Sparkle & Ice is my favourite of Girlguiding’s large-scale events. That’s partly because I’m a polar bear and I like things that are meant to be cold and/or wintery and partly because I like the weirdness of it. We don’t generally camp in the winter, because we’re not tough enough and the girls certainly aren’t and yet we hold this event every winter – and this year it’s happening simultaneously at four different venues, one of which I’ve never heard of.
This is the fifth Sparkle & Ice. In 2017, we took a few Rangers and Guides and it was cold and muddy, everyone cried, at least one went home and we vowed never to do it again. In 2018, I went as a volunteer, ran the archery all weekend and realised it was 1000% better than last year. So in 2019, we took just the Rangers. It snowed. Parents asked if it would be cancelled, as if it could be too cold for winter survival camp. In 2020, there was a named storm whirling overhead. In 2021, it didn’t happen but I did it at home because I wasn’t missing out. And in 2022, it moved from February to November, so we’ve missed two winters but we’ve only missed one event.
A quick overview: the camp runs from Saturday morning to Sunday lunchtime, with an optional Friday night camp. I did that in 2017 and that one I really will never do again. One night under canvas in winter is a novelty. Two nights is miserable. You do adventurous activities all day – there’s no schedule, it’s all drop-in. There are good filling hot meals, soup is prominent and there’s a closing ceremony on Saturday night – fireworks in 2017, which we listened to from the tent because it was too cold to go and watch them, but by 2019 that had become a laser show and we had a campfire in 2020. I bought a packet of sparklers and waved a couple of those around for my at-home version in 2021. There are more activities on Sunday but by then everyone’s cold and tired and probably damp; the tents need to be struck and camp needs to be packed up and we’re basically ready to go straight after breakfast.
Anyway, welcome to 2022. I was going as a volunteer this year, not having any Rangers right now, and that meant sleeping in the house. Up until a week before, I’d been planning to camp – because it’s not winter survival camp if you don’t camp – but when the info email came through, my resistance melted away. You know what, I’m going to be working, I’m going to be experiencing this camp 110% anyway. I can do that and sleep in the house. So I arrived on Friday afternoon, moved into my room, met my new roommate (who is half my age, literally, quite posh, boy-crazy and full of the joy of youth) and then went to seek a job. The pair of us were sent up to the campsite where the pre-pitched tents needed a clean before their occupants arrived. Some of them were muddy, some were wet, some just generally messy and the method we were to use was to take a clean white towel and clean and dry the floors. They wouldn’t stay clean or dry for long but in the face of a winter camp, groups would at least be pleased to find a dry home waiting for them. But the clean white towels! OK, they’ll be washed on a hot wash with bleach and no one will ever know what happened but know this: somewhere there’s a pile of towels that have been caked with mud and the evidence hidden.
Job 2 was to direct traffic. Get everyone parked neatly in a car park not really big enough for the job. Get the girls gathered outside the house. Get one leader to check in and collect the girls. The trouble was, even in fluorescent jackets, it was too dark to see us and plenty of cars will just ignore you. Then we had entire groups delayed on the motorway and one group that wasn’t delayed but just had a long way to travel. I’m not the outgoing extrovert type but I can fake it when I need to and I wanted to be the happy smiling face who’d greet every car excitedly and send everyone in the right direction and make them feel welcome and happy at least at the beginning. We went outside at about 4.30. Within half an hour it was dark and by the time the last of us came in about 8.40, it was very dark and pretty cold. Actually, it had been surprisingly not cold until quite late. A minibus came along and that seemed to mark the moment it suddenly got really cold and a heavy mist appeared but it was a good beginning. We had a volunteers’ meeting after that and were given our timetable. Now we knew what we were actually doing all weekend and who we were doing it with and we were finished for the evening, so I found a quiet-ish corner and tried to do a Finnish lesson and then went to bed.
It was a very comfy bed! However, I’m not a huge fan of sharing a room, even with the embodiment of youthful joy, and someone had turned the heating up to “approximately the surface of the sun” so by the time I got up on Saturday I could have gladly jumped off a jetty into a semi-frozen Finnish harbour. The poor campers were coming in to breakfast in layers and wellies and trying to warm up and I was sitting there in socks and a t-shirt trying to cool down.
