I don’t think I mention it here on this blog as often as I could but I’m a big fan of live comedy. It’s the reason I go up to Edinburgh in Augusts some/most years. I’m not going to review everything I saw this year because over the course of two weekends I saw 22 shows and that would be six months’ worth of posts but I am going to talk about this one. It’s not even really going to be a review.
Hands up anyone who could predict that when I heard that Lucy Porter’s show was going to be based on her time as a Brownie that I was going to go. Hands up anyone who could predict that I was going to spend an hour struggling to suppress – not even heckles, outraged interruptions at all tiny inaccuracies. Guess what? I’m an idiot, I didn’t see that coming.
Yeah. I enjoyed the show, give or take the persistent “there are badges and certificates for adults!” This has been a bit of a theme in the last couple of months – first Angela Barnes talked about it in Rose-Tinted, then the subject made my Facebook feed via Loose Women and now Lucy. There’s a demand for adult badges (and validation, and fun) even from outside the movement and yet it seems impossible to get the idea of the Trefoil Guild at people. Girlguiding, please please can we have some kind of adult Brownie-equivalent complete with badges?
Girlguiding has a public image. The goodie-goodie, the Stepford wife sewing and cooking, the geek learning outdoors skills no one needs, the infernal dib-dib-dib (will someone tell us what this means? It’s not a thing in Girlguiding and never has been and so we’re bemused by it as a stereotype) and the eternal woggle, clearly spoken by someone who has no idea what a woggle actually is. It’s a tiny hoop made of leather or plastic or macrame that holds your neckerchief together. It’s not a substantial or even hugely visible bit of the outfit. Surely the neckerchief is a more obvious thing to mock? Yes, Lucy fell into the trap of commenting on the wearing of the woggle.
But whereas that’s where public discussion of Guiding usually ends, Lucy went on to talk about the good and the modern and has accidentally nominated herself as an unofficial ambassador. Good. We need someone. The Scouts have Bear Grylls. We have a lovely lady called Amanda Medler as our Chief Guide, a lovely dedicated enthusiastic ordinary lady who doesn’t have the star power her Scouting counterpart does. I asked this question at work – who could be our celebrity Chief Guide? – and work fired back with ideas for men.
Lucy talked fondly about her own old Brown Owl (although not without some gentle mockery of the owl name system), who gave her a slightly different vision of Girlguiding volunteers than the usual kind you get from outsiders. Lucy sees women who have life skills, competence, who are prepared and able to be calm in a crisis. Women who can take charge (cue detour in the direction of our government. Girlguiding as an organisation would not be able to fix UK politics. Individual adult leaders as a large committee absolutely would).
It’s fashionable to be flappy and useless. The clarion cry of the current decade is “adulting is haaaard!” and the theme is that no one feels like a competent capable real adult. I suppose up until that show, I probably agreed with them. But I’m a Girlguiding volunteer of twelve years’ standing. I have three adult leadership qualifications, two outdoor instructor qualifications and my weedy pathetic First Response (training course: CPR and “call the ambulance and the parents”. Course finished, congratulations, you’re now just as First Aid qualified as I am!). Six certificates between driving licence pass and the one with my cause of death on, and there are two more I want in the not-too-distant future.
I’ve gradually become aware, thanks to my colleagues, that First Aid training is not as common as I assumed it was. There isn’t a single other person qualified at work. Two did it in the far-distant past, about eight CPR songs back, but that’s it, in an entire company. I’ve been doing First Aid since I was a Brownie. Did it again as a Guide, a Young Leader, did it for DofE, did a cave-specific outdoors course as a student and I’ve been continually qualified for twelve years now because I have to be. More First Aid trading for non-Girlguiding folks please, life.
Second, I’ve recently discovered that I am indeed one of these people who can stay calm in an emergency. A month ago I watched an eleven-year-old girl sprint across the road and get thrown into the air by an oncoming car she didn’t even look for. Under the circumstances, calm and capable is essential and one of my colleagues suggested that if our company goes under, I should retrain as a paramedic (I absolutely shouldn’t). The girl’s fine. Grazes on the day, bruises the next day. Dad and Nanny are probably not going to let her walk home from school alone for a while and will bring this up in every family fight for the rest of her life.
Third, yes, I can take charge. I have leadership skills. If you knew me more than ten or fifteen years ago, this would have been laughable. I was shy to the point of selective mutism. I’m not neurotypical. I was the silent sidekick. But then again, I was weird. I guess it was always lurking in there, deep down, that streak of independence, pig-headedness and capability. There are so many teachers who wouldn’t recognise the adult I am today.
And Lucy, thinking of her Brownie achievements, looks deep within herself and discovers she also has the qualities nurtured through Guiding. A lot of people probably do, unbeknownst to them. Ultimately, the show is a rare celebration of people like Brown Owl, rather than a mean-spirited dig at an organisation that does good things in occasionally-eccentric ways. I’m far more accustomed to the latter whenever anyone outside the organisation talks about it so Lucy had a low bar to jump and she soared so far over it that you can’t even see it.
I talked to her afterwards. No, the Brownie uniform and camp blanket hanging on the stage aren’t hers. Well, I knew that. She said she was in the Gnome six and that’s a Kelpie badge on the uniform, to say nothing of the Leprechaun badge and four Guide Patrol badges on the blanket. She’s been invited to visit lots of units and will definitely end up with a volunteer role of some kind. And she thanks every volunteer she encounters for doing what we do and it is nice to be appreciated. I do it because I (mostly) enjoy it. Because having those archery and fencing certificates on my CV makes me feel like a warrior. Because I’m gaining life skills. I haven’t even mentioned event planning and management! And because after 29 years in the movement, what would I do with Tuesday evenings without Girlguiding?
(Mind you, we could all live without the stress of unit accounts.)
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ to Lucy (deductions for woggles, dib-dib-dib and apparently not knowing what singing in a round is.)
