Adventure? Moi?

It's a bit of a cliche that being a parent is an adventure. It's unpredictible, it's exciting, it's scary. It involves the total You. You might catch some horrible disease. It's big, and requires commitment - you can't just turn it off like a boring TV program. It could all so easily go pear-shaped. You have to not mind when stuff gets broken.

And yet, how much of the time do we treat parenthood as an adventure? I mean, really choose to approach it as an opportunity to have an adventure?

Well, what exactly is an adventure? The Oxford English Dictionary says what you might expect - ''an unusual and exciting experience; a daring enterprise; a hazardous activity." So far, so useful for articles in FHM on fatherhood as the new white-water rafting. We all have our own ideas of adventure though. Personally I reckon an important element of adventure is discovery and exploration - for yourself, or helping others discover. Usually both.

Adventures can happen anywhere - you can have incredible adventures in a library, for example. I remember trembling with excitement when I read a 400-year old book while researching a history essay at university a few years ago - seeing, touching, smelling, feeling an actual book from Jacobean times, printed when Shakespeare was still churning them out, when Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot were as fresh as Osama bin Laden and 9/11 are for us now.

Exciting, certainly; also hazardous and daring to take on responsibility for something so fragile, important and priceless, to open up this window into another time. More parallels with parenting there. But I take issue with "unusual". Adventures shouldn't be unusual. Reserving the excitement of adventure for rare occasions confines us terribly and makes us boring. I know, because I've taken plenty of boring options over the years. I've spent a lot of time on the metaphorical sofa watching metaphorical reruns on metaphorical cable TV. (A goodly proportion of that hasn't even been metaphorical.) Much better to get out and engage with the adventurous spirit, the me that loves mountain biking and skiing and experiencing culture I've not experienced before. The me that likes to take risks, find out what happens when I do this or look at that.

Which of course brings us back to that magnificent adventure, being a dad. It's funny that many of the things I most love to get adventurous with involve playfulness, and they all involve curiosity. I say funny because these are qualities we more readily associate with children than with adults. As adults we can often be more concerned with being serious and knowing than being playful and curious. We feel more secure saying "I know the answer!" than "What's the answer?" Play is the opposite of work, and therefore unproductive, even vain.

I've often tended to shut the playfulness and the curiosity away, especially around my son. It's as if I've wanted to "put away my childish things" and show him a shining, upright example of stiff-backed, no-nonsense adult manhood. I've resolved to give that up and have adventures, both with Fred, my friends, and my self. Fred loves to ski - we've been twice to the Alps. I was recently thinking, in a very responsible sort of way, that this year I couldn't really afford it. Once I'd paid all the extras especially.

Well, I've changed my mind. We're going skiing! We're going to have adventures in the snow! All the more so because I'm not going to put him in ski school this year, we'll just go out and have fun on skis and see what happens. And when we're back, let's see how well I do at continuing to treat parenting - and maybe some other things too - as an adventure.