It’s been a while since I did a Girlguiding post (last November when we went to Sparkle & Ice, in fact!) so it’s definitely time to do another. Last weekend, I went to GLOW!
GLOW is Girlguiding South West’s new flagship event for girls. With the selling-off of our Training & Activity Centres, our big national events – Wellies & Wristbands, Magic & Mayhem, Sparkle & Ice etc – have been wiped out. Maybe they’ll come back with new homes next year but for now, this is Region’s attempt to give our girls a big event. I wanted to take my Rangers but how do you get four teenagers two hours up the road from one rural place to another? I dithered over going as a volunteer. And then Region very specifically asked for people to come and run campfire singing and that seemed to be my sign.
It’s only a one-day event, 10am on Saturday until 6pm but because the 100+ volunteers who were running the 70-odd activities were coming from all over the region, which is Surrey to the Scillies, Gloucester to Guernsey, we could come up on Friday evening and leave on Sunday morning if we wanted. My plan was to stay Saturday night because I thought I wouldn’t be in the mood to drive two hours after a full day at the campfire. I’d have liked to drive up Friday night but we had boat club. But on the day, it was too windy. We didn’t cancel exactly – we swapped from kayaking to raft-building, which we do closer to shore where it’s more sheltered but apparently it was too windy even for that, so rafts were built inside and then.. just dismantled, I guess. So, having spent the week watching my weather apps, I packed for Friday night and did indeed end up driving up there earlier than expected.
I was in the Lovell Centre – initially in the First Aid room but when the first aiders got annoyed that both their rooms were occupied and they couldn’t set up, I got moved to a four-bunk room with the deputy region chief commissioner. If that sounds a bit intimidating, Liv can’t be more than 24 years old and we’d been emailing for months about borrowing our county archery stuff and she makes a great roommate, if a bit of a messy one. No complaints about the roommate. The Lovell Centre, though… put it this way: apparently if a fire breaks out, you’re supposed to get everyone out and then… maybe just wait fifteen minutes before phoning the fire brigade.
Friday was moving in, having dinner, having the briefing (“if there’s a major emergency, we evacuate to the Severn Field at the far end of the campsite. If there’s a minor emergency, phone the campsite’s main reception and they’ll handle it. Don’t let the girls run around the campsite”) and then the archery team went to look at the corner of the field where that was happening. I was backup for archery – yes, that was a surprise to me too. Archery was supposed to have five volunteers plus Liv (when she wasn’t being deputy chief commissioner) but two had had to pull out. If they needed someone, I was available to be called on, so I went to see where it was all actually happening.
On Saturday morning, we had breakfast (and I met a cat) and then, since I wasn’t wanted at the campfire until about 9am, I went straight to the archery field. Apart from the fact that we needed to set up curtains and targets and boundaries, we also needed to move a set of tents and gazebos semi-permanently left there by a local Girlguiding division. Sorry, Severndale. Archery needed to be up in the corner, otherwise you’re risking sending arrows at passers-by, so the first job was to move those tents. We unpegged them, walked them into the middle of the field and pegged them back down again.
This was where the first interesting personality appeared. No, everyone’s interesting, I just mean… what do I mean? A Girlguiding celebrity, such as they are? She says this, as if Liv isn’t already the second-most important person in the entire region. Anyway, we were looking at the tents when I heard someone say something along the lines of “I guide in Bournemouth” and I turned around to say something like “Oh, hi neighbour, I’m in your county!” when I realised it was region ambassador, Rainbow unit helper and travel/lifestyle YouTuber Brogan Tate. I knew “several” of the region ambassadors would be there but I wasn’t expecting them at 8am and I certainly wasn’t expecting them to help haul stuff around the campsite for us.
We put the curtain up to catch arrows and stop them going into the woods. That was a bit… well, put it this way. Fences were stood on, trees were climbed, brambles were climbed into, ropes were thrown into trees and then pulled down again. And then the real archery people – ie not me, the backup – went to fetch their targets and arrows and I went to my campfire.
