Nothing can beat my wet weekend in Yorkshire

JO WOOD, 63, is a model, TV celebrity, entrepreneur and ex-wife of Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood. She has four children – two with Ronnie – and ten grandchildren, and lives in London. AS YOU read this I will be waking up under the stars – or probably a wet tarpaulin – halfway through a survival course on the North Yorkshire moors.

My son Tyrone, who is a huge fan of camping, has persuaded me to go on a ‘backwoods weekend’ with him. I’ll be learning how to forage, to cook the food myself on a camp fire and erect a shelter, and apparently I’ll have the chance to hone my knife skills.

There’ll be lessons in making drinking water safe, lighting fires with flint and steel, and signalling for rescue – though I’m hoping not to need that!

I’ll be the oldest one there but I reckon it’s never too late to acquire new knowledge, to make yourself more resilient and resourceful. It will also be a chance to be closer to nature, to look up from a screen and out into the real world.

When I agreed to go with Tyrone, I was anxious about sleeping in the rain but then I thought: ‘Jo, you’ve never done it before, so how do you know you won’t like it?’

It will be the first time in my life I have been camping. But why should being a granny in my 60s stop me? You have to keep trying and learning and challenging yourself. Anyway, I’m sure I can find wild garlic to put in my nettle soup…

One of the great pleasures of having grown-up children and grandchildren is what they end up teaching you, if only you are open to new experiences.

Planning and packing for the weekend and swotting up on the best practice for knives and axes reminded me of my childhood, growing up with my little brother Paul in Essex.

Paul and his friends considered themselves naked without a little knife and would go into the woods and make shelters and kill the occasional rabbit for the pot. It seems so sad that we now have teenagers for whom knives have such a different meaning.

The knife crime epidemic in London is madness – a boy died after a gang fight on the street where my daughter Leah and two of my grandchildren live. We need to teach an entire generation something I am about to learn: that a knife is a useful tool, not a weapon to be feared.

I JUST HOPE I DON’T HAVE TO CALL IN A RESCUE TEAM