I suppose this doesn’t strictly come under the headings of “travel”, “outdoors” or “adventure” but I’ve done so much that does come under one of those labels thanks to the Rebel Badge Book that I think you should see the inaugural Big Rebel Meet Up of the Rebel Badge Club. There are 3,884 members in the Facebook group as of right now and around 75 of us met to do some activities last Saturday. There have been plenty of meetings of local Rebellions and I’ve met fellow Rebels at both Camp Wildfire and Try Inspire Qualify. I dithered over whether to go to the big official meet up until about as late as I possibly could. It’s quite expensive for one day and Reading is quite far away. But as a one-off, it’ll be fun, right? And it was literally March of this year when I drove to Reading to spend one (1) hour in a swimming pool. Can’t really complain about the distance after that, can I?
But also, it would be wrong and incorrect to say my decision wasn’t influenced by “Everyone attending will get 3 FREE BADGES – including 2 no other Rebel has”. Well, it’s a club for badge fiends!
Because this whole thing is inspired by Brownies and Guiding (Scouting too but it’s very female-dominated), we were split into Patrols for activities. I was assigned to Nelson – it’s mostly arbitrary, just split the group into smaller groups to do the crafts rather than try to get 75 people changing a wheel or dancing at once but there were three considerations that put you in specific patrols: clothed vs naked life drawing, intensity of the dance class and the presence of a guide dog in one of the Patrols. They’re all named after notable real-life rebels and Nelson, obviously, is Nelson Mandela.
Patrol pin badges to wear there and then came as part of the event but I pre-ordered a fabric badge to go on my blanket, as well as a couple of badges I was working on. One was Mechanic – one of those I’d initially put on my probably-not-to-do list, but as we were having a mechanic session, I thought I’d do what I could on Friday and then I could cross off the bit where I have to change a tyre under the guidance of an expert. And by the time this is published, hopefully that badge will be completed and sewn onto my blanket!
So just before 8am on Saturday I set off for Reading and arrived early enough to get one of the few spaces in the car park. Oh, Reading seems to have the worst combination of motorway and city navigation, not to mention five speed cameras in not as many minutes and so many people who just casually walked into the road in front of cars. It’s a pretty incredible building – purpose-built, with a large hall downstairs and a kitchen that’s verging on industrial, an attic room bigger than most church halls and a small room lined with squishy, elderly leather sofas.
First things first, when you arrived, you picked up your name sticker (with a patrol-coloured border – that’s purple for Nelson) and the three badges. That’s the aforementioned patrol pin badge, the fabric Big Rebel Meet Up badge and a small Rebel Badge Club pin. We also collected any pre-orders and then took our seats around the room.
It was all a bit awkward at first. A few people are Rebelling together and had come with friends but most people had come on their own so we sat around the edge of the room like we were waiting for the doctor to call us and gradually, as more people arrived, the gaps started to fill in and we started to chat to our neighbours. What’s your name, what’s your patrol, where have you come from, that sort of thing. I watched Alice, who’d preordered a Rebel Council neckerchief, casually roll it into the neatest triangle I’ve ever seen and then then, even more casually, tie a friendship knot in it while it was around her neck! It’s witchcraft, I swear. I can tie a friendship knot – if I have a diagram and if I have the neckerchief lying flat on a table in front of me.
After the official welcome, we split into our patrols to spend five or ten minutes introducing ourselves, which three badges sum us up and what activities we were nervous about. Nelson didn’t really do that. We chatted, sure. But we didn’t really keep to the “Which badges are you?” theme. In fact, actually, fourteen or so people is a few too many and the chat only really got natural and onto the requested subject when we split into twos and threes.