This was where I spent the entire day! We were going to have groups passing through all day. We had a list of about 60 songs but with everyone coming and going and no one staying for more than about six songs, I doubt we got through twenty different songs in the entire day, and that’s counting a single rendition each of Barges and Land of the Silver Birch. We sang the Crazy Moose, Let Loose and Joe so many times that by lunchtime, they were all on the “no more!” list.
We were supposed to be on a rota, with three people taking it in turns to lead while one person tended the fire and two people had a break, switching every hour, but in the end, our youngsters did a lot of the singing and didn’t touch the fire (they missed their formative camping and firelighting years to the plague so they didn’t really know what to do), I tended to back up more than lead and I definitely kicked the fire and added logs to it a lot. We had to keep a small campfire going for the best part of nine hours! We needed it to never go out but we also needed it to never get big and that’s quite an art. We had a lot of wood but we also had a trolley to go and fetch more but it turns out we barely used half of what we had. Scouts apparently set campfires like arsonists so everyone was a bit surprised at how small and tidy and perfect our campfire was, how little wood we burnt and how clean we kept the campfire circle.
Let’s talk visitors. Brogan came by. As the social media ambassador, her job was to document the day on Instagram stories and she said we made her job easy for her. We had a fire, we had singing, we had quite a big group who was willing to pose for photos by the fire. But also, one of our youngsters had made Taylor Swift-style friendship bracelets with GLOW beads and so she gave one to Brogan and she took photos of all the matching bracelets together. She also came by and filmed us singing Campfire’s Burning, which is a proper traditional campfire song (the kind that doesn’t make my mum say “You sing some weird things these days”) and we also happened to have a fairly large group and were singing it as a four-part round at the time. Honestly, she couldn’t have come at a better time. Imagine if she’d come by and filmed us doing Joe!
We also had Racheal, the region chief commissioner, come by. I’ve known Racheal since she was county commissioner helping my Guides out with a difficult situation six or so years ago, so she’s not intimidating either. But she brought the deputy chief guide with her! You know how the Scouts have (had!) Bear Grylls as Chief Scout? Well, we have a chief guide too (style guide says no capitals on job titles, for some reason). Ours isn’t a celebrity, though. Ours is just a leader who’s come up through the hierarchy and knows how it all works and what it’s all like, which is far better than a celebrity parachuted in, but doesn’t have quite the same prestige to outsiders. We also have a deputy chief guide and an assistant chief guide and the deputy was at GLOW. Her name is Sally Kettle and I was really taken by her.
Our youngsters were practising firelighting with ferrous rods and steel and cotton wool, and the teacher offered the thing to the professional adventurer and said “Do you want to have a go?”. Yes, Sally Kettle is a proper adventurer and I said so (and she seemed impressed that I knew that! I won the approval of the deputy chief guide! I want to be her when I grow up!). She promptly set fire to her cotton wool and then helped teach our youngsters how to do it too. We gave her a friendship bracelet too and she sent her own badges up to us later on, since she didn’t have them with her right then. These days, anyone at county commissioner level or above seems to have their own badge – the chief guide and deputy chief guide have diamond-shaped ones with crossed hands that say “the [deputy] chief guide met me!”, the SWE region team have a big “thank you from the region team” badge (I got this at Try Inspire Qualify nearly two years ago, so didn’t add it to my collection today) if you go to a region event where one of the team is present, and I know my county commissioner now has her own badge too.
Plus all the region ambassadors have their very own badge that you get if you either do a session with them or go to an event with them, so one of our youngsters, who’s on Girlguiding’s central communications team (read: makes TikToks for them), having filmed a snippet for a TikTok with Brogan, then went and begged for badges for the entire campfire team. I also spied Rear Admiral Jude, who was talking about the Royal Navy but there’s no organic way to really chat with her as a passing leader and you definitely can’t go “Hi, I’m on the campfire, can I have your badge?”. Author Holly Webb was there too and I saw her too but same. You can’t just tick them off and collect their badges like they’re Pokemons without having some kind of real interaction with them. Laura and Debbie, our two engineering ambassadors were also around but I never found them, let alone made an excuse to chat to them and get badges from them.
