IN YOUR forties, it is easy to look back and to regret not having done more and seen more half a lifetime ago. Travelling seems to be for those younger or older, the gap-year students or the mobile retired.

The memorable trips are there, captured in old photographs that rarely see daylight. In my case, there was the big American drive, from New York to Los Angeles, and then six weeks in Australia, with a week-long drive from Sydney to Queensland. There were other breaks too, the random hitch-hike through France to northern Spain, the holidays in Greece, travelling alone and sleeping in a tent on the island beaches.

The holidays of the young can seem scary in retrospect. Was it safe to sleep by myself on a Greek beach or to beg the indulgence of Gallic strangers with only a spot of half-remembered O-level French to go on? My fortysomething self wouldn't do these things, at least not via hitch-hiking and sand in sleeping bags. But the urge to travel still flickers, even if most days I go no further than cycling to work.

With luck, there will be late-life chances. Maybe I'll follow in my mother's globe-skimming footsteps, just back from Australia and New Zealand, and soon off to India (again).

If it's easy to regret not having travelled enough, Caroline Stuttle's parents could be forgiven a greater regret. For their 19-year-old daughter died last week on a trip of a lifetime that ended her life. The life-loving, joyful-seeming young woman from York was murdered by being thrown from a bridge in the Queensland town of Bundaberg.

At a time of shock and sorrow, Caroline Stuttle's parents left a message among the flowers at the spot where their daughter died. This memorial to their daughter included a plea that can only be called brave, reading: "Those of you that have daughters, please believe in their dreams and let them pursue their desire to travel and experience life. Let them fly."

These words were written when just such a dream had cost their daughter her life, and the message they convey is courageous and important. The young need their dreams, the hoping after what is possible, the wish to surf the horizon and see what lies beyond. Without that there is only the ordinary, and while the ordinary is fine, getting us through, the young should, to borrow from Caroline's parents, be able to fly, to rise above everything.

This is especially so at a time when many children grow up in bubbles of protection, driven to school and too rarely allowed outside, protected and cosseted, kept apart from the world for as long as possible. It's hard to know what we are teaching with so much protection.

Being a parent is one of the toughest things we do, because to invest love and hope in someone is to invite the prospect of heartache and disaster. Also, parents naturally worry about everything all the time, from those first steps to that momentous solo outing into town.

The big world trip is a final letting go, the biggest joy and the biggest worry of all. Yet it is right that young people should travel and experience what is out there.

Caroline Stuttle was having the time of her tragically-short life, according to her best friend and travelling compan-ion, Sarah Holliday. "Australia, it meant everything to us," Sarah said this week. "We were having the best time there."

That's what the young should be doing, "having the best time".

The opportunity doesn't last long and parents should let their children go, freeing them to travel.

It isn't easy but it has to be done, with fingers crossed into knots.

Updated: 10:26 Thursday, April 18, 2002