I’ve done Sparkle & Ice every year since it began. There was muddy 2017, volunteering 2018, icy 2019 and stormy 2020 and now we’ve got at-home 2021. Just because Sparkle & Ice 2021 isn’t happening doesn’t mean I’m going to miss it.
Last year, Girlguiding did an online version of Wellies & Wristbands because that’s their flagship event. In normal years it’s huge, it happens in two or three places simultaneously and there’s a new t-shirt and hoodie for it every year. It’s Girlguiding Glastonbury. Sparkle & Ice is the winter version and for obvious reasons, it’s a smaller event. It’s only the really hardy members who want to do a winter survival camp, especially if it coincides with actual ice or a named storm. There’s a badge but it’s the same badge every year, with the year added to it from 2019 so you could keep track of when you’d been. There’s no clothing, although I take enough money every year to leap on an elusive hoodie if it should appear. So I knew right from the start that Sparkle & Ice probably wasn’t even going to be acknowledged, let alone put online. If I wanted to do it this year, I had to do it myself.
I’m all prepared. Last year I bought a spare undated badge & a Girlguiding badge and sewed them onto a white hoodie so I’ve finally got my (unofficial) merchandise, I’ve put together a programme and got a box of activities ready to go and I’ve even got a badge on the way, and so welcome to Sparkle & Ice 2021.
Saturday
It was a good weekend, the first that wouldn’t have featured anxious parents asking “but surely it isn’t going ahead, not in this weather?”, as if it isn’t winter survival camp. Ironic then that it’s the camp that didn’t actually happen.
I got up, put on my unofficial merchandise and pitched my tent. Normally it’d be a two- or three-man shared with another adult but since I was on my own, and since several poles in my two-man are cracked, I pitched my little one-man yellow tent. Far easier for one person’s body heat to keep warm. It was a surprisingly warm task and I needed to come back in, change my long-sleeved adventure top for my casualwear pink t-shirt and have a drink afterwards to cool down. Then it was time for the opening ceremony.
It’s absurd to announce the beginning of a camp where you’re the only attendant, so I replaced the big exploding campfire of 2017 with my cardboard campfire and a large tealight to cook a marshmallow. I know it’s traditional to cook them over campfires but given that we can’t light campfires at Brownie and Ranger meetings in the middle of our community centres and church halls, I’ve become well-practiced in the art of toasting a marshmallow over a candle and it does work really well, if a bit slowly. I like my marshmallows to be gooey in the middle but not burnt, whereas Guides and my other leader like to literally set fire to them.
With that done, it was time for my outdoor activity. Normally it would be a busy morning of climbing, zipwiring, crate-stacking and so on. We even had an indoor ice rink in 2017 and a barrel train in 2020. If I was recreating this camp in a normal year, I’d definitely have checked whether any of the winter rinks are still around by the first weekend in February, but then in a normal year I’d just be at the camp. So this year, my outdoor activity was a walk, 7km along the trailway on a surprisingly beautiful day. I felt sunshine on the back of my neck and I was out in just my hoodie and t-shirt. I’m used to piling on the layers for Sparkle and Ice. And we found a zipwire! I mean, it was a short one in a playground alongside the path but I had a run, just for the video.
Back home, it was time for lunch. That would normally entail a zigzag walk around whatever room is being used for the meal, picking up a sandwich (“cheese or jam, tuna or ham!” goes the refrain from the volunteers as you walk in), a packet of crisps, a biscuit and a piece of fruit and then taking it back to your tent or one of the picnic benches, depending on the weather. I ate my cheese sandwich inside and I made it straight onto a plate, without replicating either the brown cardboard box the sandwiches get delivered in or the paper bag you fetch your unit’s food in and very satisfying it was too.
After that, it was time for some crafts. The real Sparkle & Ice isn’t quite as craft-heavy as the at-home version but there’s only so much outdoor stuff you can do in the garden. I’d put some thought into this part of the day. My first craft was felted penguins – they come in a kit with all the stuff you need and they’re suitably wintery and they’re cute. It took me an hour to make the big one and it came out pretty well.
Next was the planetarium – last year you got a random draw of either planetarium or horse experience but we’ve always always done the planetarium. It’s normally an excuse to go inside for an hour, lie on the floor inside an inflatable dome watch the stars while warming up on a muddy floor. I don’t have an inflatable planetarium handy or a projector but I do have a laptop, BBC iPlayer and access to episodes of various Brian Cox series. So I sat and watched Into the Darkness: Ice Worlds, the episode of The Planets about Uranus, Neptune and other small objects on the edge of our solar system while doing the second penguin in the kit.
My second craft was a macrame snowflake. I’ve never done macrame before and I didn’t anticipate my first problem being the cord itself. It came as a big spool but when I unwrapped it, it turned out the top isn’t attached and there doesn’t appear to be an end. Well, it now has at least ten ends, where I resorted to chopping randomly at it. Eventually I managed to cut myself twelve 90cm lengths and began to knot. It wasn’t too hard, actually. Once I’d mastered the square knots, it was just tying them over and over again. Twenty-four ends flapping around was a pain at first but you start to tie them together in groups of four, and then tie those groups of four together as well and as you use up the cord, it all gets a lot more manageable. I think some of my loops aren’t as neat as a professional but I think it was a very good effort for a first-timer, especially when I’d trimmed and fluffed up the ends.