And on the subject of badges… we knew we’d be getting a GLOW event badge. Those were delivered after lunch by the volunteer in charge of our field, in envelopes with thank you cards and the region thank you, you’re a star, badge. Last, Woodhouse Park, the Scout camp where all this was happening, has its own badges so I popped to the shop and grabbed one. But they also have small badges for the different activities. I have a ton of this kind of thing from Foxlease but those were huge and Woodhouse’s are tiny and I love them. So I got a campfire badge too. But one of our team got to the shop before me and discovered the activity badge and brought us all back a random one, so I also have a Jacob’s ladder badge. So that’s a total haul of 7 badges when I was expecting just two, the event one and the campfire one.
Yes, there’s not a lot to say about the campfire. We sang the same songs on repeat for the best part of eight hours. I like campfire singing. I like it in itself. I like the effect it’s had on my confidence over the years (the me of 17 years ago, the very beginning of my guiding career, couldn’t have led campfire singing even within my own unit!) and what I particularly like is that here are hundreds of people, from four-year-old Rainbows up to veteran leaders, from all over the region, all over the country and at other events, sometimes all over the world, and you all know the same songs. There’s no central Girlguiding song directory. There’s no national training. And sure, there are local variants. People will always sing slightly different tunes and slightly different words but essentially, you all know the same songs. Any two Guides can sit down at a campfire together and there will be something that they can both sing together.
We also had a few leaders who said things like “we don’t sing in our unit so we’re hoping to learn some songs to take back” and I love those! Campfire singing is such a great community thing and it’s amazing to get to put someone’s foot on the first rung of the ladder. Sometimes it’s because they’ve come in as a leader without the background of having been a young member and learnt this when they were a Guide. Sometimes it’s because their area just isn’t into singing. Sometimes it’s because they’re too shy and self-conscious – because singing in public is scary. Top tip there, mess it up badly. Ten or so years ago, I sang I Am a Pizza with my Guides. It’s a repeat-after-me song which just keeps getting higher and I started too high. We kept going but I was laughing too much to sing, my Guides were laughing too much to sing and I’ve never been shy since. I’m sure none of the Guides who were there have been either. People worry that they can’t sing well enough and you don’t need to be a good singer! Many songs don’t strictly even have tunes. Many of them are just shouty. Most of them, it’s quite enough to just be part of the group and to feel the joy of singing together.
But if you’re new to campfire singing and you’d like to do more of it, I’m going to update my songbook over the next couple of weeks with all the new songs I’ve learned and then I’ll pop the pdf up here. Download it, print it, scribble on it, do what you want with it. Let it be your first step into singing. We had one leader who said she doesn’t mind singing and she knows lots of songs but she just can’t remember them to get started. Songbook! If you can get your girls to learn them, soon it’ll be the older girls teaching the younger girls and that’ll keep going as long as you keep singing and the leader hardly has to know the songs at all. That’s my two top tips for campfire singing. Have a songbook and make a total idiot of yourself to completely smash and obliterate the ice.
The plan to stay overnight on Saturday fell by the wayside. Campfire singing is intense on your voice but we spent the day in the shade in the woods and we had plenty of sitting time, either between groups or during songs we didn’t want to sing (I don’t do Get Loose, it’s too dancy and I can’t dance). So although I was tired enough to just sprawl all day on Sunday, I wasn’t too tired to drive home after all. And honestly, the door to our room in Lovell had glass panels and the corridor has a light on a motion sensor and so trying to sleep on Friday light was like having a floodlight shone on you every ten minutes. I couldn’t take a second night of it, so home I went. Home to wash the campfire smell out of my uniform and out of my hair and gloat over the badges and write down all the new songs.
Next up: county camp (well, division camp that was advertised on the county website and I know there’s at least one unit going that’s not that division) but whether or not it gets it own post depends on how it goes.