.. to think this would blow some minds?

[BeepBoopBop]

….. standing next to my van, loading my stuff into it when a black Volvo pulls up behind me and the female driver asks if I’m leaving. I tell her no not yet so she thanks me and reverses back a little and stops and asks if the two men in a van (having a tea break) are leaving. They tell her the same thing, so she asks if it’s okay to leave the car in front of the van as she only needs five minutes. They say it’s fine and she says great, I’ll leave the keys in it just in case they need to leave and then off she pops.
Two minutes later, a car opposite starts up and the driver can’t manoeuvre out. as her car is in the way. Van driver jumps out and gets in her car to move it. At which stage, two startled heads pop up in the back. She had left the keys and her two young kids in her car.
Van driver lets the other driver out and neatly parks Volvo in the now vacant space.
Could you see this happening in the UK? By this time it was about 10 minutes - I wonder what she thought as she came back to the car park and saw her car wasn’t sitting where she left it?

So the equivalent probably of a village or small town in the UK with a low crime rate. Although it might be all the fish.

Under 20 years ago I was at a small UK theme park with my primary aged children.

We were queuing for a ride which I didn’t intend to go on (I don’t like them) and there was another mother there with a younger child and a baby. The child wanted to go on the ride but was too young to go on alone and she couldn’t take the baby on it. She left the baby with me!

I'm not berating anyone, but I'm not from the UK (although I live in London now) and I do find British people are a bit obsessed with privacy. I get not wanting a half dozen neighbours staring out the window at you while you're sunning yourself in the garden, and I wouldn't want people gaping in at my bathroom or bedroom, but I honestly don't quite understand why it matters if people see the interior of my house lit up at night or one of us walking through the kitchen.

I wouldn't leave my kids in the car, though.

I genuinely don't think people would mind that? Plus, I do find it odd to generalise about the habits of 67 million people, of various ethnicities and origins. They can't all be "obsessed". You aren't, and you live in the UK?
I couldn't care less whether people keep blinds closed or open them.
Their choice.

People used to leave babies in prams outside shops in the U.K. - mostly the big prams, though.

When dd1 was 10 days old I once left her in her pram in Boots for about 15 minutes, having completely forgotten that I had her. I was meeting my mother, who instantly said, ‘Where’s the baby?’
’Oh shit!!’ - and a quick charge back to Boots, but she was fine, and nobody had even noticed an abandoned baby!

Oh, I totally believe that some people idiotically believe it'll "never happen" to them, because they live in a "safe" area. It's not as if thugs target such areas because it's well known residents think it'll "never happen" to them.

But I've no idea why you'd lock your door when you go away on holiday if you never bother, day or night, the rest of the time.

Not mad that she left the keys but mad that she left her kids in the car!!! Not because of the men and you but incase of an accident or her not coming back for whatever reason heart attack etc.

Stupid thing to do in any country, there are car thieves and paedophiles in every country. Not to mention if she collapsed or was injured somehow no one would know where the children were.

I'm hardly generalising about 67 million people. Just observing that I was genuinely surprised when we first moved here by the number of people who talked about being overlooked as a reason to not buy or rent a house, or wanting blinds or draperies on every window. It had never occurred to me before to cover windows other than in rooms or situations where you would naturally want a higher degree of privacy.

Serious question: what do you gain from not doing so? It takes a second to lock your door.

You haven't seen the state of my living room, I would be totally embarrassed.

Apart from that it also makes it very obvious whether anyone is home or not if there are thieves around.

Oh my god 🤣 bless you, it's that post natal fog!

Of course.

It works quite well unless a cat gets into the garden at 1am, then the whole neighbourhood is woken 😳

You live in London. I used to live in Finsbury Park and for safety and security I had my blinds closed a lot.
Now I live in North Yorkshire, in a very quiet cul de sac, not overlooked, and very safe, so they're often not closed at all. The same with other houses in the neighbourhood. If I come home late, I can see in everyone's living room.
Circumstances and personal choices rather than the "obsessive" nature of UK residents, I would suggest.

Perhaps train him to use the toilet. Less feline disruption.

A workmate leaves her car keys in her car at work. Quite safe as the carpark is in a secure area, random members of the public can't access it, but another colleague decided to play a prank on her and moved her car to the other side of the building, which was harmless except he put her keys in his own pocket out of habit and left work before her so she was stuck

Someone else I know never locks his car. Asked why his car has no radio - "got stolen"

My DP actually does this, he lives in a tiny village. It scares the hell out of me

I live near but not in a seaside village in Ireland and this is regular occurrence at school pick up time. Parents abandon cars left, right and centre, with keys in, occasionally babies in car seats, in the local community centre car park.
A woman attempted to park in front of me when I was going into a fitness class, offering me her keys in case I needed to move her car.
its an odd dynamic as apparently ‘ we all trust in each other in our little middle class cute seaside community’

This happened to me at Legoland about 15 years ago - a Japanese man was at the top of a waterslide with two small children. The smaller one wanted to go and the other outright refused to go without him (it was a 1 or 2 person at a time ride). So he asked the rest of the immediate queue (group of random women) to look after Child 2 while he went down, left child 1 with mum who was waving from the bottom, then ran back up. Some of the other women were huffing and saying 'well, we could be anyone - we could be paedophiles'. I thought they were bonkers - it was a public place and perfectly reasonable for the sake of 3 minutes or so.

I used to live accross the road from a laundrette. I once saw a mother leave 2 DC in the car with the car running while she went into the laundrette to do her washing. The mind boggles.

When I had my children (late 60’s/early 70’s), leaving the pram outside shops was normal. Prams were big, and shops were smaller, so it wasn’t physically possible to take them in. I always made sure that the babies were strapped in, so if an attempt was made to snatch them from the pram, the kidnapper would at least be slowed down. This was England.

Used to be perfectly normal in the UK too. My mum always left my sister and me outside shops (SE London, early 70s) - nobody thought twice about it and other shoppers would stop and chat to us. The shops were too small to take prams into (plus the pram we were in was enormous by today’s standards!). By the time I had my own kids this had become unthinkable.

It was lovely to live in a community safe enough to assume other people would look out for your children while you ran an errand, and so much easier for busy mothers. It’s incredibly sad that there are almost no places left in the world where this would be considered anything other than madness, and would likely lead to child abduction or social service intervention.

Ha - x-posted, @Bjorkdidit!

Totally normal. I came out of a local shop one day and got halfway down the street before it dawned on me that I’d left the pram and baby outside the shop. 😱

Outrageous - I have lived in France for 15 years - I would still find this wrong on many levels..