Jordan Romero is a very unusual teenager. At the age of 13, the Californian hopes to become the youngest person to climb Everest.

When I was 13 I had climbed no mountains. I had not yet even made an attempt on the north face of Janet Pringle. Adventure meant camping out in a tent on the front lawn.

Even by the age of 16, my idea of adrenalin sport was riding a moped with dodgy brakes. And yet, as this page told a few weeks ago, my childhood was filled with much more everyday risk than that of the average child of today.

In welcoming the book by Gever Tulley, Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do), I recalled how, as a 12-year old, I carried a large sheath knife, explored rat-infested disused railway tunnels, jumped off waterfalls, climbed trees and sometimes fell out of them.

My reminiscences provoked readers’ own rosy recollections, including one from a bloke whose childhood amusement was a ‘game’ which entailed standing opposite a friend and throwing a dagger into the ground between the friend’s feet. Don’t try this at home, kids. Really, DON’T try this at home!

Tulley’s other suggestions for character-forming rites of passage included licking a 9-volt battery, burning things with a magnifying glass, squashing pennies on a railway track and learning the art of dramatic sword-fighting.

Nowhere did he say anything about climbing Everest at the age of 13, though, which is what young Jordan aims to do next month.

With him will be his father Paul, a mountaineer and paramedic, and his stepmother Karen Lundgren, also an experienced mountaineer.

Jordan’s mum Leigh Ann Drake seems unfazed, pointing out that Jordan will be with his dad all the time, and he will even take his homework with him to the top of the world.

It was as much as my wife and I could do to let our 16-year old son venture forth, sleeping bag in hand, for an overnight party in Clitheroe this week. The idea of sending him somewhere that 216 people had died would be beyond unthinkable.

Jordan Romero – who climbed Kilimanjaro at the age of ten – is not alone in his precociousness. A Nepalese climber Temba Tsheri reached Everest’s summit at the age of 16, but only after losing five fingers to frostbite at the first attempt.

Laura Dekker, stopped last year by a Dutch court from sailing solo around the world at the tender age of 14, is aiming to have another go in July.

I don’t pretend to understand what drives people to risk their lives in pursuit of a goal. It’s a question brought into sharp focus by the mission of Tom Ballard.

At 21 he aims to scale K2, 15 years after his own mother Alison Hargreaves died while descending from K2’s summit.

Tom says it is no different from getting behind the wheel of a car knowing that his mother had died in a car crash.

I suspect that only someone who has adventure practically written indelibly in their genes would come up with such reasoning.

At least Tom Ballard is now an adult, capable of making his own potentially fatal decisions.

Jordan Romero is still of that age when he takes his own immortality for granted. It is his parents’ duty to remind him otherwise.

Jordan’s father may choose to pit his own life against the mountain, should he so wish. But he certainly should not be taking his 13-year-old son anywhere which officially has a ‘death zone’.

Watch my lips - miming’s not the problem

TWO Chinese singers have become the first in the country to be prosecuted for miming.

The young women were fined the equivalent of £4,763 each after being spotted lip-synching during a concert in Chengdu last year.

The law was passed after the furore surrounding the little girl who lip-synched to China’s national anthem at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.

China’s law-makers obviously thought the world was offended by miming per se.

Not so. The really offensive part of that fiasco was that the little girl whose voice we heard was deemed, at the last minute, not pretty enough to be seen, so a cuter stooge was drafted in to mime.

Lip-synching – in the shape of Top Of The Pops – was a great British tradition for decades. In fact, TOTP was at its most worst when a no-miming rule was imposed in the 1990s and hapless artists were forced to display their meagre talents.

Certain huge stars have been known to conserve their vocal cords even when it comes to concert tours. Britney Spears may wish to steer well clear of China, for fear of becoming a martyr of this latest cultural revolution. An eagle-eyed colleague assures me that Britney was miming on her visit last year to the M.E.N Arena.

And when she did open her mouth for real, it was only to put her foot in it.

“What’s up, London?” Britney yelled at thousands of bemused Mancs.

Tweet