Dear Mary… | 31 March 2007

Q. My son is on his gap year and travelling around India. While having lunch with a friend she showed me a website on to which her son has posted a blog of his gap year. By the looks of it virtually every 18–19-year-old public schoolchild in the country has done the same. Endless faces in various states of stupefaction leer out against tropical backgrounds accompanied by descriptions of how ‘chilled’ everyone is. I am only human so when she suggested typing my son’s name into the search box I naturally concurred. I was initially shocked to see that he too looked stupefied in his photographs and he too is boasting of being ‘chilled’ and describing how ‘wasted’ he feels each morning. Now I realise that my son is almost certainly not at all wasted or chilled — but just as subject to peer pressure as the next person. Nevertheless I do resent him posting these misleading bulletins.