My county came up with a May lockdown challenge badge in 2020 which kept me nice and busy. In 2021 they did another: the Jurassic Plod badge. Yes, May 2021. I only finished it last week, in April 2022.
The “plod” in question doesn’t have to be along the Jurassic Coast but I immediately decided it couldn’t be anywhere else. It’s the compulsory challenge of this badge and it mentioned “taking your dinosaur” with you. I read on.
One plod plus five clauses of your choice, based on dinosaurs & local history. Well, five for Guides & Rangers which probably means five for adults too.
Challenge one
“Take your dinosaur”, it said, and there it was. Challenge one obviously had to be to make a dinosaur. I considered 1001 methods of making a dinosaur then I googled it. Soft felt dinosaurs. I made the diplodocus at lunchtime that very day. I didn’t have a huge amount of felt so I used the pattern at 50% size and a button from Granny’s button box and ta-dah! Dinosaur!
I made the stegosaurus at work that afternoon. I had 51 reports to run and download in PDF format from Google Data Studio. That’s a lot of processing time. Enough to make a dinosaur. It took six reports to trace and cut out the pattern, three to sew on the eyes and so on. Productive afternoon all round. I did my 51 reports and I finished a stegosaurus. Challenge one completed.
Challenge two
“Try making Dorset buttons”, it says. Right. Why not? Because it’s difficult!
All I had at hand that was suitable was a bag of keyrings I bought for my Sparkle & Ice crafts and the thickest thread I could still get through a needle was upholstery cotton. That first button took all afternoon and was wrong. I re-read the instructions and tried again. This time I figured out how to do it. The second button was correct but took two days. What kind of cottage industry is this where it takes two days to make a single button?!
I went to the craft shop. I bought some embroidery thread, like six strands of my upholstery thread. I bought the biggest needles I could find. That stuff fills up a ring a lot quicker than upholstery thread and within half an hour, I had a passable Dorset button. Within an hour or so I had three passable Dorset buttons. They’re all kind of wonky but they’re quite cute. Of course, they’re also really basic cartwheel patterns. There are far more complex patterns but I feel like I’ve done something quite impressive in just wreaking victory from catastrophe. I have four handmade Dorset buttons. No idea what to do with them.
Challenge three
“Why not try an interest badge?” Well, because I’m an adult and none of them are meant for me. Ok, so why not scale up the challenge to make it more adult? Do four interest badges, one from each section. I looked at their suggestions for relevant badges and picked Nature from the Rainbows, Local History from the Brownies, Photography from Guides and Blogging from Rangers. Relevant to my interests and relevant to the badge.
Rainbows: Nature
These badges each have three challenges. I’m not sure how to talk about them without listing the syllabus. Girlguiding want you to buy badge books, they don’t want you to share the information.
So, without giving away too much, I got my pastels out and I roughly sketched a scene from a recent walk, quartered it and coloured it by season. I tried instinctively to overthink this one and I shouldn’t. It’s aimed at five-year-olds. I already had a garden full of things I’d grown from seed because relevant to interests. And the third challenge was to go to the woods and collect different leaves. I couldn’t read the whole syllabus but I could see “find leaves”. I didn’t collect the leaves. I didn’t want to cut the leaves off the trees but there weren’t any good leaves on the floor so I photographed them all, identified them all and was gobsmacked at how many different kinds of trees there are in a tiny patch of urban woodland – I found oak, elder, beech, ash, hazel, horse chestnut, holly, laurel, spindle, dogwood, cherry, hawthorn and elder, and that’s not mentioning smaller things like the dock leaves, the cow parsley and the nettles. I wondered if perhaps the leaf thing was to make a collage or picture with my leaves but I’m sure no one will think it’s unreasonable that I’ve identified them all rather than picked them and made a picture with them.
Brownies: Local History
Some of this I’m leaving out, like the map of local landmarks and special places, since I did that with my Brownies and it includes some of their schools and favourite places. I did some learning about Thomas Hardy – the writer one, not the “kiss me, Hardy” one, although he’s local too.
I’ll give you my two treasures instead. I’d already made Dorset buttons (don’t accuse me of taking shortcuts, I’m doing four badges when I only needed to do one!) but after a lot of thought about a second treasure, I came up with the local pirates and smugglers and Captain Harry here came into existence. Harry’s a bit wobbly – he sat up by himself when I made him but he’s very top-heavy now he’s properly dried and he has a cocktail stick helping keep him upright for this photo.
Guides: Photography
I liked the idea of learning a little more about taking photos, even if it’s meant for 10-14s. My first challenge was to go out and take some photos to try out some techniques. I started with the compositional ones – the rule of thirds and the golden triangle and concluded that the scenery isn’t always cooperative when it comes to thirds and that I can’t make any sense of the golden triangle. My googling led me to conclude that you take any photo you like and draw some lines on it, regardless of what’s happening on the picture, and go “There! Golden triangle!” Not convinced. There was also some experimentation with camera settings and I did fiddle with mine but on the whole, there’s nothing in there that I’d like to use more often in future.
