The TV presenter has been criticised after her son went Interrailing at 15, but isn’t taking risks part of growing up?
Would you let your 15-year-old go Interrailing? This is the question that has provoked enough impassioned discussion to make it on to the Today programme (although we must remember it is August). The TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp, who is no stranger to provoking a reaction with her forthright views, allowed her son to do just that. Against all odds, the boy has returned alive and well in time to get his GSCE results, although this hasn’t prevented vocal criticism online and off.
I’ve disagreed vehemently with Allsopp about various things, but in this case I find her stance rather admirable. She says that Oscar – who hopefully isn’t too mortified by all this – is a very sensible young man, and that she’d worry more about him getting in a car with a new driver, or going to a festival. I did both as a teenager (I was too skint for any Interrailing). I went to my first weekend festival at 15, several hundred miles away from where I lived, and spent my teens enjoying various overnight camping shindigs in local but remote rural locations where drugs – usually weed – and alcohol were consumed. Just as Allsopp might be horrified by the prospect of similar episodes, so our parents wouldn’t have been thrilled about the illegal raves that gen X latchkey kids were putting on in abandoned quarries. Times change.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
:format(jpeg):quality(80)/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/euro-1.jpg)
