Cambridgeskip

So at our summer camp this year we shot a bit of a video diary of what we got up to. It's now been edited together and is on line here. If you have 11 minutes to spare have a click! Couple of health warnings.... It won't work on mobile devices Youtube have decided to be helpful and fix some shaky camera work. The result is an effect in places that's akin to seasickness! I'm trying to get them to change it back again with little success..... And if you've ever wondered what I look and sound like that's me at 2.31!

Interesting observation but one I'd disagree on. I see boys and girls as typically having different strengths. I see girls tend to get things right first time more often, but boys are better at recovering the situation when it goes wrong.

I'd say Ian's group is probably the most common you will find in terms of policy in the UK. Certainly identical to mine. From experience the groups where adults pay their own way or rare. We recently had a leader join us from another group and she was quite surprised to find that she didn't have to pay to come to summer camp. I was even more surprised to find that she expected to!

It was fantastic fun! Just a pitty we didn't have enough cardboard to make one for everyone. They were certainly better than the pioneering rafts they scouts also built. Judging how long they lasted we may need to do some training on lashings.....

Just thought I'd share this..... Our twin troop in Canada sent us a challenge, to build cardboard canoes. Something we happily took on and turned into an interpatrol competition at summer camp. Build a canoe and paddle it across the lake (well, large pond) and back. This video is the result. Worth watching to the end as it doesn't end quite how it looks it will..... Fantastic fun and something I'd recommend to any troop.... Full set of photos from camp here.

If by not worried you mean worried it might not happen then quite right. As above, it is happening! If by not worried you mean not bothered then please reconsider. World Jamborees are something special. They are not about advancement or hiking or day to day scouting. They are more about learning and discovery and meeting those from around the world you may not otherwise ever get to meet. All in a giant melting pot of scouts. I've never camped at a world jamboree only done a day trip. I did though attend a European jamboree and it was a life changing experience. Italians camped one side of us, poles the other. Dutch, Irish, Portugese, Swiss, French, Hungarians, Norwegians all nearby. Everyone I've ever spoken to that has been to a world or European jamboree has a huge stupid grin all over their face when they talk about it. My favourite memory? Being at work a couple of days before the 2007 jamboree kicked off. A non scouting friend sent me a text message that said something like "every scout in the world seems to be in London, what's going on?" It took a lot of explaining! You and your scouts may not get to go but if any of them do it will be something extraordinary and in 3 years time if you are there or not you will feel very proud indeed.

Er.... It's not a plan. It's happening! The ship rolled down the slipway some time ago. Certainly the Uk is starting to put together the adult element of its contingent and this time next year will begin the selection process of the youth contingent. Other national organisations are heading that way as well. It will be interesting to see what influence the international influx has on the future of BSA. After we hosted in 2007 there did seem, at least anecdotally, to be a movement towards more international contact and expeditions.

That sounds interesting as a side project. I'll take a closer look. In the mean time though it looks like we're moving to Flickr as our main storage site, it works well with Wordpress and gives a TB free. And very kind words on the photos. Thank you!

@@packsaddle - Thanks. Alas though our photos very much tend to be action shots, so GE wont accept them so I'm guessing that will hit our storage limit? Also the shear volume of them may cause problems with mapping. What we tend to do for each event is do a write up for the website with a few of the best photos included but then do a separate page where we pretty much dump our cameras on. So hundreds at one location can happen. eg last year's summer camp gallery here. @Qwaze - if you do get anything from someone at google then do let me know. That would be grand!

