing her snot-encrusted face along the otherwise spotless window of Monsoon.

She had already howled her way round Woollies and tried to demolish an entire bookcase of Enid Blyton's Nice Tales For Nice Girls And Boys at Waterstone's with the sheer force of her temper, so I had become immune to her Tasmanian devil-like behaviour by the time we reached Davygate.

There appeared to be a lull in the storm for a few sweet and all too brief moments, but then all hell broke loose again when I refused to allow her to pick up a filthy cigarette butt from the gutter (alert the NSPCC immediately!).

It was then that I decided enough was enough and requested, not unreasonably, the presence of her bottom in the buggy.

For those of you who have never attempted to push toothpaste back into the tube, it's difficult to explain just how tricky it is to squash a screaming, kicking creature into a buggy without a) breaking a vital bit off the buggy, b) breaking a vital bit off them or c) losing the will to live.

As you try to lever them into position, they seem to suddenly sprout extra limbs to match the extra decibels they are producing. But still, it's hardly a spectator sport.

So next time you see me wrestling a child to the ground in the middle of the street, please don't stop and stare. And if you really must tut and mutter (or, indeed, mut and tutter), why not keep it to yourself until you can do it in the comfort of your own home.

Kids have tantrums. Parents have to deal with them. It happens. Get over it.

Me and my badger's bum

I'VE got a bit of a badger's bum on my head at the moment. No, it's not my Ascot hat, it's my hair.

Left to its own devices, my hair would probably be a mottled tangle of grey. I say 'probably' because my hair has not been left to its own devices since about 1981 when I discovered the joys of Sun-In, a peroxide spray that sucked the life out of your hair leaving it with the colour and texture of a pile of chewed straw.

After 24 years or so of regular colour tinkering I can barely remember what my natural hue is. But every now and again a strip of grey starts to creep east and west from my parting as a reminder.

For reasons I can no longer fathom, I was trying to describe this badger's bum stripe to a friend the other day without actually using the words 'badger' or 'bum'. Luckily, she came to my rescue.

"Oh, you mean like Indira Gandhi's hair," she said, making my ridiculous animal marking sound strangely glamorous.

"No chance," yelled my beloved from the kitchen. "It's more of a Dickie Davies."

Men, eh? Can't live with 'em, can't be bothered to dig a hole big enough to bury them in.

Updated: 09:19 Monday, March 07, 2005