GO WILD!

Jo Schofield & Fiona Danks (Frances Lincoln, £16.99)

Here’s a thought. What will your children’s memories of their childhood be? The time they sat indoors and played a computer game or watched a film on TV, or the day they went into the woods, made a fire and slept out in a home-made shelter?

Local photographer and author Jo Schofield and Fiona Danks make precisely this point in their tempting book Go Wild!. The book, broadly aimed at 11- to 17-year-olds, is full of ideas to tempt young people outside, and is packed with colour photographs showing the fun that can be had.

You don’t need expensive equipment. You can make a very good shelter from sticks and leaves; you can make a catapult, or a bow and arrows, with just a penknife; you can go crayfishing with a piece of string and some out-of-date bacon.

As with every topic in this book, there are very clear instructions, which are easy to follow, and photographs illustrating every step of the way.

Whether you’re a parent or a youngster leafing through this book, it’s hard not to be inspired by Go Wild!.

Expeditions don’t have to be complicated or lengthy: there’s great fun to be had in merely making a fire and cooking some very simple bread on home-made skewers; you can carve a penny whistle, make tent pegs from hazel. And for full-blown camping expeditions, there are instructions about collecting water, digging a latrine, how to clean your hands without soap or to clean your teeth without a toothbrush.

Schofield and Danks are passionate about inspiring our generation of ‘cotton wool’ children to go into the outdoors, to achieve the proper balance between technology and nature.

Youngsters need the freedom to explore and enjoy wild places, the freedom to use dangerous tools and to learn to use them responsibly, the freedom to make their own decisions and control their own play.

Despite its subtitle of 101 Things To Do Outdoors Before You Grow Up, this book is inspirational for parents as well as youngsters in discovering the immense fun that can be had in the wild.

My advice would be: get your hands on a copy and see for yourself.