OUR soon-to-be 13-year-old has dreamed up a really scary birthday party treat for himself and six friends.

They want to camp out overnight by the stream down at the bottom of the dark, dark woods. But the most truly terrifying, blood-curdling, mind-numbingly horrifying bit is that we're the parents in charge of them all.

Last weekend the same boy was invited, for his friend's birthday, on a challenging 26-mile cross-country mountain bike trek with six other lads. He came home with a swollen, bloodied face, a busted brace and broken teeth. But he didn't look half as upset as the father who had taken them off for the day.

I can understand teachers feeling increasingly jittery about taking pupils on outdoor activity trips. It's a big responsibility. And we're all aware of the few well-documented cases where things have gone horribly wrong.

But schools are now so desperate to reduce risk, according to the Chief Inspector of Schools this week, many children are missing out on adventurous, life-changing experiences. Which is a shame.

Forget the canoeing, rock climbing and geology field trips, the reality is we put our children at even greater risk when we put them on the school bus every morning, never mind when we rush them around in our cars to all their after-school activities.

If we parents stopped to think about what could go wrong every time we take someone else's child to football or swimming, or when we have them back for tea and they want to go on their bikes or climb trees, we'd keep all our children under house arrest, watching TV every night, never seeing their friends - safe, but stifling and ultimately more damaging.

We have a duty to expose our children to, and help them cope with risk before we release them into the big, wide world alone. Our boy may have smashed his face on his bike ride but he learned a valuable lesson about how far he could push himself, and there's no chance of him going out on his bike without his helmet now.

In the long run, it has probably made him more cautious and much safer both on the road and off. And, most importantly, he had a great time and wants to do it again - preferably without falling off.

Let's hope his night out in the woods is just as exciting. But this time, I'm praying there'll be no blood spilled.

I AM glad Prince Charles is working to help save the Gaelic language in Scotland, where the small number of native speakers is elderly and dwindling and the young show little interest in it.

Gaelic, a beautiful, poetic language, still thrives as a first language in parts of the west coast of Ireland, where we holiday and, as a result, the English spoken there has a charming, almost Shakespearean, quality. One old woman told us how she learned English at school when she was ten. Before then, she had only come across it in John Wayne movies: "We all wanted to speak like the big Yanks," she said.

An elderly farmer was obviously translating from Gaelic into English when he asked us: "Is there any harm in an old man asking where you have come from this day to arrive in such a place as Gwebarra Bay?" It's a sentence that has stuck in my mind ever since. "Where have you come from?" doesn't have quite the same ring.