Today is Thinking Day, a kind of Girl Guiding and Girl Scouting birthday. I’ve spent Thinking Day at Pax Lodge three times now. I went for the day with another leader in 2020, where we could feel the pandemic drawing in around us. I went for the day on my own in 2019 but spent the whole weekend in London, doing their Turn Back Time challenge on the Sunday. And in 2017, I went for the entire weekend on my own.
There were activities planned all weekend – on Friday and Saturday evening, on Saturday and Sunday morning and definitely on Saturday afternoon. I can’t remember about Sunday and I’ve misplaced my entire folder of information which would tell me the answer to all this. For once, I was actually going to stay at Pax Lodge. You can stay there, even non-WAGGGS members; it’s advertised in all the usual places as a hostel but it’s a bit on the expensive side and a bit far out, so I don’t make much use of it that way. But for this weekend, staying there was part of the package. Specifically, sharing a room was part of the package. I could have upgraded to a private room but this was supposed to be about international friendship and sisterhood so I’d put up with roommates for once.
When I arrived on Friday, it transpired that the Friday night event had been cancelled for lack of participants. Well, it’s not like Pax Lodge is lacking in stuff to do. I got to work simultaneously on the Pax Lodge Challenge badge and exploring the centre. There’s a lot of memorabilia. They have Olave’s badge collection and a postcard from BP, not to mention badges, souvenirs and all sorts from all over the world. It takes a long time to get tired of looking at all the stuff.
The Owl Room is a small lounge with bean bags and sofas and lots of books, and Olave’s cape. Opposite, the USA and Canada Rooms are the main activity and conference rooms. Then, down the end of the corridor, is a large dining room. Off to the sides are smaller rooms, mostly offices. You may see inside the main office when they bring you an activity pack and you’ll almost definitely see inside the shop, which is little more than a cupboard with shelves.
So on Friday, I occupied myself with the parts of the Challenge that I could do around the building – the Pax Lodge past and now sections and some of the WAGGGS stuff and then I went out to Hampstead Heath to answer a few more questions. Would you believe, I’ve never actually been there? I accidentally discovered the Parliament Hill viewpoint and was very taken with it. In fact, about 90% of the pictures from that weekend are of that view as the sun went down.
I met my roommates when we got back. There was a British Guide from somewhere not far away and a Guide from Hong Kong – and let me clarify, adult Guides. Pax Lodge is not in the habit of putting pre-teens in the same room as strange adults. But it was like being an actual Guide all over again – sharing a room with bunkbeds, talking and exchanging badges into the night instead of going to sleep, comparing blankets. I could manage some UK Friendship badges and some region badges: we just don’t have any local badges. The others did. Our district was still two and a half years off its first international trip and we didn’t even have any local challenge badges.
Come morning, we had breakfast together in the big dining room – there’s food laid out at the kitchen end of the room, you help yourself and you tidy up when you’ve finished – and then we stuck a pin in the map on the wall to show where we’d come from, and got ready for activities. We were not the only participants, but we were the only ones staying overnight at Pax Lodge. There was a big group of Norwegian Rovers, aged about 16-25 who were staying in a cheaper hostel elsewhere and a few London/Home Counties groups of Brownies and Guides who’d come up for the day. The Norwegians weren’t a unit, exactly – they’d been selected for this event from across the country and most had never met each other before they’d landed in London. I remember them in green uniforms but my attempts to identify them from the Norwegian site is leading me to conclude that either my memory is faulty or the uniforms have changed in the last four years because they seem to wear grey (with an optional navy blue) all the way up every age group.
Every year, the WAGGGS WTD activity pack has a theme and 2017’s was Grow. It’s about self-growth and also growth of the Movement, with a side order of appreciation for the environment. There was no reference to Olave Baden-Powell, Chief Guide’s quote “a gigantic family, tied together like a bunch of strong twigs of the great strong tree” but that would have fitted too. 2021’s is Stand Together for Peace and by the time you read this, I’ll have spent an entire weekend on virtual region Thinking Day activities and Sunday night on virtual WAGGGS WTD pack activities, thus earning the badge that’s currently sitting in a box on my desk.
