Ignorance, Pig Bloody Ignorance

I have just been reading the have your say section of the BBC website about whether scouting is still relevent. Most contributors are very supportive but the pig ignorance and absurd opinions of some has left fuming. So lets dispell a few myths about the scouts shall we?

1. It is not shrinking it's growing, both nationally and internationally.

2. It does not groom children for war. Actually it promotes international peace and co-operation.

3. Baden Powell never intended it to groom boys for war, his speach following the first world war was one of the most powerful anti war speaches ever made.

4. Having girls in scouts is a good thing. It has caused no problems for me or any other leaders that I know of. Sounds like a bunch of mysogenists just making trouble to me.

5. Health and safety rules does not prevent kids doing adventurous activities, it just means they do it safely eg helmets when climbing, life jackets when sailing etc. are you telling me that is a bad thing?

6. We are not some kind of Thatcherite organisation that wants to crap all over those less fortunate than ourselves.

7. Scout leaders are not peadophiles.

8. We do not promote imperialism, quite the reverse.

Start doing some research and stop talking crap.

This morning the UK contingent started arriving at the World Jamboree, tomorrow the rest of the world arrives and on Saturday it properly kicks off!

Words can't quite describe just how much I wish I was there, reading the website it sounds totally magical, just as it should be. At the end of the day though this is about more than the big events, for scouting to move forward it still has to happen at a local level. It needs volunteers to give up their time for local kids and do something special. Next week I will take the cubs on summer camp and we will celebrate the centenary together in the New Forrest.

I hope I don't sound bitter or resentful, I certainly don't feel it or mean to sound it, I just know that my heart will be in two places.

I will be taking the Cubs for a day trip and I already have my mind set on 2011 Sweden, maybe as service crew, maybe as a unit leader, who knows?

But right now, this summer, my place is with the pack.

I have turned away 4 kids in the last 2 weeks as well, we have demand in our district for 3 new pakcs and 2 new troops, never has their been more need for the likes of me to go and weave a bit of magic.

Don't think this was the most coherent post ever, just a few thoughts.

On Being Human

Being a human is a funny old experience. There are days when you feel alone. I don't mean lonely, although that happens as well, but in the sense you wonder if anyone else feels like you do, anyone else feels out on a limb like you do, that feels the same weird messed up feelings like you do. The fact is that everyone goes through moments like that, we all do. It might be different messed up feelings that we have, but we still all have those moments. Sometimes though you can be touched by something that makes you realise that you're not alone, that other people fee what you feel, not just that feeling of being out on a limb, but that some people have the exact same feelings that you do.

And moments like that can provide moments of total comfort and touch you so deeply it almost hurts. What's more it can come from such un expected places, even a childrens film.

And that is both the wonder and the tragedy of being human.

Weird huh?

So just how are flights to New York and a hefty bill for lunch linked leaving me feeling a little agrieved and out of pocket?

It works like this, I just pretended to work this morning, actually what I was doing was searching or flights to New York for myself and Mrs Akela to take a holiday there this November. So far so good. But it got even better! I found an utter bargain, £241 each return, Stansted to New York, time to fill one's boots I think.

Akela had, however, promised to meet Mrs Akela for lunch, so off he toddled and settled the bill for a nice round £20.

Now what I can hear you shouting is that that is not very much for lunch, Akela seems to be getting a bit pickey! But read on fellow bloggers, read on........

Returning to my desk some 2 hours later I dug my credit card out and so armed went to book the flights, but what's this? What do I see before me? No longer are they £241 each! They are £265! In the space of 2 hours, some 4 months before we are due to fly they had gone up 10%!!!!

Now I know that £265 is still a bargain basement price to pay, but really, to go up by that much in 2 hours? Somebody somewhere is taking the piss! It means I paid £70 for lunch, at that folks, is a lot!

AAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!

My employer has been in the process of cut backs for some time now, but now it is begining to bite. They have changed their supplier of toilet roll, and wow do we all know about it!

It's like dragging a lump of sand paper, liberally laced with those nasty little birds eye chillis, slowly across your ring peice. In short, utter agony.

Much more of this and I'll be suggesting industrial action to my union rep, this is intolerable!

Just how much of a total arsehole, and I mean total human slime of the highest order does someone have to be before you can solemnly swear that you could not stand next to them on any issue?

I ask this because of a conversation I had yesterday with a friend of mine about the one and only Richard Littlejohn.

Mr Littlejohn, as is well known, is a “journalist” who writes (at the moment) a column for the Daily Mail. It is typically full of badly thought out right wing diatribe that at times borders on the racist and is regularly utterly offensive. It is though genius in that it appeals straight to the mob culture that normally only the Sun and the News of the World get anywhere near.

At the end of last year RL wrote a piece in his column that plumbed new depths of utterly offensive crap. It concerned that prostitutes who were being murdered at an alarming rate in Ipswich. He basically said they were of no great loss, no one cared, it was an occupational hazard and that they chose to be there.

It was so utterly vile in its tone that at that moment he passed into that category of people who I utterly loathed, who’s total lack of humanity in receiving money for writing something that offensive sent him of the scale in terms of how much of an utter prick he really is.

Yesterday however I was told that he had made a very well made, sensibly thought out and sensibly reported film on the rise of anti-Semitism in western Europe. He was trying to draw attention to how it was on the rise and no one was challenging it while the likes of the BNP were spreading it.

Now the BNP are an utterly vile organisation, who’s leader Nick Griffin is the very epitome of human slime. He spreads hate, division, racism and homophobia where ever he and his cronies go. And he and Mr Littlejohn have had a very public falling out over the film (not that they got on anyway RL once describing NG as “knuckle scraping scum”).

Now my friend who had similar opinions on RL said that on the basis that my enemy’s enemy is my friend it made RL one of his closest friends.

I could never go that far but it has made me stop and think, how quickly should we push someone away who’s views and actions we may find contemptible when they could be a very useful ally against someone far worse?

I don’t have the answers to that one I’m afraid, but it’s worth sleeping on!

Last week I did something rash, oh very rash, very rash indeed.

I download the official world jamboree single, cunningly entitled “Jambo”. (Do you see what they did there?).

This tune is awful, it really is, it sounds like the evil offspring of an S-club 7 B side and Michael Jackson in one of his weirder moments. It’s cringe worthy in the extreme and I bought it! I’d thought the Eurojam one was bad, but this?......

But what’s this? In an idle moment at work, staring out the window, I find myself humming, and what is that tune I’, humming? Need you ask? Do you even need to guess? It’s that bloody song! It’s irritatingly catchy and it will be stuck in my head forever now.

And there’s not a bloody thing I can do about it.

The Bastards!

Its been a while hasn't it? I've been a little busy! Just a quick post to provide this link

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Students_hand_Bush_letter_urging_ban_0626.html

If my efforts as a scout leader can produce any young people of this calibre then I will be a very proud man.