Dear Peter Kerry

People will tell you that there's something wrong with you, now that your Far Eastern adventure is over. Don't listen - yours is the spirit that once made the country great

You were probably too preoccupied to notice, but it's been quite a week for runaways. First there was Ritchie Manic, an otherwise insignificant pop guitarist whose 15 minutes will be up any ... oops! There it goes.

Then there was Stephen Fry, that poor, overworked luvvie with a major case of Garbo Syndrome, who never dreamt that his unexplained absence would cause such a fuss. Yeah, right. Tell it to your press agent, Stephen.

By doing a runner, both ensured that their imagined woes were etched deep into our consciousness. It was nauseating, the way the country went into paroxysms of hand-wringing about these over-aged truants, speculating on their emotional states, as if show business were something soul wrenching.

Well, I'm sorry, but these are grown men with bank accounts, cash cards, front-door keys and Vauxhall Cavaliers. The logistics of going AWOL pose no problems for them. But when it comes to you, Peter, I'm lost in admiration.

A family row erupts over a spilt tin of spaghetti, and as punishment you are forbidden to watch Arsenal (hardly a deterrent, but I digress).Instead of setting the house on fire, you steal your father's passport and credit card, head for Heathrow, buy a ticket on the first available flight and travel to Kuala Lumpur. Excellent.

A lesser individual might have been content at that, but you are clearly on another plane, as it were. You travel 700 miles across Malaysia without any money, and try to check into a luxury hotel. You phone your Mum to say you're still in one piece. By the time the cops turn up, the trail is cold again.

Next you try to cross into Singapore, telling the border guards your father has already entered the country, mistakenly taking your papers with him (you weren't looking for the missing Barings trader, were you?). When that fails, you turn around and hitchhike 1,100 miles, to within spitting distance of the Thai border. They tracked you down, five days and nearly 8,000 miles later, as you tried to cash a cheque. But you gave them a bloody good run for their money.

People are talking about counselling, as if you have some kind of psychological deficiency. Don't listen to them. You are 14, but you got halfway round the world on your 59-year-old father's passport, and travelled the length and breadth of a foreign country on little more than your wits. If it hadn't been for a miserable pair of do-gooders, you'd be kicking back on Ko Samui right now.

You have demonstrated the spirit that made this country great, the stuff the British Empire was built on. If there is any counselling to be done, you should be giving advice, not taking it. It's about time we started acknowledging guts and initiative again and spent less time worrying about the Manics and Frys of this world, who could certainly learn a thing or two from you.