Cambridgeskip

Absolutely! It's one of the reasons I come on here. Seeing how different countries view things is fascinating. I'm sure in time you'll spot things the the UK or Europe are far stricter on than you folks are. There will always be differences. Differing national attitudes to alcohol is not really the point though. What I was more trying to point out is that a zero tolerance approach to (insert misdemeanour here) is rarely of much use. All you do is box yourself in when it comes to dealing with it. We're adults. I'm sure we all have the experience to identify that no instances of a given misdemeanour are ever the same and you need a sliding scale of sanctions for dealing with it. Yes the ultimate deterrent of kicking someone out first time needs to be there particularly where you need to protect others. I'd consider serious cases of bullying to be a case in point. But I wouldn't commit myself to that course of action in advance of it even happening. When I was what we call a young leader aged 16 helping with cubs and instance of bullying was identified when the culprit had his nose broken by a new (turned out there had been others) would be victim. (Yes an 8 year old broke someone's nose. It was an impressive punch!) Leaving the would be bully to explain to his parents how it happened coupled with several weeks suspension proved more than sufficient to teach a lesson he never forgot. Case closed. In differing circumstances a more lengthy suspension or expulsion would have been more appropriate. Similarly I would never consider one scout of any age punching another acceptable. But I think these circumstances are rather different to the more common instances of fighting I've (very occasionally) seen It's all about flexibility and adapting to circumstances.

I’d make two points on that. Firstly there is a big cultural divide between Europe generally and the USA on alcohol. I’ve seen it many times. Alcohol is definitely seen as less of a big deal here than it is in the USA. (With the exception of Scandinavia where they are paranoid about it) In parts of Italy and France kids are brought up drinking wine from startlingly early ages, some as young as 6 or 7. Nevertheless yes the organisers did deal with the Maltese scouts. It’s over a decade ago so I am not going to claim to recall exactly what happened although I am pretty certain no one was sent home. Secondly in terms of my two scouts I’m afraid we’ll have to agree to disagree here. They broke the rules, there were consequences, they learned their lesson and neither they or anyone else in the unit did it again. As far as I was concerned job done and case closed. I don’t see where sending them home would have got anybody. I would see it as disproportionate. If they had repeated that kind of behaviour then it may have been a different matter. But they didn’t. So it wasn’t. And no leaders turned a blind eye to anything.

You seem to be making a very polarised distinction here. There is zero tolerance, there is permissive and nothing else. In actual fact there is a whole raft of grey between the two. Taking an approach where there are consequences but ensuring that there is a way back is not being permissive or cruel to the innocent. It is helping develop the scout involved. Back in 2005 I was part of a district contingent to the European Jamboree.One evening, after the scouts had all disappeared off to whatever evening events they were meant to be at a leader from the Italian unit next to us came over to fill us in on the gossip that the Maltese unit on a neighbouring sub camp had the illicit vodka supply. We may wish to watch out where our scouts were headed. Now it turned out that yes, two scouts, aged about 14 i think, had indeed made the acquaintance of the Maltese contingent and as they came back to camp, their manner of walking indicated that they had indeed indulged in the Maltese contingent's supplies. Now we could of course have sent them home. There are though many ways to skin a cat! They were dispatched to bed having been invited to drink a pint of water each. Me and the other leader there didn't say a word about the drinking. Next day dawned, bright and sunny. Bill and Ben, as I will call them, magically found that the chores rotas had all been changed! Guess who was invited to get out of bed at 6am and get the food delivery for that day? And then cook it? All while nursing a cracking hangover each? Now I fancy myself as a bit of a camp fire leader. I encouraged everyone to burst into some loud, lusty singing as all this was going on. Part of me was half tempted to keep them back from whatever they were meant to be doing that morning. Till I remembered that it was a good 30 minute walk in the blazing sun to get there. They were going. And I was going to make sure they went. And join in everything. Loudly. And quickly. I generally made sure that that day was the longest and most miserable one of their existence while of course making sure no harm came to them (I made sure there was plenty of water available). That night they turned in quite early and didn't go near a drop of the stuff again. And all without having to say a single word about Maltese scouts or vodka. The point is that you can get a kid to learn a lesson without taking a zero tolerance approach. And make sure it stays learned as well.

