Disabled shopper Frances Brandreth made a fuss after her request to management at the Lakeside, Thurrock, shopping centre to borrow an electric wheelchair for her shopping trip there was turned down.

She was told the centre does not loan them at peak periods, and quite understandably has kicked up over Lakeside's "rules is rules" attitude.

The rules say disabled shoppers may use their own electric and manual wheelchairs during busy periods.

But they are barred from borrowing electric ones there...even though they are presumably niftier and don't demand the prerequisite puffing carer behind them.

"Disabled people themselves have said they prefer to come when it's quieter," says Richard Belt, general manager of Lakeside, by way of justification.

Well, no, not actually all of them do, as Mrs Brandreth, who came shopping all the way from her home in Brightlingsea, near Colchester, has made plain.

Such folk may not be as able-bodied as the rest of us, but they still have their own lives, their own friends, their own families and their own social timetable...Mrs Brandreth wanted to go shopping on a peak-time Saturday to buy her teenage daughter a present.

And anyway, Mrs Brandreth in her electric wheelchair is not half as much a nuisance to other shoppers as people like me, mums with young children. Truly, we are the menace who ought to be banned from peak periods if the cloggability rule is taken into account.

We are the women who sail forth with our double buggies, scattering resistance.

We are the women who see this vehicle slowly tip over through the weight of shopping bags balanced on the handles, a catastrophe which happens as we abandon the said buggy to go running after wayward offspring who have decided to leg it to the nearest lift.

We are the women who manage to enrage old people who have a rose-coloured view of the way their children used to behave by shouting in sweaty exasperation (why is it always so damn hot there?) at our own.

No, compared to the Mothers Army and the gangs of stroppy teenagers who swarm around the clothes shops, a few extra folk in electric wheelchairs don't make much of a difference.

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.