Sorry Kirstie Allsopp - I went interrailing at 19 and I wouldn't let my teenage child go now
It was in Bratislava where we faced possibly the strangest situation of an already-eventful trip. It was the summer of 2000 and two friends and I had rented a room from a nice lady we met at the train station.
She had a large spare room, she told us, with two beds in it. There were three of us, but having spent most of the previous month crammed into one single bed to save costs on our interrailing trip during the university holidays, this sounded positively luxurious.
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Hide AdThe alarm bells should have rung when we were shown the room - the large double bed in the centre had a leopard print bedspread and a mirror on the ceiling. But it was, as she had promised, very spacious and we were tired. We also, in a very British way, didn’t want to offend her by turning it down.
We were given her spare key and went out for dinner. When we returned a couple of hours later, we headed for bed - only to find a large, middle aged man fast asleep there. Our landlady, Dominika, was not home. Our minds began to race. Were we being people trafficked? Had we been inadvertently hired as a three-for-the-price-of-one offering for this snoring man?
We quickly retreated and huddled together on the street outside the flat, terrified. Our rucksacks, which contained our passports, as well as all of our worldly possessions, were still in the room - we couldn’t just run. Our saviours came in the form of a young, English-speaking couple who lived in the same block of flats. They challenged the sleeping giant - an animated argument ensued in Slovak and the chap was thrown out on his ear, much to the dismay of Dominika, who reappeared in the middle of the dispute and seemed angry that her friend was being made to leave. We never really found out why he had been there in the first place.
The craziest part about the whole thing was, we were so concerned about not appearing rude, that we actually stayed the night, tucking ourselves up all together in the bed recently vacated by the strange man. We, thankfully, survived.
But the point of this story is that at 19, we were idiots.
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Hide AdWorldly wise, with a moderate level of fluency in at least three European languages between us, we thought we knew what we were doing. We had successfully navigated a route around eastern Europe, found somewhere to sleep every night and no-one had suffered from severe malnutrition: all before the days of mobile phones.
But it’s all very well until someone loses an eye, as your granny would say.
This week, TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp came under fire for boasting on social media her 15-year-old son, Oscar, had been on an interrailing trip around Europe, with only a 16-year-old friend for company. One internet vigilante called social services and Ms Allsopp was investigated.
She has publicly defended her decision, arguing her son is “more mature” than many others his age. He well may be. But what a 15-year-old is not prepared for is when things go wrong. They may be seasoned travellers, adept at reading a train timetable, ordering food in a foreign restaurant and using Google Translate to give themselves the vocabulary to ask Wie komme Ich am besten zum Bahnhof, bitte without actually having had to pay attention in German class at school.
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Hide AdYet, if they find themselves scammed, or in danger; stranded alone on the streets without a room late at night, faced with a cancelled train or a lost passport, that is when the panic would kick in. Would they know what to do?
Now a parent of an almost-teenager, I try to give her as much freedom as possible. She has been allowed to do a range of things independently for a while, more than some of her friends. Yet even I would draw the line at an solo interrailing trip in three years’ time.
At 19 - and a fairly sensible 19 at that - my own judgement was questionable. I would argue that of the average 15-year-old is even more questionable.
If things are straightforward, then, obviously a 15-year-old can survive an extended holiday in Europe alone. But it would probably be safer to let them have a few more years of life experience first.
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