We do have some very bright kids in the troop, the area of town we draw from has a lot of academic staff at the university who's offspring tend to have a few brains. Some though are perfectly capable of producing a flat bread that looks like some kind of nuclear waste.

As it happens I've not seen that demo done. Although given the climate lighting fires in wet conditions is something that we regularly do. I encourage them to have a fire lighting kit and one of the first things we teach them to do with knives is to strip wet outer layers from fallen twigs to get to the drier part inside. Something that younger scouts seem to have real trouble with is the preparation side of it, getting all those different sized twigs ready before you strike a match!

Partly. They originally suggested doing exactly the same thing based on 1940s rationing. It was me that came across the ration challenge here and suggested it to the PLs as an alternative, which they agreed to. This Thursday coming we're doing a backwoods cook out at a nearby campsite. Given recent weather there will be plenty of wet wood around. I'll be interested to see if any of the scouts have had the foresight to dry some kindling at home before hand!

So.... this was originally made for Tampa Turtle and his scouts who asked to make contact with us. I've put together a bit of a video of what a typical scout night looks like for us this side of the pond complete with all the mess, all the noise, all the things that didn't go according to plan. A long way from perfect but a lot of fun! The background is that when we were planning the term the PLs said they wanted the annual remembrance night to be themed on rationing. The original idea was for it to be based on what rationing here was like in the 1940s but this morphed into bringing up to date and doing a cook off based on typical rations distributed at refugee camps in Syria. Basically rice, lentils, flour, cooking oil, kidney beans, chick peas and tinned fish. This is how it went! Enjoy

That's the point though. Things now are pretty much the same as the 60s and 70s with the only exception being dangers from traffic. But people are more afraid of everything. What I think has changed is the attitude, and indeed nature, of the massed media. They have learned and taken advantage of the fact that if you make people scared they will lap up what you are feeding them. Back in the 1970s the IRA were killing far more people than muslim extremists now in the UK. Yet people now are far more afraid of terrorism than they ever were back then. The difference is that back in the 1970s by the time the paper went to press or by the time the 6pm or 9pm news bulletin came round the facts were broadly known. What we have now is rolling 24 hour news and social media coming out of everyone's ears. So when something happens, when someone is shot or a bomb goes off or there is some kind of accident we get bombarded from every angle with news media trying to fill all their channels with, frankly, nothing. So they speculate all over the place and that just ramps up the fear far more than a calm news report 3 or 4 hours later. My own parents are terrified if being burgled. They are scared because their favourite newspaper The Daily Mail (a vile publication which makes Fox News look calm and objective) tells them to be afraid. They reject out of hand all the statistics that show they are less likely to be burgled now than they were 20 years ago. The media have a hell of a lot to answer to in my opinion.

There's a book you might be interested in, called "Risk, the science and politics of fear" by Dan Gardner. It's a very good dissection of what people are scared of and why, with, as the title implies, it lays the blame very much at the feet of the media and politicians. It's quite extraordinary what people perceive as being risky and how it compares to reality. Some of the statistics are astonishing. In the UK a child is far more likely to be killed by lightening than by an adult they do not know. We're talking orders of magnitude. Yet ask most parent what they are most worried about and you know exactly which of those they will go for! As I always say, if you want to keep your child safe then the most important thing you can do is teach them to cross the road safely.

Stosh, I think you inadvertently hit the nail on the head there. Fires are fun, but not necessarily essential. Once upon a time being able to light a cooking fire in any conditions was an essential outdoors skill because back packing stoves were either too expensive for most people to buy or too heavy to want to carry. So fire was often the only option. Now though stoves are extraordinarily light. My scouts use these. At 220g it's amazingly light! And at £25 its pretty cheap as well. That doesn't mean we don't ever use fires to cook on. We do regularly, but it's because it's fun, not because it's essential. And I suggest the same goes for scouts throughout the developed world. When something goes from essential to fun its importance in the skill set naturally slips with it.

