I Am A Polar Bear

Over the last ten or fifteen years, Girlguiding has cultivated four flagship events, held simultaneously at anywhere between two and four of its Training & Activity Centres. The really big one is Wellies & Wristbands, a festival camp for Guides & Rangers, the 10 to 18-year-olds. Then came Magic & Mayhem, a circus-themed fun day and optional sleepover for Rainbows & Brownies (4-10). The newest, from 2019, was Fearless Fun, a weekend of adventurous activities for Brownies and Guides, and then there’s my personal favourite, Sparkle & Ice, a winter survival and camp for Guides & Rangers. I haven’t missed it once, either as a volunteer or taking my Rangers, not even 2021 when it didn’t happen, except in my own back garden. Back then it was in February, so we just squeaked 2020 in but lockdown got the 2021 edition. Fast forward to 2024 and I’m DIYing it again but for very different reasons. In the middle of 2023, Girlguiding announced out of the blue that it was selling off the TACs, in what comes across as an impulsive and bad idea to save some money. So now we have nowhere to hold these large-scale events.

I’m not missing Sparkle & Ice just because it isn’t happening. Last time I put up my tiny tent in the garden but we’re free now. At the real Sparkle & Ice you spend all day doing activities around the site and only go to the tent at bedtime. Doing it myself, I’d be in the tent pretty much all weekend so I thought I’d do it in style and opt for a shepherds hut. I prefer glamping in winter, it’s absolutely a winter activity for me. No one wants to sit in a hot tub in June (I don’t. I’ve tried it. Too hot).

So I put together a timetable and meal plan inspired by six trips to the real thing, filled a box with craft stuff, packed up my swimming bag and everything warm I own and headed off for the Happy Hare at Farmstead Glamping in North Dorset. I stayed at its sister hut, the Pleasant Pheasant, in June 2021 and fancied giving the other one a try. They share a field but whereas the Pleasant Pheasant is at the top, twenty yards from the car park (patch of gravel built for three cars at the end of a farm track), the Happy Hare is 200m away at the bottom of the field. A wheelbarrow is provided for transporting your luggage. I liked the idea of it being more remote but mostly I preferred its hot tub, which is a proper wood-sided two-person wood-fired hot tub. The Pleasant Pheasant has a more rustic outdoor bath – it’s the same as the one they visit out in the wilds in the ICEHOTEL episode of Amazing Hotels.

The Happy Hare is beautiful. It has a light greyish-purple theme inside and I especially loved the grey-purple dressing gowns hanging on the back of the bathroom door. Towels from grey through to purple, purple tea towels, purple bedding, a purple kitchen unit, all beautifully coordinated. Please don’t picture a headache-inducing shade of purple – this is very much the dusty sage green of the purple spectrum. I had a gas hob for cooking indoors, a hot plate on top of the woodburner, a wood-fired outdoor oven and a firepit, so plenty of options, although this is one thing June does better than the last weekend in November. The other thing June does better is seating. The Happy Hare has two low cupboards with cushions on for seats and there’s a folding table stowed away between them in the huge storage area under the bed. However, if you’ve put your luggage in there, it’s almost impossible to get the table in and out. If you haven’t put your luggage in there, it’ll be on your seat where it’s easy to access. So much easier in summer to just eat at the little bistro table in the shelter outside. The Pleasant Pheasant has a breakfast bar and two stools, which probably makes it much more practical for winter stays.

Before I even took my first wheelbarrow of luggage inside, I got on with the important job of lighting the hot tub. It could take two to three hours to heat up and once it was going well enough to only need another log or two every twenty to thirty minutes, then I could worry about moving in. I’m not a great fire lighter. It took two or three matches because at first I tried to light the screwed-up newspaper and kept missing but once I’d set fire to the firelighter, it went ok. I did panic that it was going out at one point and had to shove another few bits of newspaper and another handful of kindling in but after that, it was no problem.

I had my Sparkle & Ice traditional dinner of pasta cooked on the gas hob while I waited, put fairy lights around the hut to supplement the solar-powered LEDs that might not last the evening in grey November and put my camping lights outside. My friend Catherine gets these things advertised to her on Instagram all the time, whereas I’d never seen them until she sent me the screenshot, because it’s definitely something I was curious about. It’s a string of LED fairy lights that wind up into a plastic disc that also has lights in it. You charge the thing by USB and then you can use it as a portable charger, as a string of lights, as a lantern (it has a hook on the bottom) or as a combined string & lantern. It’s waterproof so you can string it up outside your tent or keep it inside. Having arranged it around the dining shelter next to the hot tub, I can vouch for its waterproof-ness (just don’t drop it in the hot tub), for its longevity (on for at least four or five hours two nights in a row) and for it making a good lantern – I wound it up and brought it in on Saturday night and used it in bed rather than crawl out and go for the main light switch. I’m astonished it didn’t target me on Instagram because it’s perfect for me and I’m a big fan.