Saturday’s first job was back on parking because most people would be coming either for the one night or as day visitors. We knew there was a coach coming and that arrived five minutes before my shift started. I was already out there. I got the coach into the car park, it turned round, we offloaded it onto every trolley and it was long gone before the real chaos started: leaders and parents trying to pack into the car park. We ran out of spaces so we made a second row, blocking in the people who were running the event and would be there all weekend with parents dropping off who’d be gone again in five or ten or thirty minutes. I tried, again, to gather everyone on the grass outside the house but parents wanted to stay with their kids in the car and leaders wanted to gather by their own cars or by the trolleys and I tried to point out that milling around the car park is an accident waiting to happen. Anyway, by about 10.30, we had everyone in except one last unit that didn’t need directing to the remaining spaces and I was free to go to my second job. I went back to my room for five minutes first for a snack and then to the shop – there would probably be ample time but might as well get it done while you’ve got a short gap. We’d been presented with our Sparkle & Ice 2022 badges at the meeting the night before but I wanted a Skills Builder badge I did with my Brownies this term (if I’ve done more work running the badge than they have completing the badge, I’ve definitely earned that badge myself) and I discovered, at last, Wellies & Wristbands 2020 badges. I missed that one at the time. Wellies went online at relatively short notice, obviously, and I partook but the badges were only available on the online shop and they sold out. When I was at Try Inspire Qualify, I looked in the shop just in case but nothing. I’d resigned myself to having missed that one. And then there they were! So now my badge collection is complete again!
Next up was Craft. That was easy. There were already three volunteers in the craft room and two participants. Saturday morning was dry and relatively warm and everyone knew it would rain later, so they were getting their outdoor activities in while they could. I found some embroidery thread in approximately the colours of Sparkle & Ice and used a loom to make a festival friendship bracelet, which is precisely the right length to tie very snugly three times around my wrist but far too long to be a looser double-wrap. The craft room was freezing. For the girls to see where it was and that it was open and welcoming, they’d left the doors open but the radiators don’t work and the heat comes from the pipes that link them, which means it warms up very slowly. That room was freezing!
I was glad to escape for lunch. Cheese or jam, tuna or ham. Grab a sandwich, grab a packet of crisps and a Penguin and a piece of fruit and get a cup of soup if you want it and then flee to find somewhere quieter to eat. I opted for the cinema, which was my next job. It’s an easy job. Put the correct DVD in the player and press play. Then you can leave. This was between films so I found a comfy seat at the back to eat my lunch and put the film on – Sing 2 – at 13:30, which was the start time advertised everywhere. No point putting on early if you’ve got groups planning their day around it starting at 1.30. Then I could have gone back to craft but it was cold in there and I’d done the craft that I was really interested in, so I sat at the back and half-watched the film while reading on my Kindle. I started with a book that’s going to be a later Blogmas post and then ended up picking up three of the Trebizon books, girls’ boarding school books I first read when I was about eight. It’s not a real cinema, it’s just a room with a projector and some seats and blankets but it’s a good place to shelter from the cold or rain or to just decide you’d rather relax for a while than fit in as many adventurous activities as humanly possible.
After that came the quiz. It was a drop-in quiz, which is a difficult thing to arrange. We had four rounds of 15 questions and you could come for the lot or you could leave after as many rounds as you wanted or you could come in late, join in the next round, stay as long as you like. Most people stayed for the whole thing, with a couple who came in for the last two rounds. We planned to run it round for as long as we had but by the time we’d done four rounds, one complete circuit, it wasn’t worth starting again and anyway, almost all the quizzers had already done round one. So we called it a day and went off for early dinner.
My evening activity was the chillout zone. That’s another freezing room with chairs and puzzles and games. People drifted in gradually and I found myself sitting with a group of Rangers from Swansea who were trying to sing but a bit uncertain of the words at times. I filled them in and then I joined them and long story short, we both went home with some new songs in our repertoire. I’d skipped the campfire because 1) it was raining by then and 2) it clashed with the chillout zone but I got my campfire singing anyway. I like campfire singing. I like that even though I’m from a very insular district that doesn’t mix with anyone else, I still know the same songs as a group I’ve never met before. They were so friendly and welcoming and polite and just nice that you almost wonder if they’re being sarcastic but I’m 99.9999% they weren’t. They’re just so nice that you don’t recognise them as teenagers – you know, teenagers are selfish and self-obsessed and only interested in TikTok and all that jazz. No. Some of them – plenty of them – are really nice people and their leader should be very proud of them.