The problem I've found with my scouts is that they are quite good at getting a fire lit, but the problem is then building it. They have a tendancy to ignore the preparation part of getting twigs of different sizes ready to feed it with the result of it then going out. In terms of tinder the preferred substances are sliver birch bark and for those who prepare before hand getting the fluff out of the tumble drier filter at home to bring with them. You get a pretty decent long last flame out of that. Incidentally while being a long way from natural I've found pringles make great fire lighters! There's such a huge amount of fat in them that they act like a candle with the potatoe part of it acting like the wick.

I think the nearest we have to a scout council in the UK is a scout county. My county, until 3 years ago, had a small campsite called Little Abington. It was small, about 8 acres, but well loved. It had a toilet block and another small building with a kitchen that needed repairs. Rather than repairing it they sold the whole site. Our county now has no campsite. There is a small site owned by a district within the county but it is right next to a river that floods regularly, it's simply to unpredictable to plan to use. Our neighbouring county to the south has spent money on theirs and has 5 in their county plus own another in the Scottish highlands for what you would call high adventure trips. They seem to have remembered what they are there for. Our county meanwhile has a large bank balance. Sad times.

It's not just this side of the Atlantic that has that myth then! Not quite sure how people that think that run white water canoeing....

Morning all Bit of a longshot, but has anyone had experience of a child with trypophobia? Just had last minute notification that one of my new scouts has it before camp this weekend. The wikipedia entry (yes, yes, I know, it's Wikipedia) certainly suggests it's an unusual one. Trying to get hold of parents to discuss but any word on the practicalities?

In two weeks time we'll be in camp which will include 14 scouts on their first camp as scouts. 3 have camped as cubs before but other than that..... It's going to be a long weekend for me and the PLs!

We typically give them about an hour and a half which is just long enough for it to be a challenge but still long enough to actually complete it. Most of it changes from year to year. The questions that we keep as standard are the photos of the patrol in the phone box and the photo of them as a human pyramid,

We do have a big advantage in Cambridge of having a city centre which is largely pedestrianized and also as a city generally it is ridiculously safe. The crime rate here is next to nothing. To put it in context Cambridgeshire police, in its entire history, has fired precisely one bullet from a gun!

I thought I'd share this from across the pond..... Last night at scouts was a regular night that we have about this time every year, The Monopoly Run. It's an ever popular night and when the PLs Council meet to start planning the autumn term it is normally the first thing that goes down on the piece of paper. I think there would insurrection if we didn't have it! The concept is quite simple. Instead of meeting at our normal HQ we instead meet in the city centre. The PLs are issued with a sheet drawn up by the leaders of various tasks they have to carry out and questions to answer that involves them having to run round the city centre for the evening. This year's sheet is attached, It won't mean anything to you in terms of the answers but it gives an idea of the kind of thing they have to do. It's very competitive with a prize for the winning patrol. As well as being a lot of fun it is also good to run at times when, just like now, we have a lot of new recruits (11 out of 35 are either just up from cubs or new to scouts altogether) as it emphasises the step up from cubs in quite a big way. Here we have kids as young as 10 let loose in the city centre, just as it's getting dark with their PLs in charge. The kind of thing most would never be allowed to do normally. We do have adult leaders in town and on hand should anyone have a problem but we basically hang around on a bench in the market square with whoever draws the short straw doing the donuts and coffee run! If you've never tried anything like I'd recommend it as something to suggest to your PLs. Great fun Monopoly run 2016.doc

I think there's actually two different issues getting confused in this thread. How should communication with the scouts be done? And should parents being assisting their scouts with reading it? On the latter point i think it depends on age. If the scout involved is a 10 or 11 year old new scout I would say Qwaze's approach is a good one. Don't do it for them, but perhaps nudge them in the right direction and, most importantly, get your child to reply themselves. Help build up that approach of it being down to them. As they get older then that parental assistance should drop off and it should be very much down to the scout themselves to be taking responsibility for it. In terms of the best method of communicating..... that is a tricky one. The trouble is that social media is changing at an extraordinary rate. What is used today isn't what was used two years ago and isn't what will be used in two years time. The fluidity makes it difficult to give an exact answer about how to communicate with your common or garden teenager! However.... ever since IT went mainstream in the late 80s one thing that has remained consistent is that in the adult world email is used for most formal communication. And scouting is meant to be about preparing young people for the adult world. For that reason I would stick with email for anything that is issued by adults whether that be to parents or the scouts themselves. Encouraging the scouts to read it may not be easy. But I think it is a worthwhile goal. How the patrols communicate among themselves is up to them! One of my favourite anecdotes is I remember one of my patrols here planning a camp. The PL had requisitioned her Dad's conference calling facility from work! They had a question for me and I suddenly got a phone call from an automated voice informing me I was being invited to a conference call.... Quite imaginative I thought

