AMID the doom and gloom, it's nice for a change to encounter a news story with a happy ending. When 19-year-old Jamie Neale emerged last week from the Australian outback having been missing for 12 days in freezing temperatures and inhospitable terrain, for once, dread turned to delight.

His distraught father, Richard Cass, had been at Sydney airport waiting to fly back to Britain when he received a text from one of the police officers in the search: "Phone me, I've got good news." The joy of texts abounds.

Having lit a candle, buried a flower and carved his son's name and date of birth into a tree where he had gone off for a trek in his sandshoes and cagoule, Cass had come to what he described as "closure", believing that his boy was dead. A huge search of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales had found no trace of him. His dad had accepted the worst.

You don't have to be a parent to imagine the sheer gut-tumbling gladness the news his son's survival must have brought. It does, however, help to be a parent in grasping the exasperation felt by Cass, who branded Jamie a "stupid kid". Reunited with his son at the hospital where he was being treated for dehydration and exposure, Cass spoke with a mixture of delight - "I was like a lunatic. My boy's been found! My boy's been found!" - tempered with some healthy parental frustration.

Dad's tirade is brilliant: "When I have seen the mistake after mistake he's made I can't say I'd kill him 'cos obviously that would spoil the point of him coming back. But yeah, I'm going to kick his arse.

"Because the millions that have been spent on this search, the man hours and woman hours ... all because he goes out on a walk without his mobile phone. The only teenager in the world who goes on a 10-mile hike and leaves his phone behind."

Phew. I reckon young Jamie's going to be washing the car for months to make up for this one. Mr Cass's rant is the best fatherly outburst I've heard in a long time. It certainly beats "your bedroom is a total hovel and it won't tidy itself," and "if you stay on that sofa watching telly all day you'll stick to it and your eyes will turn flat-screened".

But the real hero in this boys' own tale of victory over the elements is not the lad who survived against the odds. It's a father with the guts to blame him. It's refreshing in an age when middle-class parents - they're usually the ones with the cash and the aspiration to have kids that go backpacking - actually realise that you can't mitigate for Bad Things Happening when offspring are old enough to reap the consequences of their failings.

In the control-freakish culture of our age, the trend is to blame outside influences on misfortune. Responsibility is never ours, especially not when we've built our parental lives around young people who are tutored, schooled and moulded around every whim and accomplishment. If Hannah and Harry can master martial arts, Mandarin and mime, surely it's not their fault if the gap year goes belly-up.

Obviously, Jamie's upbringing equipped him in some way to survive. He got by eating seeds and "some sort of weed which was like rocket". It's comforting to know that when your kids are up against it, all those salad bags paid off. Who says middle-class values are worthless?

Meanwhile, I suspect Jamie is on porridge for a while. There are reports that he has sold his story to the media. Good old Dad says cash will go back to the rescue services - a bit like having to pay for breaking a pal's toy out of your own pocket money.

We should listen again to the voice of parental reason. Mr Cass, hiding the keys to the car and probably even the remote control, said this on hearing of Jamie's plans to travel to southeast Asia: "I think he has put his mother through enough. When I heard he was going to southeast Asia, I thought that was going to be dangerous. I had no idea that he was going to screw up in Australia."

Well said, Dad. I wouldn't let him go the length of Tesco.