I am in need of a bit of techie help.... We put a lot of photos on our group website but because we have limited storage we have historically stored photos on Picassa and put them on the group website via an RSS feed, which needed some basic info to create including our google account user ID and the album ID number. So far so good. Google have recently shut down Picassa and moved albeit all photos have been moved into google photos and are accessible from our google+ account. The RSS feeds from the historic albums still works so all the old photos still appear on the site. While it is no longer possible to get the info for the RSS feed from the URL of each album like it was before it is still possible to find this info via a slightly convoluted route as explained here. The problem comes with new photos. These do not appear in the picassa archive as per point 3 of the "from Google photos" section at the link above. They appear nicely in google photos itself but without the all important info needed for the RSS feed. So..... has anyone else seen this or know of a work around? Bear in mind I'm not a computer techie! Monosylabic instructions appreciated

It's the massed catering side of it I find really strange. For our scouts part of the fun of summer camp is that they get the food they like, cooked the way they like it. So they plan the menu in advance and then each patrol cooks breakfast and dinner on an open fire. They love it Particularly good this year was the meat balls and garlic bread done from scratch. Although we did discover for our veggie contingent that making meat balls from soy mince is a bit tricky getting it to bind together.... The only exception this year was one evening they had all been out hiking during the afternoon and were caught in a downpour that was only just this side of biblical.* While they sorted themselves out, hung wet kit up to dry, took hot showers to warm up etc the adults cooked dinner for them. We need to stop being so nice! Still to their recipe though. *Seriously. Some Girl Guides camped just through the trees from us had a couple of tents washed away when a new stream established itself straight through their camp site.

I think what surprises me most about American summer camps is the way BSA puts so much emphasis on the patrol system and yet summer camp, the way you describe it, is both very rigid in terms of signing up to do merit badges and the like but also very individual, ie not patrol based. It seems like such a contrast!

Back from summer camp and ready to write a bit more.... I'd broadly agree with all that Ian and Pint said above, I won't repeat but will try and expand and add. It strikes me that part of the difference lies in the geography of the US and UK. Comparing the two countries I think the UK has a population density something like 5 or 6 times that of the US. And the vast majority of land, particularly in the southern half of the country, outside of towns and cities is farm land. Hence the opportunities to get out and camp in wild country is relatively limited. The areas that aren't farmed are like that for a reason. If you want to camp wild in even the most tame of our wild areas like Exmoor or Bodmin Moor you have got to properly know what you are doing! Start venturing into places like the Cairngorms and you need full on mountain leader experience. We are a country of huge contrasts! Hence most camping is done at scout owned campsites. These vary in nature from a 2 acre field with a tap in the corner to large (in our terms, ie 100-200 acres) campsites with multiple activities like a climbing wall, archery butts, high ropes etc. Which brings me to the differences in the cubs age range. Reading here my understanding is that cubs don't camp without parents. Very different here! Cubs camp regularly and while any given pack might recruit a couple of parents to muck in on camp as cooks or drivers we would certainly not expect all the cubs to bring a parent. When i was a cub leader I actually preferred to avoid too much parent involvement as it sometimes stopped the cubs getting the best experience from camps. Cubs also run on the six system which is like a patrol, and beavers have lodges which is again like a light weight patrol system. A few historic photos of our cubs here, In the scout section where I am we do still use the patrol system as much as we can but as I said above the vast majority of scouts would identify with their troop first and patrol second. Just how it is really. The age of the PLs means that the PLs council doesn't run the troop on a day to day basis. Instead what is more typical is for them to get together every couple of months, probably with me at least sitting in, to make decisions. We had one at summer camp during which they decided on who would be a new PL (we're expanding from 4 to 5 patrols shortly) and new APLs. They fed back on last term's program, gave ideas for the new term program. I advised where necessary, eg they talked about an evening with our local canoe club. I pointed out that when we start back in September sunset will be around 19.40 and getting rapidly earlier. Had anyone considered making it a weekend trip? That's just an example but shows the kind of input that the adults do need to have, simply because of the age of the PLs means they still need that kind of guidance. Girls is an interesting issue. From 1991 each individual group could chose whether to be coed or not. From 2003 all new groups had to be and from 2007 all groups had to be. The group I am at went coed before it was enforced and were in a minority. What has been interesting is that because pre 2007 we had the reputation of being the "go to" group on the north side of Cambridge for girls who wanted to join cubs or scouts rather than brownies or guides we've carried the momentum over. We still have a disproportionate number of girls (around 40% compared to about 20% nationally) with our closest neighbouring group having no girls at all. Despite it coming up to a decade since all groups went coed and 25 years since they had the option it is still common to find that people are surprised that there are girls in scouts. The withering looks that some of my girls give at the suggestion they may want to go to guides could frankly freeze hell over from extreme range.... Girls clearly mature more quickly than boys and that does have to be managed a little bit in terms of who gets the leadership opportunities. I think we are far more social, at least from what I can see here. And I think that again comes from the nature of using scout campsites. You will nearly always find yourself camped within ear shot of another group (very useful when you find you've forgotten that one vital piece of kit!) and friendships between groups often form that way. We have a "young leader" scheme which is like an apprenticeship for Explorer scouts who want to be adult leaders. From 14 they can be a YL with beavers, Cubs or Scouts (although for scouts it's more common for them to wait till they are 15) and can take training courses to turn them into adult leaders when they hit 18. As a group we've always found it very successful and have produced a lot of adults that way. From what I can make out that's not something you have in BSA? Anyway, that's enough rambling from me for the moment. I'm meant to be at work.....

