The jibe, commonly attributed to Napoleon, that England is a nation of shopkeepers, was at least a sort of compliment. Britons embodied, it seemed to suggest, the bourgeois virtues of thrift, industry, self-reliance and pragmatism. But what would a latter-day Napoleon see if he looked at us now? A nation of busybodies, bluenoses and snitches intent not on minding the shop but on minding each-other’s business. That’s the only conclusion to be drawn from the news that Kirstie Allsopp has been reported to social services for allowing her 15-year-old son to travel round Europe with a friend to celebrate the end of his GCSEs.
Allsopp shared her pride in her son’s adventures on Twitter – he having, be it noted, arrived safely home with a spring in his step and a rucksack full of happy memories.
There was a bit of back-and-forth online, as there always is, about whether you or I might do the same thing. Would we be scared stiff of what could happen? Would we take the risk? I detected in some of the responses, including my own unspoken one, admiration mixed with mild envy: Allsopp had had the confidence to let her boy that far off the lead; and she has evidently raised a son in whom she was right to have such confidence. Good on her.
These things are judgment calls. I’ve had a version of the same conversation with my youngest son about when he could become an ‘independent walker’ to and from his primary school. Every parent makes their own assessment as to how likely their child is to walk backwards into the path of a speeding pantechnicon, and weighs that against their child’s desire for more freedom and the companionship of his friends, and says no until, one day or another, they say yes. We reach different conclusions. Mostly, those conclusions turn out to be about right – because no sane parent wants their kid to be run over, and every sane parent knows their child better than anyone else does.
Astonishing, then, and depressing, the spite and pettiness and entitlement that will have led some perfect stranger off the internet to try to get Kirstie Allsopp in trouble with the social services. That Kirstie Allsopp, they’ll have thought. Muckety-muck. She thinks she’s all that. Well, I’ll show her. Never mind that they don’t know Allsopp, have not the first acquaintance with her son or sense of his maturity and capacity, and can’t point to any law that has been broken. Never mind that the supposed offence was done and dusted, that no harm was suffered, and that the complaint will waste the time and money of already overstretched social services for no reason other than to satisfy the anonymous complainant’s spite. Never mind that Kirstie Allsopp’s parenting, like everyone else’s parenting, is ring-fenced – where it doesn’t involve criminal abuse – by a mighty forcefield of feel-free-to-mind-your-own-sodding-business.
At fifteen, if you have your head screwed on, you’re pretty capable. My father was years younger than that when he travelled the breadth of South Africa alone by train to go to boarding school. Time was when 15-year-olds could lead armies, rule empires or apprentice to steeplejacks. Most of us will probably agree that these are not ideal recreations for adolescents; but it doesn’t follow from that conclusion that the average switched-on teenager, with a friend in tow, should not be perfectly able to navigate the European transport system without a chaperone.
And isn’t that sort of thing – stretching your horizons, having some real-world experiences that will challenge you but are highly unlikely to imperil your life – exactly what we can all agree adolescence should be about? Not an extension of infancy but a bridge to the adult world? I would further submit that this young man – connected as he will have been to his parents by a mobile phone – will have been in far less danger than the teen travellers of my generation who may have been a year or two older but who went to the other side of the world for months with nothing but a sheaf of blue aerogrammes and some poste restante addresses at which to receive missives from their parents every few weeks.
Allsopp has always, and admirably, stood against the drift in the culture towards a neurotic aversion to any real-world risk or exertion for young people, and their concomitant abandonment to a digital realm of proven toxicity. She got some stick a few years ago when she announced that she’d killed her children’s iPads with a hammer, but I think most of us will have registered a sneaking approval for the project. There’s a reason, I think, that The Dangerous Book for Boys was such a runaway bestseller a few years ago; and that ‘touching grass’ has become shorthand for everything that the internet fails to give its users.
It is a matter of record that – thanks, it’s suggested, to a combination of the pandemic and the poisonous quasi-introversion of screen-addiction – the mental health of the generation now entering their teens is in some sort of polycrisis. Self-harm, cyber-bullying, suicidal ideation, eating disorders, identity crises of all sorts: the version of ‘safety’ we have been offering our children seems to have produced a full English breakfast of misery.
So when someone does something that seems to go in the opposite direction – when someone trusts her son to have an adventure in the real world, where they will meet real people and experience a different world that isn’t virtual but material – it’s a matter for celebration rather than priggish and cowardly denunciations. I’d much rather have my 15-year-old travel unaccompanied through a French railway terminus, personally, than travel unaccompanied through the festering algorithmic swamp of TikTok or Instagram.