My Scouting Top Ten

I've had an exchange of emails with a fellow blogger recently in which I was very open about why I think scouting and similar organisations are great for kids. Everything from leadership to creativity to cultural tolerance to team work, it's all there. I know it did a great deal for me. So I thought I'd put a few of my experiences down, in particular the most influential ones.

These are not necessarily the most memorable, or the most fun or my biggest achievements, but they are the ones that were probably the biggest influence on me when growing up. And they are in no particular order either.

1. My first night away without family. I was a 9 year old cub, and a pretty timid one at that. I'd done camps before but only our group's annual "father and son" camp. When I was 9 I want a 3 night camp at Tolmers in Hertfordshire. First time without my family, I was pretty timid it's true but I loved every second of it!

2. Being 15, on a scout summer camp and having to dig trenches around the patrol tents to keep the water out. Marvelous!

3. My patrol picking a fight with some army cadets when I was 13 and running away when we realised there were more of them and they were mostly older. Valuable lesson learned there!

4. Learning how to light a cooking fire in the pissing rain the hard way.

5. A sad one this. A lad in my Venture Unit lost his mother while we were in the Lake District on a 2 week trip. Our leaders had to leave to take him home leaving the rest of us to look after ourselves. A lot of growing up was done very quickly on that camp.

6. Being voted scouts scout of the year when I was 14. Having been savagely bullied at school to get that kind of recognition from my peers was bloody brilliant!

7. As a venture scout building a rope bridge for a beaver funday, thinking we knew it all. We didn't. A leader, who came across as a right old git, put us right. Turned out he was a top bloke. Looks can be deceiving!

8. Waking up in a wet through sleeping bag, moaning and then finding that another tent had copped even worse than mine had and they were all laughing about it.

9. Being chased across the field by a knife wielding guide leader after I and the other 2 patrol leaders had made the mistake of trying to chat up her girls. Hilarious! (Same camp as the trench digging incident)

10. In the pissing rain on camp, with not a dry stitch of clothing left, building an impromptu mud slide down a steep bank. Brilliant fun :)

I might do another one of these soon, maybe the happiest, or funniest or something like that.

Looking Back

I remember once being asked which adult had the biggest influence on you when you were growing up. It's a question I've always found it very difficult to answer but this morning it came to me so I thought I'd write a quick blog about it. I think it was my maths teacher at school, Mrs Lumsden. So why was that?

Here's the deal, Mrs L (or Lumo as she was more commonly referred to) was an absolute dragon. She enforced discipline with a rod of steel and everyone was terrified of her. Now this is not going to be some cheesy comment about the life lessons I learned through her because, while I believe in discipline in schools, I maintain to this day that she was such a dragon that it actually back fired at times and she got very little respect in the class room. She was far too strict. Even in the 6th form we had to line up outside the room and ask to take our blazers off. Totally unnecessary.

So why was she such an influence?

When in the 6th form I found out about the charity work that she and her husband (who was my physics teacher, and you couldn't wish to meet a more different man, strict yes, but he showed kids some respect as well) did for a charity called PHAB who run camping holidays for disabled teenagers with able bodies teenagers buddying them. Eventually I got involved myself and went along myself ( I might write about my experiences another time) a number of times and loved it.

What I saw there though was this totally different side to the dragon that existed in the class room. She was kind hearted, gentle, compassionate, (still tough though, she stood for no nonsense even then!) and generally completely different.

It showed me how complicated human beings can be, how what you see one day is not what you get the next, that people are not good or bad, brave or shy etc, they are so much more than that. And that is why my maths teacher was my biggest influence.

Happy memories

So with the snow on the ground I thought I’d reminisce a little about my sprightly teenage years.

As I think I’ve written before I was always one for the great outdoors although living in darkest suburban Hertfordshire as a kid it wasn’t the easiest place to throw yourself into it. Let’s face it, the Chilterns are hardly mountains are they? Which is why I was extremely grateful for the fact that Hertfordshire Scouts, of all people, owned a wonderful place at Lochearnhead in Perthshire, right in the Scottish Highlands. I did several walking/climbing trips up there and had the time of my life! It’s such a pity that the website doesn’t really do justice to it. Maybe I’ll scan in some old photos one day that do!

The place itself was, and still is, an old railway station on a disused railway line that runs along Glen Ogle. The station buildings are used as central facilities with wooden chalets providing the accommodation. The place is hemmed in with trees and despite the village being quite a bustling place it felt wonderfully secluded. Often the trees would be coated in snow when the snow line dropped and when it was warm, as it often could be in spring, the smell of the pine was simply out of this world.

What I loved most of all was that the slog of getting there (10 hours over night on a coach) meant that only those of a similar mindset to me, i.e. love the outdoors and pretty bloody minded, actually used to make it there. I made some wonderful friends there and am in touch with many of them still. The scouts and guides that went up there were typically left to their own devices in the evenings (outside of theory sessions on mountain craft etc) and there was a tangible feeling of growing up but still very young and youthful. You know those moments where you start to spread your wings a bit and everything is a little bit scary and a little about dangerous?

I got reminded of it on the way to work today, a pigeon was cooing in a tree while snow was thawing around me. Very typical of the place when I was there.

I think it’s brilliant that places like that still exist, where kids can go and have a real adventure. Long may it continue!

Let me take you back to July 1997. It was my Queens Scout Expedition, day 2, and myself and 3 friends were trecking across the central Scottish Highlands. It was typical Scottish weather, cloudy, windy with intermitent rain, exactly what we expected. It was wild, bleak but incredibly beautiful. And there was moment inparticular that I remember.

It was late afternoon and we were coming down off of Ben Bheil (pro Voil), which is a long ridge type mountain, and we were looking down into the glen below having just dropped beneath the cloud line. And scudding through this glen were a series of small grey clouds that were being blown over the edge of the col at the top of the glen. The speed that they were coming down the glen was incredible and we spent quite a while just sat there looking out at this.

We called it the Cloud Factory.

Just thought I'd share that memory.