Another year, another large-scale event missed. This time it’s Wellies & Wristbands 2021. I’ll let you in on a secret: it’s not my favourite of Girlguiding’s flagship events because I find it’s just too much and it’s too busy and too noisy and mostly too expensive but I could fix all of that and make this the best Wellies ever by doing it at home!
Last year it was held online, via a series of videos in the evening. Last February, refusing to miss Sparkle & Ice 2021 just because it wasn’t happening, I held my own large-scale winter survival event at home and it was one of the highlights of Lockdown 3.0. Using that as a template, and with a little help from the official pack, I planned to put together my own Wellies & Wristbands 2021. Yes, there’s a pack. They tested this with Magic & Mayhem: you pay for a pack for your unit and that comes with a badge and then you can order extra badges. Or you can just do it yourself at home. To tell the truth, I was away the weekend of Magic and I still haven’t done it, which is why there’s a badge looking accusingly at me. But it meant I had an idea of what the Wellies pack might look like.
I put together a timetable. Sparkle starts Saturday morning and everyone’s offsite by lunchtime on Sunday so I made my camp that long. Wellies starts Friday evening and everyone’s offsite by Monday lunchtime. I can’t do a camp at home for three days, I don’t have the energy, so I planned for mine to start on Saturday morning and finish at bedtime on Sunday. That’s plenty long enough. And this one isn’t during a lockdown so I actually could go out and do adventurous activity. Sparkle’s adventurous activities were a countryside walk and a quick stop on a zipline I spotted in a playground.
I planned to take a boat out on the river but as I’d be kayaking the two weeks before and the week after, I wasn’t too heartbroken when an alternative came up: the so-called “medieval trio”. We’ll get to that in good time. I also decided I wanted some high ropes in the form of going to Go Ape. I went for my birthday fifteen years ago and I’ve taken my Rangers a few times since but I wanted to be able to go and do it myself in my own time. I got out my Wellies t-shirt from 2015 and my orange lanyard from 2018 – at the very least, if I took a camera to Go Ape, which I intended to, it needed to be attached to me and that was the perfect excuse for the event lanyard. My personal favourite feature of Wellies is the hot tubs. As I don’t have one or easy access to one, a bath (with a fancy bath bomb) would have to be substituted. Live music too… how do I replicate live music, other than by taking my treble recorder out in the garden? Aha! Put on my sequin jacket and put Taylor Swift’s reputation stadium tour on Netflix on the big TV! And then there were gaps to be filled with crafts and ideas from the official pack.
And so the day dawned. Well, it dawned earlier than I would have liked for a bank holiday weekend. My first activity was my medieval trio. This was in a field alongside a dual-carriageway. Like, right alongside. It consisted of two and a half hours of archery, crossbow shooting and learning to throw axes. If you’ve been around here for longer than about five minutes, you’ll probably know that I’m an archery instructor but they don’t offer the other two without archery included in the combination. I don’t necessarily enjoy being taught archery by other people; I spend the session going “well, that’s not how I’d do it” but his opening speech covered everything I’d cover and nothing else, so that was good. His tips for improving aim weren’t things I’ve ever seen before – adjust your fingers on the string, move your anchor point and so on. Given that we were shooting from about twenty yards and I was already shooting low, I knew that most of his adjustments would result in me personally shooting straight into the ground and we did eventually get to “if you’re aiming for gold but hitting bottom left, aim for top right instead”, which is what I teach. And to be fair, when I’m teaching it’s not like I get much chance to shoot, so I quite enjoyed that novelty.
And then we got to the exciting bit. Of the twelve archers, three of us were there for the medieval trio and now we were separated out to go and learn how to shoot a crossbow. Yes, I did like it, although reloading is a lot more faff than reloading a recurve bow. Put it on the floor, make sure safety’s on, foot in stirrup, pull string up with both hands until it cocks, slide the arrow in, safety off, aim, squeeze trigger. The trouble is that once you shoot, you can’t see where it’s gone until you walk down to the target. Mine had three little red targeting marks and (for me!) it shot miles to the left. I had to aim somewhere in the middle of the curtain just to hit the wooden target at all. I guess it feels a bit like riding a horse vs driving a sports car – I feel like me and the bow are working together whereas the crossbow is a tool. Interesting, and it’s something I’ve always wanted to try but my least favourite of the three activities.
