Melissa’s family are living their worst nightmare

William and Debra Reid’s worst fear for their child have been realised.

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare.

You kiss your teenage daughter goodbye as she sets out for a summer job in Ibiza, then weeks later you get a phone call from the Foreign Office to say she has been arrested on a drugs charge in Peru.

Melissa Reid, the 20-year-old girl who is in a Peruvian jail this weekend with Michaella McCollum Connolly, could face a long term of imprisonment if convicted.

Melissa lives just a 10 minute drive from my house. She went to the local school, Lenzie Academy. Her family are hard-working, ordinary, decent people with four children.

They’ve had the same kind of experiences my own teenagers had. After-school activities, pals round to the house, nights out in Glasgow clubbing. The occasional night when they partied too hard.

Every parent knows what that feels like. You lie waiting for the key in the lock so you can finally sleep, knowing they’re home safe.

So imagine, for just one moment, if that didn’t happen. If you were confronted with information which turned your everyday family life into a living nightmare?

Everything you believed to be true was wrong. Your daughter wasn’t having a fun summer on a Spanish island she was involved in something very dark and very dangerous.

It’s the kind of thing you warn your children about be careful. Take care of your money and your passport. Don’t trust strangers. Stay with friends. Don’t get so drunk you don’t know what you’re doing.

What parent doesn’t dread that knock on the door? The visit from the police. The frightening reality of what can go wrong when your children are grown-up and out there in the world.

You can’t protect them 24/7. You can’t wrap them in cotton wool.

They need space, freedom, friends. Not a nagging mum and dad who would turn them into a Johnny or Jill no-mates.

Instead you give them the warning words, you let them go and you hope and pray all will be well.

You tell yourself repeatedly that you’re a worrier and that life has to be lived, not feared.

Believe me, I’ve done all that. And I’ve still paced the floor in the small hours, my mind playing a cinema reel of horrors.

Falling off balconies on foreign holidays? Being robbed on a walk back to the apartment after losing their friends? A cocktail spiked by something nasty?

I’ve played out these scenes many times over the years as my kids headed off on holiday.

“Have fun but be safe. Watch out for drink/drugs/bad guys.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” was the collective answer.

Obsessively I’d watch the TV news every day, waiting for the announcement of a revolution or riot in whatever country they happened to be.

Am I freakishly anxious? I don’t think so.

When your children are living their lives which is what they must do and what you want for them you have to accept there’s a part of your heart out there in the world.

Thousands of kids go on holiday and have fun and are safe. It’s part of growing up.

They leave home to go to university, travel on a gap year, or working in foreign bars.

It’s all part of life’s rich tapestry.

We have to give our children roots and wings. We have to let them experience the incredible variety, challenges and opportunities of this wonderfully diverse planet we live on.

But don’t tell me there aren’t moments when you don’t wish they were safe in their bedroom upstairs.

Today we share the pain, the anxiety, the fears of William and Debra Reid a mum and dad who waved their pretty daughter off as she left for Ibiza, hoping she’d have a lovely time in the sun.

Let’s hope that for them the nightmare will end.

And that Melissa will soon be home.