The Girlguiding fun never ends (or perhaps I should say that the Region events team are gluttons for punishment) because this is my third Region residential event in a single month. A week ago we had 60 adults camping on the field at Dartmoor Zoo, two weeks before that we had Try Inspire Qualify and … More The Brownies had a sleepover at Longleat
Has anyone else ever been woken up in a tent by a lionness roaring at quarter past three in the morning? On Dartmoor? This was my second Girlguiding adult-only residential in September. Two weeks ago I was at Try Inspire Qualify and now I’m pitching my tiny yellow tent in the rain at a zoo! … More We snoozed at the zoo!
Three and a half years ago, and more, I sat down one weekend and sewed a bag to Icelandair’s exact personal item size and it’s still going strong. I was tired of hunting the house for a bag that maximised the limited space allowed. People criticise the likes of Ryanair and easyJet for being too … More I made my own custom personal item
Second weekend in a row of uniformed adults having adventures in the woods! But this time, we’re not pretending to be Scouts and the neckerchiefs aren’t a festival costume; we’re the real thing – Girlguiding adult volunteers and the neckerchiefs were mostly Region ones. Try Inspire Qualify is an adults-only event run by Girlguiding South … More I made a knife at Try Inspire Qualify 2026
Welcome back to the second part of Camp Wildfire 2026. The story so far: it’s rained for 24 hours, I’ve made a copper necklace, mastered lino printing, earned a point for Hawks Patrol in Filipino stick fighting and met the Chief Scout. And now, on Camp Wildfire… I always wake up early in a tent … More Camp Wildfire 2026 part 2 (in which I
After three years, I’m back at Camp Wildfire! I said last time that I probably wasn’t going to bother; that after a credits error in my favour in 2023, I didn’t really have any activities left that I desperately wanted to do, at a festival that’s all about the activities. If there was anything I … More Camp Wildfire 2026, part 1
“Can I do a kayak trip around Copenhagen?” I wondered as I was planning my birthday week in Denmark. Yes, of course you can. And the first company that comes up is GreenKayak, an enviromental NGO that gives you a kayak for free on condition that you collect rubbish as you go and give them … More GreenKayak, red flags
I’m going to start this off by saying that this was never on my original itinerary. I planned to spend Friday enjoying the reborn Laugarvatn Fontana, which is now revelling in saying “steam by the lake” to the point that I wonder if they’ll just take that as their new name. It was supposed to … More I went back Inside the Volcano
All the way back in 2012, I spent a beautiful sunny fortnight in Reykjavík, because if you fall in love in winter, you have to go back to make sure you like it in summer as well, and I did. It was, I later learned, an uncharacteristically hot and sunny summer of the kind you … More I spent a day in Þórsmörk proving my tour guide wrong
One thing I expected when I started researching my West Bohemian Spa Towns trip was that every town would have some kind of central bathing experience, probably using the famed spa water and what I found instead was hundreds of small-to-medium hotels offering a list of medical treatments that would put most hospitals in the … More Aquaforum: Františkovy Lázně’s big central water experience