@@CalicoPenn I see your point. However I write from the experience of twice having had to phone the parents of female scouts to tell them that, sadly, we've discovered evidence on camp of their daughters having an eating disorder. I can't tell anything more than that due to the confidential nature of the incidents. What I can say though is how angry those incidents left me. I see shelf after shelf of magazines aimed at women and girls that concentrate on little but looks, weight, clothes, diets, make up and generally making girls worry about what they look like. And it's my scouts and other kids who end up suffering the fall out.

Be careful what you wish for. I don't know what it;s like in the USA but land prices and the cost of building in the UK are eye watering. Many of the scout owned campsites date from the early days of scouting when various philanthropists donated tracks of land. Those days are now gone. Once these sites are sold off and gone they are pretty much gone for good. My thought has always been that we as scouters are the custodians of such places on behalf of the young people that come to them and grow to love them. It's not our place to sell them off except in the most exceptional of circumstances.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away..... I worked at a department store and one day, about this time of year, I was sent to the loading dock where my job was to unload a lorry which was bringing in the first batch of toys for Christmas. That particular lorry had on board, 3000 barbie dolls. I moved pallet after pallet of them off that truck. I have never seen so much pink in one place in all my life. And it was that particularly nauseating pink. You know the one. In all honesty I had a head ache after staring at it for too long. Seriously though, I look at the girls life cover and I weep.

So winter camping in the UK.... Yes we do winter camp. Certainly not as often as in the warmer months but camp we do. Like most of our camps we tend to use scout owned campsites which vary between a field and not much else to the large scale activity centres. It really just depends on what we are up to! Weather - we're in southern England so the climate is pretty temperate. Even in January a typical winters day is day time high of around 7C and night time low of hovering around freezing. Planning for a camp we're generally more concerned about it being persistently wet than being particularly cold. In a typical winter I would expect day time highs of below freezing only for a handful of days and night time lows below -5C on a handful of occasions. Literally able to count them on my fingers and have some left over! The coldest I've camped with my scouts had night time low of -6C one night. For the northern half of the country I would expect colder temperatures more often and the Scottish Highlands are a different climate altogether. We typically use light weight tents. When below freezing temperature expected we pack them in a bit more. 4 to a 3 man tent, 3 to a two man. I would camp with scouts aged 10-14. Boys and girls. Explorers regularly camp in winter as well (14-18). It is unusual although not entirely unheard of for cubs to camp in tents in winter. More likely they will use indoor accommodation. Certainly in my cub leader days I never took them in tents in December January or February. Theoretically beavers (6-8 year olds) can camp in winter although I've yet ton encounter any that do. Adults tend to be that bit less keen although never to the point of not being able to get enough. Does that help?

The wakey wakey was a bit of a one off for the sake of the film. Normally if they aren't moving I sing at them. Loudly. And badly. My vocal range has approximately two notes. Which are out of key with each other. It's a truly horrible noise On a more serious note though it does highlight a big difference between us and you. Scouts here runs to 14 and a half rather than 18. It does mean that there does always need to be that bit more adult in put on anything they get up to. It doesn't mean the PLs don't get responsibility, they certainly do, but the average level of maturity and experience will always be that much lower meaning we do have to support and prod them in the right direction that much more. And some times that does mean kicking them out of bed! On top of that at the moment I have quite a young troop at the moment. I lost 9 x 14 year olds to explorers at Easter. That only exasperates it at the moment! They are getting there though.

Thank you, very kind! After your comment about mobile devices.... I used tunnel bear to make it look like I was in the USA and worked on my phone. Killed tunnel bear and the video doesn't work again. Worth remembering!