It took forever to take and present my ten photos. I eventually decided that I had to do them in Iceland because if I couldn’t take ten photos “that tell the viewer something about you” there, then I couldn’t take them anywhere. I planned to do them on Volcano Day but in the end, it was so windy and my camera was so uncooperative that I didn’t give it a thought until I got home. I eventually did it on my penultimate evening when I went to the Sky Lagoon.
Rangers: Blogging
This one’s all online so I can talk about it! This is the 21st-century rebirth of the old Writer badge. The Guide version, incidentally, is Vlogging.
Challenge 1 is to find out how bloggers deal with trolls and assess the various methods. Ok, I did some reading and some writing. I don’t get enough eyeballs on this blog to have trolls of my own, which is nice. The lack of trolls; I’d be delighted with a few more eyeballs.
Challenge 2 was to choose a platform and set up my blog and because relevant to interests, I obviously did that years ago. You’re reading it right now.
Challenge 3, write 5 blog posts. Again, done years ago. Look at that, I earned an interest badge in blogging by having a preexisting interest in blogging!
Challenge four
“Go fossil hunting.” No problem, a day at the beach it is! Well, my first attempt was a bit of a problem. I’ve written a post about my trip to Lyme Regis but in short, the weather was stormy and I decided it was dangerous and stupid to put myself in that narrow strip of beach between fragile cliffs and violent sea. I’m going to have another go when the weather’s a bit better and I might check the tide before I go this time.
My second attempt was a bit better. I only found one rock to bring home but there are lots of ammonites in large rocks along the seafront that you’d need either a truck and chain or a strongman to pick up. That’s fine, it means it’s there for future fossil hunters. Charmouth/Lyme Regis’s policy is that it’s all going to get washed into the sea or buried by cliff collapse in the next storm so help yourself. Unless it’s a Significant Find, in which case report it, but a Significant Find is going to take delicacy and technique that the average fossil-hunting tourist simply doesn’t possess (item 1: child bashing the cliff with a hammer he bought in the fossil shop) so there’s very little need to worry.
Challenge five
This one really was a challenge. All that was left was “do this simple quiz” or “look for blue plaques near you” or “try smocking” or “baking”. I liked the idea of a sedimentary rock cake – but was I actually going to eat it? Decorate a dinosaur cake – I’m not very good at decorating cakes and I’m not a huge fan of eating them either. Dorset knobs? Might be the most practical. And then my mum said “Haven’t you got a set of dinosaur cutters?” and so – dinosaur biscuits!
I’m not a natural or talented baker and I was convinced they were either going to spread in the oven and cease to be dinosaurs or they’d be utterly inedible or both. In fact, they weren’t bad. I used a basic vanilla biscuit recipe but made it chocolatey by swapping some of the flour for cocoa powder. I had no idea how much you’re supposed to use so I switched 50g of the 175g and they did come out very dark and quite bitter. But they’re surprisingly moreish and I felt like it was a win that I liked them, even if no one else did.
However, the dinosaur cutters produce a lot of long thin fragile limbs and tails. My t-rex and my diplodocus broke while I was removing them from the tray – fossils! bones! dinosaurs to be reassembled! – but the solid ones like the triceratops and the stegosaurus worked very nicely. Until I packed them up in beeswax to take on my walk with Catherine and they also broke into pieces. Still, easier to eat if I’m not actually biting straight into a dinosaur.
The Jurassic Plod
I saved the plod for the long bank holiday weekend, mostly so I could be certain I’d have made the dinosaurs by then. And then I didn’t do it until late September and I forgot the dinosaurs. Would have been nice to have actually done it on the Jurassic Coast but I walked from Corfe Castle up onto the East Hill ridge that leads eventually to Old Harry Rocks and which would once upon a time have continued to the Needles on the Isle of Wight. It’s not Jurassic Coast but it’s Purbeck, which is Jurassic Coast region.
It would have been a great view over the village, except it was misty – the sort of mist that’s verging on fog. I could see down to Swanage but the bulge of the hill at the end cut off part of the bay. The challenge badge said “You can choose between 1 mile, 2K, 5K, 10K, Half Marathon
and Full Marathon!” and my walk came to 12.8km in total, so we’ll call that the 10K option plus a bit more.
So there we go! It’s taken almost a whole year but I finally did it! Upgrading the “complete an interest badge” to “complete four interest badges” really did make it a bigger change; so big that I nearly didn’t finish the badge at all. But now it’s done! I have four interest badges, even if they’re not for my age group, and I finally have the cutest little green dinosaur badge too!