Then it was dinner time. It’s usually something quite heavy, to keep us poor winter campers warm so I did pasta with cheese. Last year there was garlic bread to go with the food but after my big cheese sandwich at lunchtime, I really didn’t have the space for garlic bread as well as pasta. Nor was I in the mood for hot chocolate at 8pm, as per my schedule – I think a large cup of hot milk would have finished me off.
After dinner, I had planned for another craft. Normally the evening is a bit of a dead end – we did have a campfire last year but often you sit in one of the indoor rooms and play games or finish off the papercrafts from earlier, so I’d decided on some bead crafts. The Guides did safety pin bead flags over Zoom this week so I’d taken inspiration to make a snowflake pin badge. The pins needed to be a lot smaller than the ones I’d found and my blue beads are hardly a different colour from my clear ones so it didn’t look particularly striking – the least successful of my crafts so far. The snowflake earrings were even less successful. I tried to twist three pins together to make a snowflake shape as per the tutorial I’d found but they wouldn’t tighten together and I just ended up with a lot of flappy wire. So I gave up and just went for straight bead earrings in Sparkle and Ice colours of blue, white and purple. They’re pretty but they’re not quite what I planned to make.
After that, I was supposed to have the hot chocolate but I couldn’t take another lot of dairy so I finished off the third penguin, enjoyed being inside in the warm and then, at about quarter to ten, went off for my closing ceremony. Sparkle & Ice had fireworks the first year, then I don’t remember in 2018 because by 10pm, I was in the bar with a can of Coke after a long day of archery sessions, supervising meals and filling hot water bottles. I’m pretty sure 2019 had the laser show and I don’t think there was anything other than a gathering on the lawn in 2020. I can’t do fireworks or a laser show in my garden (well, I suppose I could do fireworks but I wasn’t going to) so I got some sparklers. It feels kind of silly waving sparklers in the garden on my own in February but it’s sparkly and even without the ceremonial aspect, it formed a nice transition between the activities and actually going to bed.
I’m very accustomed to cold and bad weather on this camp. I have a two-season sleeping pod (it’s like a sleeping bag but you can starfish in it) and then I put my four-season bag inside it and a hot water bottle. If it’s cold enough, I drag my camp blanket inside; if not, I use it as a pillow. It was a very warm night – warmest I’ve ever been on this camp. I had to remove layers and the only reason I didn’t open up my inner sleeping bag was that I was afraid I’d want that heat in an hour or two, which meant I spent most of the night awake either from heat or from confinement – my four-season bag is quite tight-fitting and the hot water bottle made it difficult to turn the bag over, because every time I moved – and I fidget a lot in tents – the bag ended up upside down with the toe-end twisted.
Sunday
It rained in the night, but quite lightly, and believe me, I was awake to hear every drop. It was light enough to make me wonder if it was snow landing gently on my canvas roof rather than water but it wasn’t. I’d probably have come back inside if it had snowed. There’s camping out in February and there’s being foolhardy and risking hypothermia for a camp that isn’t even happening is something even I’d think twice about.
At quarter to seven, the birds started yelling and by half past seven, the yellow tent fabric had turned a grey dawn into a bright and tropical day. If you’re in the market for a tent, I highly recommend a yellow one. You never wake up to a miserable day when you’re in a yellow tent. On the other hand, the effect is broken immediately when you unzip the door and you discover that it’s barely even daylight yet, the sky is heavy and grey and the sandals you left in the tent’s porch are soaked.
I had breakfast and then, honestly, I crawled back into my own bed for an hour or so. I’d been fairly warm but I’d left my bedroom window open and the room was freezing so I spent a while lying on the radiator to warm up all over again. I never sleep properly in a tent so a bit of morning in a real bed is much appreciated.
Once I got up again, it was time to strike camp because if I left it, it might rain again and I’d rather pack up a damp tent than a wet one. Because I was already at home, all I really had to do was drag everything into the house. So much easier to roll up a self-inflating mat inside than in a one-man tent. And so much easier to carry a bundle of damp tent fabric inside to drape over chairs than packing it up into its bag for the journey and getting the inside just as wet as the outside. I washed the muddy pegs under the tap and stacked them in a cobhouse to dry as if they were wooden pegs – I don’t think people do that with wire pegs but it seems to work.
And so with all the necessities done, I finally made my hot chocolate – in my big enamel Senior Section mug – and sat down. Other than rolling up the tent when it was dry, camp was finished. Time for a nice bath, with the mint-flavoured polar bear bath bomb I’d been saving since Christmas – how better to spend the afternoon after winter camp than with a winter-themed hot bath?
Sparkle & Ice 2021 wasn’t exactly been like the real thing but it had kept me occupied for a whole weekend when there isn’t much to do, gave me something to mention at the weekly team catch-up at work on Monday (although actually it happened on Tuesday this week for some reason) and makes me feel like I’ve actually done something in a year where everything is being cancelled all over again. I might do another camp in the spring – if you have any suggestions for a theme, please do leave me a comment.
(At some point I’ll be putting together a little video but I just haven’t had the time to do it this week).