One year of my life

For part of the weekend just past (1-3 April) we had another Scout camp, where we had a bit of a cooking-fest including the production of an excellent batch of golden syrup dumplings to prove a point against the memory of a rather disastrous concoction from a camp long past.

However, that’s not the point of this post. The kids get little badges when they reach certain camping milestones, such as 10 nights under canvas, or 25 nights, and so on. Of course, this requires a database (well, Excel spreadsheet) which records all our camps and who was at which one, and adds up the total number of nights that each Scout has camped out. When I set this up a decade ago, I decided (me being me) to add myself to the list, for curiosity’s sake and to deflate the head of any kid who decided to get a bit egotistical about hitting 50 nights (which many of them manage after their nearly four years in the Scout section). However, I didn’t stop at that (me being me!), and I built a separate database for all the nights I’d been “out”, either camping (and not just for Scouts) or at Scout activities (but sleeping in cabins).

With 286 nights camping in a tent on Scout events I am still rather short of a full year of “nights under canvas”, but on the weekend I realised that my database was missing some of my other overnight Scouting activities (such as leader training and so forth), which means that sometime—probably in the last year or so—I hit the magic (crazy?) total of a year’s worth of Scouting sleeps.

That’s kind of scary (the total … and the fact that I keep such a database!).

Now I’m not going to give you the exact break up of that year, but those nights were made up of Jamborees (about 65 nights), camps and hikes of various sizes and lengths (about 200 nights), leader training courses (when I was learning to be a leader and when I have been a leader trainer for others), Cub leader courses, activity camps—big and small—for the Cubs (the younger age group that I worked with when I first started leading), and training courses for the Scouts. Most of it has been fun and I have felt that I was doing something worthwhile … but that is still a kind of scary total!

By the way, the Scout socks in the photo haven’t been around for all those nights, but are probably as old as my Scouting life (nearly 29 years) even if they haven’t been in my possession for quite as long. They are from the “old” uniform (two “olds” before the current “new” one, in fact), and I still wear this pair with my current uniform, since there are no longer any official socks (as far as I know) and since this pair seems quite hard-wearing and it’s nice to have this sort of link from the present to the past.

Tonight I’m at home. 🙂