Parenthood brings with it many lessons, but one which most of us steadfastly refuse to learn is the fact that small children really don't like being dragged around shops which don't specialise in Scooby-Doo or Dora The Explorer merchandise.

It's a fairly obvious thing, really, and we should all think back to our own childhood days when a trip to somewhere that wasn't the seaside didn't particularly fill us with much enjoyment, nor the incentive to be well-behaved.

So in the spirit of not-learning-the-lesson the weekend saw us taking the kids out to both the supermarket and a selection of kitchen showrooms. Hey, we naively thought, what can possibly go wrong?

The supermarket trip was undertaken single-handedly by me, although what reckless influence had got into me I just don't know. Possibly it's because the kids are normally not too bad in supermarkets, but for whatever reason they decided to take against the Sainsbury's store at Keighley on Saturday afternoon in a major fashion.

The warning bells began to sound just after I'd pushed Charlie (three) and Alice (21 months) around the vegetable section three or four times - as an aside, can I just commend the person or persons who decided that Saturday afternoon a couple of hours before the England match kicked off was a great time to restock the almost-empty shelves.

As I pondered over buying some yams and pak choi - not because we needed or even wanted them, but because I like to buy exotic-looking items with no intrinsic value - Charlie heaved a big sigh and said: "That's enough food, Daddy. Can we look at videos now?"

Possibly because this raised a smile from me, Charlie took his cue to repeat it 16 or 17 times, so by the time we'd snaked around three aisles and I was heaving an industrial-sized vat of Lurpak (the only one they had left on the shelf) into the trolley, it was something of a blessed relief when Alice and Charlie began kicking lumps off each other. At least they were being relatively quiet and weren't bothering me or anyone else.

They'd exhausted themselves pretty much by the time we got to the checkout, and I took the opportunity to return to a nearby member of staff the several tubs of guacamole that one or both of them had managed to sneak into the trolley before attempting to wrestle a packet of jelly elephants and some Petit Filous in a tube from them respectively before packing and paying.

It was at the Lottery counter that things went totally wrong. Upon being informed that half the stuff in the trolley was, in fact, for him and he couldn't have a packet of extra-hard wine gums anyway, Charlie went into full-blown paddy mode and had to be seated beside a pile of computer magazines for a doomed-to-failure chill-out session before being manhandled, screaming, out of the supermarket and through the pouring rain to the car.

The sulk had barely subsided when we went to look at kitchens the next day. What made us think we could get away with it, God only knows. But as one screamed constantly and the other tore up and down the showroom like a miniature thunderbolt, we decided that collecting a couple of brochures really was the best we could hope for, so we went home and did some sulking ourselves.

Because so little was actually achieved, we're going to have to go through it all over again next weekend. The clever thing to do, of course, would be to get someone to look after the kids while we deal with business, but we'll probably end up taking them again. After all, they might grow up to have children of their own one day, and it's only right that they should be given the full opportunity to not learn any lessons at all from their own childhoods.