BIRTHDAY parties are bad for your health. And before you start tut-tutting and wagging your finger in a condemnatory fashion, let me make it clear that I'm not talking about booze-fuelled adult parties. I'm talking about jelly and ice-cream, balloon-on-a-string kiddie shindigs.

Adults are old enough to know better when it comes to celebrating the passing of another year.

We know that if we spend an entire evening filling our bodies with various noxious substances in a bid to feel young again, we are likely to wake up the next day feeling like we have been run over by a bus.

We know this and yet we still do it, like lambs to the slaughter (or, at the very least, mutton dressed as lamb).

Kids, however, have no such preconceptions about parties. Every time an invite plops through the letterbox from their chum Emily or Daniel (in my experience there are a brace of both in each and every class), they are cock-a-hoop with glee.

Their eyes light up and their limbs go into dancing spasms of joy - a bit like when they get high on E numbers, but without the head-spinning and the fluorescent green vomit.

It never occurs to them, not even for a moment, that by accepting an invitation to the local family fun pub - usually to be found on the hard-shoulder of a smog-clogged dual carriageway between a glue factory and an abattoir - they may be playing Russian roulette with their health.

Granted, this is Russian roulette played with giant brightly-coloured plastic guns that fire nothing more deadly than ping-pong balls, but you get my drift.

When it comes to birthday parties, kids leave the house with a spring in their step only to return a few short hours later with their foot in plaster.

Or is it just mine? Is this one of the many (many, many) occasions when I assume that every child does the same ridiculous thing as mine, only to discover that he is the exception rather than the rule?

Perhaps it really is only my lad who manages to slice, dice and break off various vital bits of his anatomy whenever he gets within 100 yards of a ball pool, twirly slide or scramble net.

Somehow I don't think so.

When he experienced the latest in a long, gory line of party-related injuries last week, somehow managing to knock a chunk out of his head in a bizarre soft play area collision, almost every parent in the place had a similar story to tell of how little so-and-so broke his ankle in three places after getting tangled in a rope bridge or how little whatnot lost consciousness after being left hanging upside down for too long on the monkey bars.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the play areas in these so-called family fun pubs are inherently dangerous - although some of them are so grubby they could be a useful weapon if the Government ever decides to indulge in a spot of germ warfare. It's just that children should not be allowed anywhere near them.

My lad is no clumsier or accident prone than any other normal four year old, if indeed you can use the word "normal" when referring to children. But still he regularly leaves blood in the ball pool or a clump of his hair on the climbing net.

On three separate occasions in the past year he has gashed his head, taken most of the skin off his back and come staggering out of a play area with a black lump on his forehead roughly the same shape and size as a Faberge egg.

There's only one thing for it. The only way to stop the carnage is to go back to holding parties in our own homes. We'll have to shove sausages on to sticks, bake dozens of butterfly buns and wrap more parcels for passing than Royal Mail gets through in the week before Christmas.

On second thoughts, when did a bit of blood do a kid any harm?

Which reminds me, it's my lad's fifth birthday next month and we're holding a party at our local family fun pub.

Could the relevant authorities please ensure a team of paramedics is on standby?

Updated: 09:32 Tuesday, November 04, 2003