Now, ah, my favourite. The axe-throwing. The axes in question are not actually the kind of axe you’d cut wood with. There are places that will teach you how to throw a real axe. These axes are called angels, they’re forged from a single piece of metal – probably iron but kind of looked like steel – and they have three blades in the shape of a cross. There’s no real technique. Line up with your target, raise the axe over your shoulder, making sure not to catch your shoulder with any of the side blades, and throw. My first few attempts, I consistently hit the target with one out of three axes and I celebrated. I literally jumped up and down waving my hands in the air when I hit it with one of my first three. Then I lost it. The instructor, at that point, came to observe that he’d been told that throwing underarm was actually a valid way to throw axes too so I tried that. It was a little more reliable than overarm although actually getting a blade caught in the wood was still a bit hit and miss. I enjoyed it though! I have vague plans to one day have a garden big enough to grow vegetables in. Now I need a garden big enough to throw axes.
When I got back, it was lunchtime. At Wellies for real, this means having your hands sanitised before trailing around the marquee in a line while a volunteer sings “cheese or jam, tuna or ham!” and you pick up a packet of sandwiches, a carton of orange or apple juice, or blackcurrant if the caterer is feeling fancy, and a few other bits. So I made a cheese sandwich. I admit that I ate it inside rather than outside in my tent. In fact, I didn’t even put my tent up. Wellies and Wristbands is a festival and this year I opted for glamping (in this context that means I chose to sleep inside in my own bed!).
My afternoon activities were from the activity pack. I made a Morse code bracelet that spells out Wellies, which was nice and simple, and I made a chevron-patterend friendship bracelet in the Wellies colours. I struggle with friendship bracelets. Last time I tried, I resorted to cutting a wheel where you just pull your thread from slot to slot and you end up with a thick round bracelet of about sixteen strands. I started this one very nicely, I made a pretty loop in the middle of my thread before I started knotting. The first inch or two are very clear evidence that despite following explicit instructions, I didn’t get it. Later on, you finally start to see the pattern emerging, which is where I started taping down any ends I wasn’t using so that I stopped getting tangled. Good thing this wasn’t Wellies for real because no ten-year-old Guide at the next table needs to hear what I had to say to the ends that were tangling while I wasn’t even using them. After an hour and a half, with my back aching from my labours, I left my unfinished bracelet and went for my favourite bit.
That would be the hot tub. I love the hot tubs at Wellies. Leave the girls to entertain themselves for a few hours, Bumblebee’s going in the hot tub!
I did look into renting hot tubs earlier in the summer. It’s quite expensive and you need to book quite early so although it was technically possible to get a hot tub for Wellies at Home, I made do with the bath. I’d intended to make it a special bath with bath bombs or bubble bars or something to at least make it smelly and colourful, even if bubbles were a bit beyond my budget (there’s a gadget on Amazon to turn a bath into a bubble tub but it’s £150, which was a bit much for a camp at home.). So an ordinary bath with a book.
I allowed myself two hours in the hot tub before I got out for dinner and my daily walk. Got to fit these things into even a festival camp at home weekend. Besides, I had further plans. I went back to my bracelet and then it was time for the campfire. I know, Wellies doesn’t generally have a campfire, it’s too big for it, but they did one last year and I had the means to hold one in the garden. My dad had a firepit for Christmas and it’s still never been used. So I lit the thing and we sat outside and enjoyed the fire and watched the hedgehogs. I also had my trip to the Night Cafe. At Wellies, this supplements the meals, which are… well, they’re fine. They’re mass-catered, they’re not very exciting, you eat quickly and get out to make room for the next lot and there are no snacks included. On real camp, we have elevensies and foursies and you always have at least two helpings, plus there’s a pudding of sorts after every meal, plus breakfast goes on basically until we run out of bacon and bread. Large-scale events like Wellies need top-ups and that’s where the Night Cafe comes in. I had a dish of oven fries by the fire. I don’t eat chips often but there’s so much of something like Wellies that I can’t reproduce in the garden – the adventurous activities, the hot tubs, the live music – that I was determined to do the bits I could, and chips by the fire was something I could do.
And then I made sure the fire was well out, said goodnight to the hedgehogs and retired to my bed.
Sunday was another early start. I was doing high ropes today and that meant a drive through the countryside to Go Ape. It’s been a good long time since I last went. I’ve been by myself and I took my Rangers twice in my early Ranger days. We’ve tried to do it again since but it’s difficult with only one leader when you need one adult for two of this age and five of that age and they won’t let you have one of each age. I was given a blue paper wristband and a full-body harness and then we went off for the safety briefing.
Last time we went, I remember having a pulley and a carabiner but I’m sure I remember clipping the carabiner into the bottom of the pulley on the zipline. Not now. Now you slide your pulley onto the cable at the beginning of each station and it’s physically impossible to detach it until you slide it off the end of the cable after the zipwire. It has a slot in it to allow it to pass each place where the cable is attached to something and you use your carabiner to clip on and off around each of these. Ladders have been replaced by “fisherman traps”, which means a wooden tower with four or six half-levels within so you zig-zag your way up while your pulley tries incessantly to slide back down.