And that was Saturday. Saturday night was even hotter because it was wet and windy outside and our window blew closed, which meant we didn’t even get a hint of fresh air overnight. Up early enough for breakfast and to get everything out of the room before work. My Sunday job was to supervise the survival in space room but I was there more than ten minutes early and figured instead of standing around waiting, I might as well see if any of the units needed help packing. Then everyone was so busy packing that no one was ready for activities at nine so I carried on helping and in the end, I arrived at survival in space only when everyone was pretty sorted, just in time to fold the chairs and tables and pile the space stuff up for someone else to deal with. I hauled carts around, carried bags, helped take tents down, folded groundsheets, hauled more carts around and generally tried to make departure as easy for the leaders as possible. I think volunteers should have been actively timetabled for this – no one was ready to leave the packing until at least 11, which meant either no activities for the kids or leaders doing all the work. Everyone seemed to have had a good time, or a good enough one, anyway. No one was soaked through, no one was frozen, no one was grumpily declaring “never again!”. I did have a few people attempt to justify to me, the one in the fluorescent jacket, the arbitrator of all things camp, how they’d done things (we’ve packed too much / I know we should/shouldn’t have… / we don’t normally…. and so on) but I’m not there to judge your camp skills. I’m not there to tut at how much you’ve brought. I’m there to help! I’m there to make your weekend as easy and smooth as possible! I reassured many people that you can’t have too much stuff for winter camp, that it’s better to have too much than too little and the only way you’ve done it wrong is if you wished you’d brought extra or this or that because you were cold, wet and/or miserable. Everyone did great! Oh, I’m sure there’s some elderly Brown Owl type who’d tell them they’d done it wrong but I’m not that type and neither are any of the staff or volunteers.
Everyone vanished surprisingly quickly. The volunteers had lunch in a surprisingly empty restaurant and then we divided up the list of pack-down jobs. Mostly it was collecting the stuff from the various rooms and taking it either to the event store or the resource room. Bring back the tea and coffee from all the buildings and the campsite sheds. Bring back the urns – the one on the main campsite was still hot so I left it. The body of it was too hot to pick up and that meant it was full of hot water. Nowhere to drain it and any attempt to carry a large very hot metal vat of boiling water was going to end up with me in hospital so I unplugged it, left it to cool down and one of the instructors made a note on the board that it needed to be fetched later. We must have started at about quarter to one and I think we were finished by about two. The instructor team collected in all the bunting, windmills, lights and sails and were setting it up to dry so we didn’t have to worry about that. I hauled a projector into the stores – that was fun, those things don’t collapse and if you carry it in the middle to keep it balanced and not scraping on the floor, you can’t physically reach the doors – and there were five doors between the cinema room and the store where it needed to be left. I was glad to see a second projector already in there, every bit as tall as mine and also not collapsed. Clearly they don’t collapse and you just need to handle them very awkwardly.
All in all, it went very smoothly. Easiest Sparkle & Ice I’ve ever done and actually, the least cold one too. Once I’d finished with the car parking, I spent all of Saturday inside so I didn’t even get rained on. Ok, Friday afternoon and evening and all of Sunday were outside but it wasn’t that cold. It was muddy by Sunday, though. One of the leaders introduced me to “her swamp” which was right next to her small tent. Not underneath – that would have been unpleasant. I stood in it and it was ankle-deep. I had to shove several carts through deep puddles and quagmires and rescue stuff that fell off carts into the puddles but between the milder November weather and the constant running around the site, I never actually got cold. Wish I’d taken more photos. I’ll leave you with this one, which is from the official photographer – or at least from the Foxlease Facebook page, which I didn’t take but shows you what camping actually looked like on Saturday before it all got muddy.
I’m hoping to have Rangers to take next year but if I don’t, I can quite happily go as a volunteer again. It’s far easier than going as a participant!