In the first lockdown, I took to gardening. I’d never taken any interest in it but my dad was doing the shopping for three households in our local little M&S (Tesco was impossible for the first month or so due to the combination of epic queues and shortages caused by panic buying) and they were … More What I learned from my second year of gardening
Now we’re back on track! This is my county trip to Switzerland in 2014 and after starting in the wrong place, I’m now getting my days in the right order. Today is Wednesday and I’m going solo, off to my adopted home city of Neuchâtel and for a little spa afternoon at Yverdon-les-Bains. The story … More Switzerland 2014: My day off in Neuchâtel and Yverdon-les-Bains
Guess what? I did my Rebel Stargazer badge! I’m not going to do a separate post for every Rebel badge I do – I’ve already talked about the Water Sports badge but Adventurer just got a mention at the bottom of that post, Community Service isn’t getting a post because it’s just doing Brownies and … More I did my Rebel Stargazer badge!
Over the Christmas break, I reorganised this blog a bit – added clickable maps to the travel stuff and made the adventures into a page rather than an endless warren of nested menus – and in the process, I discovered where I had blank spaces. Enough blank spaces to occupy a full quarter of the … More Switzerland 2014: A day in the Lauterbrunnen Valley
The third post of the Polar Bear Winter Festival is another winter-themed one – well, an ice-and-snow-themed one, anyway. It’s a Travel Library post and it’s all about A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter, the Austrian wife of a scientist of some kind turned fur trapper who spent a year living with … More Travel Library: A Woman in the Polar Night
Over the years, many people have bemoaned the lack of adult Brownie badges. One in four women in the UK have been involved in Girlguiding at some point in their lives and anyone who’s ever earned a badge as a Brownie or a Guide feels, however deep down in their soul it is, that it’s … More I did my Rebel Water Sports badge!
My ordinary church hall Brownies seem to have become Forest Brownies. I’m in an outdoorsy bushcraft wild state of mind and the plague is still ravaging, so Monday Evenings Indoors Brownies are (maybe temporarily) Forest Brownies now. Being a Brownie leader is stressful sometimes, especially when you only took on the Brown Owl job right … More Forest Brownies: campcraft & firelighting in the woods
It’s now two years since my big Russian adventure and to celebrate the anniversary, and because I was talking about language-learning the other day, I want to talk about overcoming the Russian language barrier. I put off my Russia trip for years. Russia was well outside my comfort zone. It’s so… Russian. It never feels quite … More Overcoming the Russian language barrier
It’s September, it’s back-to-school season and although all that means to someone of my age is that it’s time to go back to Brownies, I thought I’d give you a quick tour of my year abroad student room in Switzerland. That’s partly because this is a travel blog and partly because I had a film … More Year abroad student room tour
I’m a serial language learner. Oh, I don’t reach fluency, nowhere near. I have a degree in French and Spanish, I’ve been learning Norwegian semi-seriously on and off for nearly six years with the intention of becoming… well, not fluent but potentially able to get by if I moved to Norway. I learned enough Russian … More I learned Finnish for a month and here’s what happened!
I Am A Polar Bear 