I don’t remember exactly what activities we did back in 2017. My “participant passport” has stamps against sixteen out of twenty-two boxes. I remember “make a Grow! Thinking Day glass” – we had a plastic wine glass which we decorated with trees and grass and flowers and then you put a candle in it and we used them for Guiding lights. I did that one with my Rangers the next week, only we used real glass candle holders and glass paints. I remember creating a pledge leaf and sticking it to the pledge tree. I can imagine playing World Centre Uno. I imagine Collaboration was probably the game where every member of the team has to come through a different gap in a spider web woven between two posts – the trick is to send half the big people through the lowest holes they can manage so they can help lift the smallest people through the highest holes. The rest is an absolute blank, although I do remember being sent off to do the Thinking Day on the Air activity – the radio equipment had worked briefly first thing but wasn’t by the time we got there.
I know what the campfire one was – they had an inflatable campfire so we could hold the Saturday night campfire activity inside. I’ve been after one of those ever since but they’re going for about £60 on Amazon at the moment. I always like a campfire. It doesn’t feel like a proper residential if you don’t have a fire of some kind and some singing, even if it’s only an inflatable one, or one lit in the grate like we did on an indoor camp once, or even some floating candles in a washing-up bowl like we did at Brownies. Floating candles, incidentally, are a lot harder to find these days than they were when I was about Brownie age.
While I was in London, I went to see a play. That was Saturday afternoon, and probably the reason for those six missing stamps. But most people only do one Thinking Day session and I did three so I could afford to miss one. Might as well do something cultural while you’re in London, right? The play had a cast of three or four and was in a room over a pub in Battersea and while I enjoyed it very much, what I really remember is my shoes falling apart. I bought them while I was at school and as I left school in 2003, you can figure out how old they were. So I spent my journey back from Battersea to Hampstead desperately trying to find something to glue them back together with and when that inevitably just didn’t work, trying to find a shop in central London that sold shoes I could afford. I finished up in New Look on Oxford Street, buying a pair of little blue plimsoll-things which cut my heels to pieces and to this day, I still have the glue. It’s on my desk right now. It’s a kind of superglue glue stick and other than the fact that I require a knife to prise the cap off because it sticks itself together every time I use it, it’s really good. Admittedly, it’s a lot better for craft and household stuff than it is for sticking elderly trainers back together.
We did more activities on Sunday. The radio thing was probably on Sunday and so was designing a postcard to send to another World Centre. I do have my timetable but all it specifies is “roots”, “trunk” “leaves”, “branches” and “reach” which is how the activities in the passport are divided up and apparently I did one of each at every session so I can’t really narrow it down.
What I’m very confident about is the Pinning Ceremony. I couldn’t tell you which day but I assume it was Saturday morning, which is when we seem to have had the most participants. It’s a ceremony that happens at all the World Centres, when all the guests and staff and volunteers gather around the flagpole, have a little speech, sing the centre’s song, celebrate the various nations represented and then present everyone with the centre’s exclusive pin. You can’t buy them or give them to friends; you can only be given them at a Pinning Ceremony so if you see anyone wearing one of these pins, you know they’ve been there. And so I acquired my Pax Lodge pin, which is a very round very shiny pin with the dove/ark/trefoil logo on it in Pax Lodge tealish-green. I also have the Our Chalet one, which is a bigger pewter one with an engraving of the main chalet on it. At the moment they live on the collar of my Guide polo shirt but when I was at Our Chalet last New Year, they went on my international neckerchief.
We had another ceremony at the end of each session, where anyone leaving was presented with the official Thinking Day badge and a packet of seeds, so I must have attended three ceremonies before finally being given mine. From 2018 onwards, they’ve been quite big badges with proper embroidered edges, a diamond for 2018 and triangles for the last three years – and in fact, at least as far back as 2013 they were the same too except square – but the 2017 Grow one was tree-shaped, without that edge, and a wee bit of a pain to sew onto a camp blanket. They went on alongside my Pax Lodge Challenge badge (the person on reception said they’d never seen a challenge booklet so comprehensively completed!), my Pax Lodge souvenir badge, badges from each of my roommates and one from a Brownie pack who attended, a county silk from Lancashire East, although I don’t remember them coming that far.
And then we were done. I was a few badges lighter and several badges heavier