OK, when I say “camp”, I mean what my previous Guides called “indoor camp” and current Brownies calls “a sleepover”: a Brownie residential of one night at a Scout-owned campsite in indoor accommodation with bunk beds. “Brownie camp” is more succinct though. It’s 9.30pm on Sunday night, we sent our little angels home eight and a half hours ago and I’m currently struggling to keep my eyes open for longer than ten minutes at a time in the bath so obviously it’s time to write about the experience.
Birds don’t carry rabies
I got bitten (insert “pecked” if you prefer) by a crow this morning. It was badly tangled in the netting of a kids’ football goal and took two leaders to get it free, in the course of which I got a nick from a surprisingly sharp peak. Poor birdie, it was very angry but it flew off despite dented feathers. I washed the cut in soap and water and wiped it with a wound cleaning wipe, then hunted up NHS advice. Wash it, watch for infection and “check your risk of getting tetanus and rabies”. Well, I seem to be fully vaccinated against tetanus although I’ll probably send a message to the doctor in the morning to check and it turns out rabies is only carried by a few bats in the UK – and only by mammals. Somehow I never had cause to discover that.
Watermelon is a favourite fruit
Tawny Owl put watermelon on the shopping list and I shook my head. I’d have apples, oranges and bananas, not watermelon, and how am I supposed to cut one up, anyway? Well, she was right. The bananas and oranges were largely untouched and the Brownies went through the watermelon like locusts, despite initial misgivings when it turned out to be yellow inside.
Sleepovers just aren’t a thing for these kids
I knew they weren’t as much of a thing as when I was their age but it’s simply not a thing they do. And not through safety concerns – Barn Owl, whose oldest daughter is a Brownie, told me of at least two families of friends she’d trust Flossie with but they wouldn’t actually do it. Another Brownies’ older sister, aged ten, had a friend stay over recently – but said friend’s mother stayed over too. Apparently the belief is that “they’re not old enough” to stay over even with people they implicitly trust. In just six years, these kids could legally have a home of their own!
Some Scout campsites have ovens that feel like nuclear reactors
I was QM (quartermaster, in old money; caterer in new) for the first time which meant it was my job to cook. That meant dealing with the oven. First, the door and serving hatch had to closed, lest I incur a £50 callout fee for setting off the fire alarm (and the notice on the door assured me I would), so I was sealed alone into the kitchen. Then I had to switch on the extractor fan, with a giant outdoors-style grey switch and then I had to turn a key to activate the gas. Then a light on a panel would flash red for up to 90 seconds before turning green. If it didn’t, I had to switch everything off and start again. Once it was green, I had to open the double oven doors, get down on my knees and lean into its cavernous interior to light the gas at the back, while holding down the knob for at least a minute, preferably while closing the doors against the enormous heat with the other hand. This is terrifying to have to do alone the first time.
Even Tesco cheap hot chocolate is nice with the usual water/milk ratio reversed
We had a tub of absolute basic hot chocolate, meant to be stirred into boiling water to make a thin, slightly oily liquid vaguely reminiscent of chocolate with enough milk to make it palatable. But Tawny Owl made it with a base of milk and just enough boiling water to make it pleasantly warm and it was surprisingly nice.
You can have ice cream on camp
I’ve never had ice cream on camp before but indoor camp means having a freezer, so I picked up three tubs of ice cream from the Lidl five minutes away and we used them on Saturday afternoon to make little beach scenes (the camp theme was Moana) with blue jelly sea, ice cream beach with crumbled biscuit sand, jelly sweet fish and little paper umbrellas.
We need to plan better and makes checklists
Tawny has run many a residential and Barn Owl and I have attended and helped with many more but somehow we missed so much! We put camp badges in the budget but didn’t actually either choose or order any, and we didn’t realise until we got there. We didn’t bring half the kitchen essentials, including oven gloves, matches or anything to store or cover unfinished food; we didn’t plan the campfire beyond “we’re having one” and me bringing my songbooks and self-forged fire poker. At the last minute, Barn Owl put a handful of firelighters, a few sticks of kindling and a clicky lighter in a ziplock bag, the girls collected a handful of twigs and there was a stock of old pallets at the campfire circle. There was no Savlon in the first aid box and we didn’t have any Blutack for sticking schedules up on the wall. This post is my reminder for next time.
The older and more experienced the Brownie, the more likely she’ll shut up and go to sleep
We had twelve girls in three rooms. In the furthest room were three of our older Brownies, all old hands at sleepovers who went to their room, stayed there and never once had to be told to be quiet. In the middle room were four of our younger girls and at least two of them were a nightmare. In the nearest room were five girls. To be fair, this one included three older girls who were also pretty good and it was only the youngest two who spent two hours talking at full volume, doing unnecessary toilet trips and bursting into tears after being sent to bed. So out of the twelve, the only ones who were problems were actually the seven-year-olds who’ve joined us since September.
Even the careful, big, experienced Brownies will slop PVA glue around like toddlers
One of our crafts was a Moana-inspired boat made out of lollysticks. The plan had been hot glue but we only have two, to be operated only by adults and that would be slow. Besides, when I made my “here’s one I made earlier”, I was too lazy to find my own glue gun so I made it with the PVA that was within reach. I learned that you need to be a bit more generous with it than I was, and leave it to dry for longer. But when I told the girls to “put a big blob of glue here”, I wasn’t expecting some of our most capable Brownies to scoop it up and drip it down the brush and across the table like they’d never used glue before.
All they want is to mess around in their dorms
All the crafts and adventurous activities we’d planned and the phrase we heard more than anything else was “Can we go back to our rooms now?”. I guess if they don’t do sleepovers and parents tend towards the helicopter, they don’t get a lot of opportunity to just be silly with their friends without overt supervision. “Silly” meant a lot of knocking on each other’s doors and running away which resulted in a lot of whining but they’d still rather have done that than the caving, climbing, crafts or waiting for most people to finish eating. A lot of them claimed to want to read but were unable to tell me what they were reading. It’ll be something age-appropriate, so they’re not being cagey, I think it just doesn’t even pause as it passes through their minds.
They don’t like their Brownie uniform
The thing we heard second most often was “can we take our Brownie clothes off now?”. It’s just a yellow t-shirt and brown bottoms of their choice! But then I can’t talk – I’m out of my uniform polo shirt and into my Adventure Leader, retro 90s Brownies or boathouse t-shirt as fast as humanly possible.
I Am A Polar Bear 