Last year, one of my favourite YouTubers, Beau Miles, did a series called “Twelve Days of Christmas Newness” which started before Christmas but didn’t finish until early April. I liked the idea. In fact, after the pain that was Blogmas last year, I borrowed the idea, in that I’d do a Christmas/winter series called Twelve Days of Christmas. This is day three and I’ve stolen even more directly: this is my Twelve Days Weeks of Newness.
I liked the idea of trying new things. I liked the idea of adding a certain element of adventure into my life via the medium of new things. But also, the Rebel Badge Club had a quarterly challenge badge back in Q2 which included this clause:
Once a week, for the 12 week you’re doing this badge, do something you’ve never done before. Big or small, 12 new things over 12 weeks.
At the time, I was still dithering over what to do for 12 Days of Christmas, had got as far as “do something like Beau” and no further. This was absolutely providential. Get a badge and a day of Christmas, all in one, and some adventure that might not otherwise happen. Actually, quite a bit of it would have happened anyway. I opened a new Notion calendar, created the twelve weeks of the challenge and set about filling them in.
As you’ll see, I had some biggish adventures and some very small ones. I had some outdoorsy things, some things that wouldn’t normally appear on this blog and some things I ended up adding in as a kind of emergency.
Week one: try a new food
I started small. I tried a nectarine. I have an eating disorder called ARFID – if all goes to plan, I’ll have written a blog post about it by now and if I have, it’ll be linked – but in short, I have such a restricted diet that pretty much everyone hates me. I thought eating something new definitely counted as trying something new, but it had to be something I could eat. No point deciding to sit down in front of a plate of medium-rare steak. We all know I can’t even touch that. So I figured I could eat fruit, if I could find something I’ve never tried before and basically, there were nectarines in Lidl that day.
I was never going to just take a bite out of it, so I attempted to cut it in half and cut it into pieces. That turned out to be more difficult than I expected – there’s a great big stone in the middle and the nectarines were all badly bruised, so finding a nice bit was tricky but the bit I did get was… well, it was wet and squishy and tasted vaguely sweet. I’m not a big fan of soft squishy things. I like things like apples and toast and candy canes, because they crunch. Things that are squishy… well, I tried it. I didn’t hate it but I definitely didn’t love it and I didn’t finish it, although that’s partly because it was bruised and damaged.
It’s a small start but it’s a start: I’ve tasted something new (so take that, everyone who’s ever asked “Have you ever just tried…?”).
Week two: blacksmithing
I’ve already written an entire post on this back in nearly-real time several months later when I gave up on any hope of receiving the photos so that’s linked right here.
The blacksmithing day was something I already had booked in before 12 Weeks of Newness became a thing, so there was no need to exercise much imagination to find something to do in the second week. I’m writing each of these as I go along so it doesn’t mean a lot if I say blacksmithing is my favourite new thing so far but…. it’s my favourite new thing so far! I like making things, I like adding hand-made stuff to my outdoors/camping kit, I like having fun weekends to talk about at the Monday meeting and I like discovering that things I expected to be hard work were more enjoyable than they were hard work.
Week three: sarsaparilla
I don’t know what I originally had planned for week three but it was another new food week. My boss had done a couple of work trips earlier in the year and had brought home presents for us. It had taken a while but he’d sent mine via a local colleague and we finally met up on the Thursday of week two. Well, I’d already done a new thing for week two so I kept the present, which turned out to be a bottle of sarsaparilla, until Saturday, when week three began.
I was dubious. I’m not a foodie. I’m as far from a foodie as you can get. My other local colleague said that she’d tried sarsaparilla and it’s kind of like Vimto or Ribena, only sort of spicy. Its shade of Coca-Cola brown wasn’t particularly appealing but I tried to imagine it was dark purple and ignore the smell and I tried it. Spices plus lovely fruity drink sounded ok. It wasn’t terrible. “Spicy Vimto” is not how I’d describe it, though. It had something of the flavour of dead tree bark and honestly, it had zero fruitiness. I almost wonder if it would be better if it was fizzy – this from someone who thinks fizzy Vimto is revolting…
Week four: burlesque, screenprinting, samba drumming and sign language choir
I went to the fourth Big Rebel Meet Up where there are always four or five activities which are meant to be fun but also to be counted towards various badges. We started the day with a big group samba band – I got to play a medium-large green drum which I hit to the pattern of “Have you got a dog? Great big dog!” while the rest of the meet-up played bigger yellow and red drums and slightly smaller blue ones, tamborims, cowbells, maracas and agogo bells. We were slightly off the beat which made a lot less sense once we got started. We played together, Paul taught us several breaks and a fine time was had by all.