With a slightly better idea of who everyone was (and who the self-appointed patrol leader was going to be), we went upstairs for our first session of the day: Craftivism with Charly. I don’t think there’s much actual activism in it, so feminist cross-stitch was definitely a better name for it. If you want to join in, it’s the We Can Do It! pattern from SonOfACrossStitch on Etsy. Anyway, it was quite a good choice for a first activity, to sit quietly and sew. Most people were capable of sewing and chatting simultaneously and that was good for getting to know people. Who’d brought their own pens and scissors and entire sewing kits, who could thread needles, whose mum had a business finishing other people’s embroideries, that sort of thing. I personally need about 90% of my concentration for cross-stitch, so I could more or less listen to what was going on around me but it’s hard to join in without completely losing track.
The sewing was the one activity that was going to take longer than the designated hour. That meant that our patrol, for the entire day, had something we could pick up and work on between sessions. I’d done all my light brown and about half my mid-brown by the time we left for the day, fitting a bit in at lunchtime, a bit before terrariums and a bit more after dance. But I’m getting ahead of myself!
Second activity was life drawing, in the sofa room. I wasn’t nervous about it, but having done a celebrity portrait the evening before in pursuit of my artist badge, I’d had a lovely stark reminder that I can’t draw! That didn’t matter so much. Rod, the teacher, gave us all a pile of paper in various sizes, colours and types and a box of materials – two pencils, some charcoal and chalk and some coloured pastels. It was then up to us, more or less, what we used when. I don’t know if it was because it was only the second session and it hadn’t warmed up in the room or whether it had never been the plan, but it wasn’t the unclothed life drawing we’d been expecting. Ziggi, our model, very much stayed clothed throughout, although she did take off her beautiful boots for one or two poses.
First we had five minutes to just draw. Rod didn’t look, he didn’t correct or criticise. It wasn’t about being good at drawing, it was about being comfortable drawing, relaxing and not worrying about the end result so much as the process. Then we had five two-minute drawings to push us further into that mindset. First, draw with your non-dominant hand. Then put another piece of paper over your paper and draw without being able to see what you’re drawing. Third, draw without taking the pencil off the paper. Fourth, draw Ziggi as a lot of geometric shapes. Fifth, give up on the lines, try to just draw shades and light, probably using the side of your charcoal. Those five little drawings were the worst ones I did in the entire session, but to be fair, they were very quick and they were meant to be about relaxing and settling in, rather than doing anything good.
Next we had ten minutes to draw Ziggi again, trying to keep in mind some of the techniques we’d used and to try to really look. That one wasn’t bad, exactly, but it had more Cruella de Ville about it than Ziggi. And finally, we had fifteen minutes. That one started out bad – I used my yellow sugar paper and my 6B pencil and I was tempted, a few minutes in, to give up and started again, which is something I growl at a bit when my Brownies ask to. So I carried on. I got out my charcoal and chalk to add shading and highlights and by the time fifteen minutes were up, it wasn’t terrible. It’s not high art and Ziggi really doesn’t need to see it but I no longer felt like I wished I could start again. In fact, I resolved to get some chalk and some coloured sugar paper and do a self-portrait at home in the same way. I like drawing on coloured paper!
Then it was lunchtime. Charly had had a delivery of Rebel mugs so she brought them along. I love an enamel mug, especially a non-white one and as it happened, my bottle tasted revoltingly of salt. I suspect it’s a side-effect of being washed with disinfectant and not rinsed properly. Anyway, I could tip my drink into the mug and that tasted a lot better! I continued with my cross-stitch until it was time to get back to activities.
Mechanics time! Kwikfit had come to do a basic car maintenance session, which featured a lot of tyres, a lot of “‘what to keep in the boot and what not to keep in the boot” (category 1: fluorescent jackets and a sealed bottle of water. Maybe a spare jumper. Category 2: a blanket, first aid kit and that tyre-repair liquid which has a short shelf-life and will be out of date when you want to use it). We did just about have time to take a wheel off and replace it, which is the bit I needed for my Mechanic badge. There wasn’t time for each of us to do a wheel but I was quick with my hand up, so I got to take the wheel off and then Alessandra put it back on. This one had locking wheel nuts but I’m pretty sure my fourteen-year-old Panda doesn’t. I do have a spare tyre hiding in the back, though. This wheel, on a Merc, was pretty heavy. Mine is a steel wheel rather than an alloy but it’s also a much smaller wheel. Anyway, what I took from that session was that if it’s humanly possible to avoid changing the wheel, avoid doing it. Call the AA or RAC or whoever. And if you do change it yourself, it’s to get you to the nearest garage where they can sort it all out properly (quote: “you are not a torque wrench”).
