Mother of all trips

YOUR heart just had to go out to the poor lad who is taking a year out to travel across Thailand and Australia – watched every inch of the way by his mother.

She’s tracking his every move via one of them there clever little satellite thingummy-jobbies that sends a signal back to good old mum’s computer.

Apart from wondering why a baby boomer generation mother has a computer in the first place, wouldn’t it be better for a19-year-old’s independence if his mother cut those apron strings – and cut the boy a bit of slack at the same time?

Good grief, woman, why do you think he’s going to the other side of the world in the first place? Could it be he’s sending you a not-too-subtle message to get off his back?

OK, back in the black-and-white days the only gap years were the periods between losing your two front teeth and waiting for the next pair to grow.

So this got us talking at Arkwright Towers and The Head Gardener was of the opinion that the world was a safer place 40 years ago and that she, too, would worry if one of ours was globetrotting. Even if they are 26 and 29.

I distinctly remember when I was about eight or nine, being packed off for the day to pick wimberries on what we knew as the Wimberry Moors but which are perhaps better known as the Pennines, nor far from the Saddleworth Moors of Brady and Hindley infamy (no, no, I refuse to do that joke).

The eldest of our little bunch of waifs and strays would be about 11, so we were obviously in safe hands, and we would tramp off carrying duffel bags containing a bit of lunch and a bottle of Dandelion and Burdock pop.

We would straggle back hours later, knackered, dusty, sunburned and with purple lips and tongues, clutching a polythene bag containing half-a-dozen squished little berries from which, miraculously, various mums created wimberry pies.

Never figured that one out.

There were no people, no traffic, no tracking devices, no mobile phones, no personal alarms, no neurotic parents – and absolutely no cares in the world.