When the hot tub was warm enough, I jumped in, only to find it was still chilly at the bottom, although the water’s surface was toasty. Eventually I jumped out and shoved two more logs in and that… was a mistake. Warm water became hot enough that I had to either stand up in it for the next two hours or lounge awkwardly with my legs hanging over the side. Sitting in the hot tub also made me realise the entire west side of Sturminster Newton, the nearby town, was laid out on the other side of the river, apparently only half a mile away. The Pleasant Pheasant feels a bit close to the car park and farm but it’s angled so it feels like you’re completely alone.

I didn’t really stick to my timetable. I had three crafts – a mini Christmas cross stitch, glass engraving and making some more nisse and only the cross stitch got done. I did watch Frozen on my tablet while I stitched – because Sparkle & Ice is a mostly-outdoor winter event, it has crafts and a cinema room to warm up in, so a film is a tradition and Frozen seemed to fit the theme. My outdoor activities, instead of climbing and archery and zipline, consisted of a very muddy walk where I was thwarted at every turn by the legacy of Storm Bert the previous weekend, and lighting the hot tub took the place of bushcraft. Firelighting is firelighting, whether you do it with twigs and a ferrous rod or with a pile of dried logs, shop-bought kindling, eco firelighters and a box of matches. I’m terrible at it either way.

I lit the hot tub at 1.30 on Saturday afternoon, had lunch while piling enough logs in that I didn’t have to disturb my own meal to put more on, and had it hot enough in just an hour and a quarter, which I idly discovered after shoving three more logs in the stove. It was hot all the way through when I got in but within twenty minutes, it was dangerously hot. I got out, put on my robe, and sat at the bistro table. I got my camp blanket and tripod for the now-traditional glamping blanket photoshoot. It was two full hours and getting dark before I could get back in, and only then because I trailed the hose in and topped it up with cold water. In hindsight, the moment I realised I overheated it, I should have closed the vents and let the fire go out but it didn’t occur to me, any more than it had on Friday night.

So, did it in any way resemble a DIY version of Girlguiding’s flagship winter event? Well, not really. Other than my lunch (a cheese sandwich in honour of the volunteers’ cry of “cheese or jam, tuna or ham” when you go to pick up the components of your packed lunch”, I didn’t do anything you’d do at the real thing. But it inspired me to spend a weekend camping glamorously in am uninsulated tin hut. Which is something I do most winters these days anyway. I couldn’t get my hands on another official Sparkle & Ice badge so I got a Pawprint Family Winter Camp fun badge in honour of the occasion instead.

And I’m being most unfair to call the Happy Hare uninsulated. I lit the woodburner around 5pm on Friday evening and fed it the three smallest logs in the woodstore. It made my hut cosy. It was still cosy when I dragged myself out of the cooling water at 11pm. It was too hot to even think about my fluffy pyjamas and far too hot to get under the covers. I did give up on the thin decorative cover somewhere around 5am and get into bed properly but normally at around 7am, no glasses on, I blearily light the woodburner to melt the ice on the inside of the windows and stay in bed until I can get out without risking hypothermia. In the Happy Hare, I got up at 7am and opened the window and when I got up properly an hour or two later, I threw open the door. I didn’t light that woodburner again on either Saturday night or Sunday morning. The Happy Hare just holds heat really well.

I think, having tried both, I prefer the Pleasant Pheasant. I like the layout and the location more. But the Happy Hare was warm and beautiful and I did enjoy my weekend away – although by the time I’d walked up the car park to retrieve the wheelbarrow in the drizzle on Sunday morning, done two trips to take everything back to the car – having not worn the entire half-wheelbarrow load of warm clothes – I was soaked with both rain and sweat and was a disgusting filthy bridge troll by the time I got home. After a Friday and Saturday of luxurious glamorous wafting from hut to hot tub, that transformation felt very abrupt. But I guess I come home from the real Sparkle & Ice feeling just as filthy and wet, so it’s all part of the experience.