Oh, and we got a souvenir: it’s a trolley token but it’s also a (very rough guide) tyre tread checker: pop it in your tread, get down level with it and if you can see anything except green poking out, it’s time for new tyres.
Our fourth activity was terrariums, back upstairs, but with Tom this time. That’s Tom from Camp Wildfire, which also came about through the Rebel Badge Club. We caught up a little as we made the terrariums. Really, they only take about ten minutes so we did it as a chilled group activity (which had the bonus of keeping the instructions away from us as they advised far too much gravel and soil). We used a cork-on-a-stick and a little paintbrush to pat everything down and brush any stray soil from the sides, planted a little nerve plant in it, decorated it with stones and then most of them got completely shaken up on the train on the way home! Even taking it slowly and finishing with a group photo, we were still done in time to be first at the cake. It was the Book’s first birthday and Charly had made a birthday cake and, unwisely perhaps, mentioned that anyone else who wanted to bring a cake was welcome. Apparently there were forty-odd cakes between 70-80 people. The cake was meant to be for lunch and for the end but we had to have cake in every break and people were going back for seconds or thirds with no guilt whatsoever.
Last came the dance session. I’d signed up for “normal” intensity, rather than “low”, and yes, I was perhaps a little nervous. I’m not great with the coordination thing and my particular brand of fitness doesn’t extend to a forty-five minute dance-exercise class. Actually, it wasn’t so bad. There were no expectations. You could sit in a chair and just do the arm movements or you could just do the leg movements or you could sit out or whatever. My coordination failed at keeping the arms and legs together on a couple of the moves but I kept going! I kept going! I made it to the end! I did have to stare intently at Emma, the instructor, for the entire session and perhaps I danced about as well as Theresa May but I kept going until the end!
That was nearly it. I settled down on the floor to do some more sewing while people filtered in from their last sessions, got cake, sat down with new friends. Then Charly produced the official birthday cake and we had a group photo and then, I suppose, it really was over.
Except that for an event on this scale, there’s a certain amount of clearing up to do. A lot of the chairs had to be carried upstairs so we made a human chain and then Tom, Charly and I made a second chain to put them into a cupboard that just didn’t look big enough. The terrariums had made a lot of mess so I used that as an excuse to hang out upstairs and chat with Tom. He swept the worst of the gravel, moss and soil off the tables and I found some antibacterial wipes to clean them a bit. Charly’s friend’s dad, who seems to be in charge of the hall, was just pulling them down and carrying them off to be stored but they need to be clean! If someone had hired our Guide hall at the weekend and left the tables in that state, we’d be furious. Tom hoovered, I went back down to the kitchen and carried – because I’d had an entire day of being a Brownie and it was time for my leader instincts to kick in – and then we had five minutes to gossip outside before it was time for the gates to be locked.
Yes, it was a good day. Like Thinking Day, but in a better hall and with adults only. I’m not used to being a participant in this kind of event, and as Charly pointed out, neither are a lot of us. We’re not used to being told how to do things and we’re reasonable efficient, practical adults, so what would take a Brownie an hour takes us ten minutes. It was like Try Inspire Qualify all over again, in a way. The activities, the badges, being a Guide but not having any kids to worry about or entertain or help. I enjoyed it for a change but I still think I’m more accustomed to being on the other side of the table. And on that note, I can’t make it to Stockport, Charly, but how’d you like it if I came and ran fencing sessions at the February meet-up (if I’m not in Norway that weekend)?