KIERAN HOWARD: Poor old Percy has gone to the scrapheap in the sky

During our visit, I carried out a fairly small straw poll (of just one), but I figured Louie’s probably representative of most children his age.

No sooner had we strolled through the dealership door, than he’d spotted the vehicle in question.

While trying to act knowledgeable with the salesman and bluff our way to a reasonable deal, the little man started eyeing up a £25,000 set of wheels.

Granted – it wasn’t the most bank-breaking car in the world, but it was certainly still out of our price range.

In all honesty, anything with three noughts on the end is a nought too many for me.

The boy took an instant shine to it though and appeared focussed on smearing his crisps all over the immaculate bodywork.

Spotting his intentions early on, I only allowed his fingertips within an arm’s length of it, much to his dissatisfaction.

Despite attempting to laugh it off, I did notice the dealer looking on a little nervously at various points.

Incidentally, if you ever happen to take a toddler to a showroom and intend on staying for longer than two minutes, I’d strongly suggest the following.

Firstly, and perhaps most crucially, make certain your little one isn’t due a nap.

A tired two-year-old is very rarely much fun – for them or you, believe me.

Secondly, take enough food and toys to occupy them through the various stages of boredom.

In my experience, the boredom generally dominates all but those first two minutes of your stay.

And finally, ensure the car dealer you’re visiting has, at the very least, a play area with toys and a working television.

Sadly, our chosen garage was two months away from a planned refurbishment.

They will eventually have both of the above to bail out other toddler-in-tow parents, but we were too soon to reap the benefits of the forthcoming refit.

So anyway, you’ve probably now guessed, Kerrie’s car accident just before Christmas was slightly worse than we had at first feared.

In fact, it was enough to write-off our poor old motor, Percy.

He won’t see another motorway or A-road.

He’s now in the big scrapheap in the sky, probably wondering what happened to his front right wing and questioning why he only had four short years on the roads.

Parker the Peugeot in Romsey will be replacing him.

We’ll tell Louie he cost £25,000, just to keep him happy.

PURE CARNAGE IN GREENDALE

Do you remember the episode of Postman Pat where PC Selby drives the famous red van into an inflatable ball pit, with Jess the cat perched precariously on the roof? No, me neither.

But as you can tell, Louie’s been having tremendous fun creating his own versions of the popular children’s classic.

I doubt he’d be able to get too many of his inventive scripts past the producers though.

At the very least, they’d have to seriously consider assigning it a post-watershed slot, largely due to the frequent violence.

He got a whole host of the hit TV programme’s characters and their vehicles for his birthday.

He’s got the post van, police car and Greendale Rocket train.

And since receiving another influx of toys at Christmas he’s been combining them all to create infinite wicked ways to write the characters out of the programme.

Pat was slumped over the wheel of the police car the other day, just as it careered off the end of his toy kitchen and slammed into the sink below.

PC Selby was upside down in a cup of water, Jess was looking confused on top of the Sky box and a plastic beetroot was driving the train.

Postman Pat usually opens with a problem which is resolved by the end of the episode.

So far, there seems to be no such happy resolution in Louie’s creative mind.