After lunch we divided into four Patrols to do four activities in groups of about 17 instead of nearly 80 all at once. I’m pretty sure I’ve made peppermint creams before (it went really badly this time – we suspect partly because it was an untested vegan variety but partly because we had to do some maths to figure out what we needed to put in) but burlesque was definitely new and so was screenprinting and sign language choir. Burlesque was done in full t-shirts, hoodies and jeans but we had feather boas to wave around and one of Nelson Patrol pleaded to the instructor that we were all “physically anxious”. Screenprinting… well, my design was beautiful but perhaps too intricate, despite me carefully cutting around all the elements. Perhaps with some thicker card, stuck to the pennant, it might have worked, but the paint spread in a lot of places. Once I got home and it was properly dry, I embroidered around it on the suggestion of some of my Patrol to bring the details back out and I liked the mixed media effect. Finally, we did sign language choir. I learned my sign alphabet when I was a Guide but progressing beyond that to interpreting a song and learning even two verses and a chorus was… well, we only had about an hour and it had to be done quite quickly.
Week five: the opera
I went to the opera in Paris! Again, this one has its own blog so I’m not going to go on about it but my first opera definitely earned its place in 12 Weeks of Newness. I wondered if I’d hate it – I listened to the music in advance and cringed at some of the… I don’t know the word for it, but when a woman sings really high and it werbles up and down in a way that pierces eardrums. Like people think they have to do on X Factor. Anyway, there was none of that and I was so taken by the madness of it that I think I almost forgot it was an opera. It’s just like going to see a musical, except it’s a very specific musical style which makes it highbrow instead of populaire. I don’t think I’ll have mentioned it, because there’s no reason for it to appear on the blog, but I went to a second opera in September – London’s Royal Opera House is putting on a new Ring Cycle and I rushed up there to see the first part, Das Rheingold. The ROH was much hotter and much less comfortable than the Bastille, I have to say. Prettier but I know which one felt nicer to be in.
Week six: Paris Catacombs
Because my weeks run Saturday to Friday – April 1st was a Saturday and so I take it from there – my week six new thing was the very next day and it was the Paris Catacombs. Never done it before. Never walked in the empire of death and probably never will again. Again, this one has its own blog. New stuff is dual-purpose – I get a blog out of it and I get to count it in my twelve new things in twelve weeks, which means this post is a bit of a listicle/clickbait at times. Yes, it was a bit weird and creepy. We got our bags searched at the end in case we’d stolen any bones and I think that’s the bit that creeps me out the most, that there are clearly people who think it’s ok to take actual human bones as souvenirs.
Week seven: kayak on kayak rescue
Weeks one to six came about fairly naturally but as week six wore on, I looked at my plan a little anxiously, given that it was blank thereafter. My plan to do a public naked swim at the old pool in Helsinki during week 9 was scuppered by said pool being closed from April to August for renovations and now I was going to have to actively seek out new things for the last six weeks.
In the end, week seven came about quite naturally. I took my Rangers to the boathouse and one of them filled up with water within minutes. Well, I know in theory how to drain a kayak with me having to get out of mine but today I put it into practice. It’s very awkward, especially when you’re in a closed boat without a spraydeck and therefore have to get it over the deck and not over the cockpit and when your partner is an eleven-year-old who isn’t really strong enough to heave a full boat out of the water upside down. We did it satisfactorily enough that we could carry on but it filled up again pretty quickly – she was too big for the boat, I suspect. Some of them – the Dagger Dynamos in particular – have to be left to the tinies. I originally named this “draining a kayak at sea” but having completed my Paddlesport Safety & Rescue training since then, I now know this is actually a kayak rescue, despite the child in question only having to stand up in ankle-deep water while we did it.
Week eight: planting potatoes
This week I planted potatoes! I know, it’s not that exciting but I’ve had plenty of exciting newnesses so far.
I’m quite the master of herbs, carrots, tomatoes, onions and so on but potatoes are a very different beast. I’d left the seed potatoes in eggboxes on a windowsill for several weeks to “chit”, which seems to mean “sprout”, but honestly, they’d already done that when I bought them and they didn’t seem to have changed much by the time I finally decided to give up on that and to just plant them. I have a four-storey potato tower so I planted them in there, six to a container, stacked them up, gave them lots of water and left them for the time being. I was prepared to cover them up again when they’d sprouted four or so inches above the soil. I wasn’t expecting that to be less than a week later. Oh, these things grew like wildfire!
