Most of our friends were agreed on one thing when Alexander arrived – we might previously have lived a car-free lifestyle as rootless ‘dinkies’, but all that was going to change. Sage nods all round.

First, there would be a nursery, followed by playschool (both made worse when we exercised our parental prerogative and chose out-of-town groups), then school, plus a long list of extracurricular activities and a ceaseless round of parties in distant villages. Some of them even began discussing car-share schemes.

The car never happened, and we’re glad of that because not having access to a car doesn’t half concentrate the mind when choosing transport options. Child trailers saw us through those infant years – pulled initially by one or the other of our Bromptons, but later behind the priceless Giant Lafree power-assisted bike, especially as the boy grew, and the volume of ‘stuff’ expanded (parents will understand).

For train-assisted journeys, we used a range of folding/collapsible solutions, graduating from a baby sling to a Burley Solo child trailer, a Brompton-mounted child seat, and most recently, the invaluable ITChair. For the school run – and optional for longer journeys – the mainstay has been Steve Parry’s tandem Brompton.

Older Children

With the boy now six-and-a-bit, and sprouting like a bean up a pole, the on-bike options are becoming more limited. But if someone tells you their child went solo at 31/2 and now pedals him/herself everywhere, they’re either living in the Outer Hebrides, lying, mad or (more likely) using a car for the tricky bits. Alexander often rides his own bike to school and to local parties, but when he’s tired, or the weather’s dubious, or we’re riding a long way, it still makes sense to travel en tandem: For years, we’ve used a rack-mounted child seat on the Ezee Sprint electric bike, but the rack was starting to sag. Clearly, we needed something sturdier.

Years ago, before the invention of the bulbous people-mover, bicycle seats for older children were quite common, but they’re much rarer these days. Any number of manufacturers produce rack or frame-mounted seats, but very few of these are suited to children of five and above.

In Holland and Germany, as we so often point out, it’s another world, and child- carriers abound. One of the very few to have found its way to Britain is the Bobike Junior, a rear-mounted seat designed for children from four to nine years old (or five to ten, depending which brochure you’re reading). If you have a podgy 91/2-year-old, we should qualify that upper age limit, because in the small print, the gross weight limit, including luggage, is 32kg, or five stone in what Francois Mitterrand would call Anglo-Saxon measures. For reasons that will be explained, we wouldn’t recommend exceeding this limit.

Fittingly, in this ‘vision of the future’ issue, the Bobike Junior is a clever multi-purpose device.

When little Hans is elsewhere, the seatback folds flat, which not only does wonders for the drag coefficient, but produces a wide rack suitable for carrying all manner of awkward things home from B&Q. The seatback also incorporates a steel frame that can be folded down behind the seat to create a longer load platform, or some vestigial luggage capacity when the seat is occupied.

…The Junior weighs 4.8kg, even before you’ve mustered the podgy ten-year-old…

Fitting

We fitted the Junior to the long-suffering Ezee Sprint, the various fixtures and fittings coping reasonably well with the slightly unusual geometry of the bike, so it should fit most conventional diamond frames. A few tips here: the frame tubes have to be clean and grease-free (that includes spots of road tar), and the bolt threads should be lightly greased. Tighten the fixing bolts, ride a few miles with the seat under load, and re-tighten everything, because the clamps are fitted with plastic bushes that take up a bit of slack as they were ‘run-in’.

Usefully, Junior shares a quick-release system with its smaller cousin the Maxi. This means that children of various sizes can be accommodated on different bikes as and when required. The seat is secured by engaging the nose in a connector bolted to the seat tube and plonking two struts into a pair of brackets secured to the chainstays. This produces a triangulated structure, but unlike a conventional rack, which generally puts a pair of struts under the load, the supporting legs of the Junior are positioned well forward of the seat.When the child sits down, the seat base bends down and back, putting far more strain on the assembly than is really necessary. Fortunately, the mountings and bolts are the types used to secure truck bumpers, but we never really worked out why it had been made this way. Another slightly odd feature is that the manufacturer assumes you’ll be keeping the luggage rack in place under the seat, which seems like a lot of unnecessary weight (a kilogram in our case) when you’ve just bought an expensive child carrier and rack combined.The Junior weighs 4.8kg, even before you’ve mustered that podgy ten-year-old, so you’ll probably want to remove the rack, as we did at first.

The odd geometry, plus the rather woolly plastic joint bushes, make the thing feel a bit insecure. From the sharp end, we’re told this is great news, or as Alexander puts it cheerfully, ‘a seat with suspension’. He’s right up to a point – the Junior does a good job of cushioning road shocks, albeit by the slightly downmarket expedient of bowing and flexing.

Is it safe? Yes, but bear in mind that a child hanging off the side making rude noises at his friends will cause a lot more strain than a heavier child reading a book. Alexander weighs 22kg, which is well within the 32kg limit, but his weight makes the Junior drop by 4mm, plus another 3mm or so on the bumps. So for us, the chair needs to be at least 10mm clear of the mudguard or rack to avoid noisy contact on bumps. A heavier child and/or luggage will need greater clearance unless the seat was deliberately allowed to rest on the rack. In the end, we refitted the rack and allowed it to do just that.

Another area that causes us a slight concern was the lack of leg protection. We’re used to a child seat with molded plastic sides that make it impossible for the child to put a foot anywhere near the wheel. This omission on the Junior was puzzling until we read the instruction leaflet; ‘Fit Bobike foot protection plates if your bicycle is not fitted with dress guards’. Dress guards are rare in the UK, but we’d strongly advise fitting one or the other.

Similarly, the safety harness is a bit wimpy, and rather poorly mounted on the top of the seatback, which will – in any event – fold forward under stress. The front mounting is better, but the buckle may prove a temptation for small inquisitive fingers. The belt also has a tendency to fall off the shoulders, something that can be improved by crossing it over behind the child’s back. With no sides to the chair (again, this is something we’re used to) we’d really want to see a better safety harness. After a fun-packed day chasing granny’s sheep, Alexander usually falls asleep within ten minutes, and a sleepy child will sag forwards, backward or – most unnervingly – sideways. Check out fernco clamp rochester.

Conclusion

We were prompted to look at the Bobike Junior because we were worried about the integrity of a cycle rack for carrying larger children, but we’re not convinced this folding seat does a better or safer job. In some areas, such as the footpegs, it’s massively engineered, but in others, it doesn’t seem man enough for the task. Of course, we have one large child – for larger families juggling awkward logistical problems with several smaller ones, it could be useful, especially if you already have a Bobike Maxi.

This design clearly isn’t perfect, but where do child seats go from here? Most ‘sensible’ bicycles have a rack and removing the rack rather narrows your carrying options. So we’d suggest a moulded plastic bucket seat that clamps to the rack, but with extra stays to spread the weight of a child into the frame best English language schools in san diego. We’d also suggest a two-position reclining seatback, both for sleeping children and awkward luggage, but not necessarily folding flat, provided the seat can be fitted and removed in a minute or two. The harness has to be really good – preferably the five-point type.

Heavy and expensive, surely? Not in our experience. We’ve solved the six-year-old problem by putting some extra struts on a basic child seat – the final structure weighing less than 1.8kg. Even if a reclining mechanism doubled the weight, it would still be lighter than the Junior.

Specification

Bobike Junior Child Seat £85 (plus £15 for the MTB kit used on our bike) .Weight 4.8kg (101/2lb) Manufacturer Dremefa BV web www.bobobline.nl mail info@dremefa.nl UK Distributor Amba Marketing tel 01392 840030 mail sales@amba-marketing.com web Amba Marketing