There were five stations, including the example one, so four real stations, which I’ll refer to as 2-5. I got to the top of number two, the first of the real ones, and discovered that I hate heights. In front of my was a group of four, two parents and two teenage daughters. I should have guessed this would go badly when the mum refused to let the instructor do her harness up tightly enough because it was claustrophobic. Instead he put her in a full-body one so he didn’t have to tighten the waist belt so much and even so, I spied her quietly loosening it when he wasn’t looking. I was slow and scared but she was even more slow and scared and as the entire family had to wait until all four of them had caught up, it made it very slow-going for those of us behind them.
For COVID-safety, it’s one on a crossing, although I suspect that was standard anyway, and three on a platform. Not just any three, though. Three from the same bubble. That suited me fine but it did mean I had to wait until the last of the four was well away before I could move.
Meanwhile, the group behind me heard me muttering and squeaking on the wobbly steps – wooden platforms suspended from a rope in each corner, which I really didn’t enjoy – and took to being friendly and encouraging and that was much appreciated, and they pointed out that I wasn’t so slow at all anyway.
Another new thing Go Ape has brought in since I was last there is a points system, by which I mean like the rail kind – you can choose which obstacles to tackle and there’s a clever thing in the cables that lets you go one way or the other. On station 3, I opted for the rope loops over a set of trapezes. The parents in front of my did too but the daughters chose the trapezes and then rather than go straight up the cargo net to the zipwire, they went round in a circle and found themselves behind me. There’s no way to overtake when your pulley is physically attached to the cable. The parents had to go down the zipwire and wait for me before the daughters could join them at the bottom, which meant I could move onto station 4.
Station 4 was the worst. We had another set of points and I opted for the horizontal ladder over a set of swinging bars. The trouble was, the next step was a set of swinging crosses, just like the wobbly steps I’d disliked so much but now in the shape of a diagonal cross. It was only stable if you stood in the middle but there was no way to reach the next cross if you did that. I hated it. I stood on the first one and whimpered that I can’t do it, but there’s no other option. Could I simply step off and use the pulley and the ropes to slide myself across to the platform? No, because I can’t step off and second, I don’t have the leg strength to pull myself up onto the platform from a hanging position. Oh, that was horrible. And then a novelty zipline! It started with a skateboard which is designed to vanish from underneath you, leaving you hanging. But it’s in the way, so you can’t just treat it as a normal zipline without smashing your legs on the skateboard as you go. Fortunately, while I was trying to avoid stepping onto the hanging crosses, I saw the people in front of me figuring out how it worked, so that at least saved me that effort.
And finally, number five. Station 5 contained the Tarzan swing, the one thing that really stuck in my mind from my last visit. You have to jump off. I know the harness will catch me and then the giant net will catch me but I couldn’t jump back then. I had to be pushed. I definitely couldn’t do it now. And bless Go Ape, they’d put in some points so I could bypass it! Of course, one of the obstacles in its place was a “giant step” or a “bold step” as we’d have called it in my caving days. In other words, two trees close enough together that they decided it wasn’t worth building an obstacle! The last major obstacle was a really long and really wobbly rickety bridge. I scampered over the first three or four steps and then it wobbled and I realised how long it was and I took it really slowly. And there I was, at the top of the last zipwire! Left to my own devices, I’d probably have done fine, but there was an instructor lurking up here, who saw that I was tired and scared and that the last crossing was a tiny bit traumatic and he got my trolley and carabiner all in place. All I had to do was sit in my harness and I’d be at the bottom in no time. But they’d put a little wooden step there, which meant that if I stood on it, it gave me more slack in the ropes, which is the last thing I wanted, and if I didn’t stand on it, it was in the way for setting off. Lovely instructor held my ropes so I could get settled before letting go of me. I’m amazed he managed – one arm on the tree and one arm holding my entire weight against the force of gravity – but he did. And I got to the bottom! I’d survived!
Once upon a time I might have reveled in Go Ape. Now I’m too old and too scared and it terrified me. Not all of it, and I did get more accustomed to the height as we went on. All the same, I’m ludicrously pleased that I finished the course. High ropes done, Sunday’s adventurous activity done! I’d taken a picnic with me (“cheese or jam, tuna or ham?”) and I went out into the forest to find somewhere to eat it and to do my walk and then I came home.
I had vague plans for the afternoon involving juices and face packs and nail painting, another hot tub session, watching reputation instead of live music and a closing ceremony involving the sparklers left over from Sparkle and Ice but at that point, I was too tired. I’d done a kayaking trip out to Old Harry Rocks on Friday and all I really wanted was to eat the big cookie left over from lunch and go to sleep in the bath. So I declared Wellies & Wristbands 2021 At Home closed and a great triumph. The badge is due in October, probably the day after I conclude that I never actually ordered one.