Week nine: Finnish sauna/korvapuusti
I was in Helsinki this week and so I’m counting my first proper Finnish sauna and in case a specific type of sauna isn’t new enough, I had my first korvapuusti. Yes, I’ve never eaten a cinnamon roll of any nationality, so I wasn’t sure what I was going to make of it. It was very sweet and just spicy enough for me to notice. It was also far too big to finish. I’ve since eaten a couple more. They’re not going to become a staple in my diet but to have added a new thing at all is quite the triumph for my ARFID. But the sauna experience was new too. I’ve been in saunas at Icelandic spas and at spa evenings but they’re not quite the same as they are in the country that invented them. It felt more like a ritual to be taken seriously than merely a really hot room.
Week ten: getting my toenails done/applying to be a region ambassador
This nearly happened back in week nine but luckily for Twelve Weeks of Newness, I forgot. Well, I partly forgot. Owing to the complete and utter lack of booking confirmation and requirement to pay, I didn’t think it had gone through. Anyway, what I did was gt my toenails done! I’ve cut and filed and painted them myself for my entire life but I thought getting my nails done would definitely be something new. I went for toenails just because but it turns out that was a good decision because I’d completely forgotten I’d had my fingernails done for my sister’s wedding ten years ago almost to the month, so that wouldn’t have actually been new. I went for gels – at the moment that the nice lady knelt in front of me, I had a panic that “gel” might mean creating artificial toenails but it’s not, it’s just special nail varnish that’s cured with a UV light and it lasts forever. Or at least until it grows out, which is a good few months. I went for a light purple with a holographic glitter topcoat and it was glorious.
The second wasn’t a deliberate decision to do something new but I saw that Girlguiding South West were looking for region ambassadors, preferably with their own areas of expertise, so I applied to be their adventure/outdoors ambassador. I never heard anything, not even an acknowledgment of receipt. Well, that was a bit of a theme this week. Try again next year? A month or so later, I applied to be a ShePaddles ambassador and while they turned me down, they did let me know they’d received the application and they did email me to say I hadn’t been picked, so either they’re just better at this than Region or my application never actually made it to them.
Week eleven: trying an apple & cinnamon turnover
I thought something new would come up naturally during the course of Rebel Fest, the first online Rebel Badge Club meet up but somehow, it didn’t. I enjoyed it, I listened to a lot of talks, I made a lot of notes, especially about expedition first aid and I accidentally took part in a Zoom quiz from the bath – well, they’d all been webinars rather than open meetings but this one changed, literally at the last minute. I suppose that’s something new, taking part in a Zoom call under the circumstances.
What I eventually did, at the last minute, was buy some pastries to take back to my tent on a camping trip. I’ve never eaten an apple & cinnamon turnover. Technically, I still haven’t. I like apple. I quite like cinnamon. I do not like apple cooked until it’s a kind of squelchy sauce. The korvapuusti was a success but the apple & cinnamon turnover – nope. Trying a new food is a pretty handy thing to throw in when you realise you don’t have anything new to do this week. Where are we up to? Four of the eleven weeks so far? Never say I don’t try things.
Week twelve: parents’ meeting
I ran my first parents’ meeting for Guide camp! Well, in this case it was Ranger camp. I’ve attended many in my time and I’ve put a word in here and there but this was the first one where I was in charge. Oh, it’s terrifying! I thought I was reasonably accustomed to public speaking – and this was a small group of just four parents – and to explaining what was going on.
But it was terrifying. I gabbled, I forgot important details, I waved bedding rolls and forms at people and it absolutely did not go as I hoped. I got all my paperwork in, I actually got to meet the parents for the first time and from December’s point of view (it’s actually late August; I’m trying to get ahead), it all worked. We went to camp.
Week thirteen: organising a local Rebellion meet up
I’d done the twelve weeks but I still had another week of June. Months are not conveniently made up of four weeks and three months equalled thirteen more or less full weeks, so I counted another new thing. I ran my first local Rebellion meet up. That is, the Rebel Badge Club has small local “Rebellions” currently organised mostly by county. A particularly local Rebel offered a community allotment, six or so people were keen and so on the hottest day of the summer, we gathered for a fencing session.
Mostly we used the pipe lagging, for no other reason than that it was too hot to put on the helmets required for the “real” (plastic) swords, although we did have a quick go with those and for the photos. I’ve never taught adults before. I’ve never taught total stranger adults before. Ok, most of the Guide groups I do fencing with are strangers but this was both non-guiding and strangers. It was good! By the time this is published, I might even have done a second session.
And so that was thirteen weeks of newness! It was a nice mixture of things I was going to do anyway, because my life is apparently full of adventures and new experiences, and foods that I tasted for the sake of finding something new. I don’t think there’s anything quite as utterly random as some of Beau’s experiences (running a marathon inside a hotel; kayaking on snow) but I think there’s some quite good stuff in there. I’d recommend it. Maybe take it as a New Year’s Resolution, to try something new every month or at whatever interval makes sense to you. Add some adventure to your life, add some new things to your life.