One difference in mentality is that while we use patrols the "esprit de corps" definitely lies at troop level. I think it would be a rare scout that identified themselves as a patrol member first rather than a troop member. Hello from camp by the way!

Don't have time to watch it now as about to walk out the door to summer camp (Huzzah!) But on a point of fact our equivalent of Eagle Scout is Queen's Scout (I am one!)

This is certainly not unique to BSA. As I've mentioned before one of my ASLs (Like your ASMs) is 73 and been with the group since he was an 8 year old cub. Fascinating man to talk to. The big thing he emphasises is that when he was that age he joined cubs and then scouts because frankly there was nothing else to do. It was that or do chores at home. Kids these days in the western world have an extraordinary range of choices whether that is in the realm of outdoor adventure or the myriad of sport, creative or other clubs that they can join. Any organisation that sits on its laurels in that environment is going to find itself with a membership problem. The thing that has made scouting successful, in nearly every corner of the world, is its ability to adapt and to serve the youth of the local community in which it finds itself. I won't pretend to know what American kids need. I know that here in the UK the issues is what we call "cotton wool" parenting, with parents scared to let their child take any kind of risk, to get dirty, pick up cuts and bruises, do something with fire or sharp tools or just go into the street on their own. It has adapted to fill that void. I doubt that BSA needs to compete with the national parks or big publishers to be successful. What it needs is to identify the needs of the nations youth, just like BP did here 109 years ago, and find a way of serving them.

Something to help from other side of the Atlantic... Do you have a website with lots of photos of smiling kids doing fun stuff? If not then get one! The first thing that parents will do when their kid wants to be a scout is own X is go to google and type "scouts town X". Make sure your troop comes as high up the list as possible and when they click on it they are impressed with what they see. What that also does is provide material for your existing scouts. When they tell their friends about scouts and try and recruit them they have an instant supply of material to go to to show why scouts is great. And forget photos of ceremonies and formal uniformed events. I mean photos of camps and hikes and climbing and canoeing. Put yourself out there!

@Qwaze - thanks, do PM me if anything comes up. @Jakdaws - thanks, I've pointed her towards that page

Anyone on here from anywhere close to Lander University South Carolina? If so would you like a young and enthusiastic British scouter on loan for a few months over the Autumn? One of my ASLs (what you would call an ASM) is a student here and is spending one semester at Lander arriving in mid August and there till mid December. She's keen to see a bit of American scouting! She's unsure of commitment levels as she's not sure what her work load is like but will be trying to fit it all in to a greater or lessor extent. She's by no means highly experienced but what she lacks in experience she makes up for in energy and enthusiasm! I said I'd plug her as a bit if slave labour on here to see where it got her. So if she sounds like what you need step right this way........

My scouts went punting last night. One punt had to do a interesting manouvre as the scouts on board tried to catch a pokemon on the river. Added a certain twist to things!

Another example of why you need to ignore the comments below the line. If you go and explore the Daily Mail website (roughly our equivalent of Fox News) you will find a story about a Portuguese submarine become tangled in the nets of a French trawler, 30ish miles off the south coast of the UK. Take a look at the readers comments below and you will find people who are unaware that territorial waters extend only 12 nautical miles off shore as per international law. People who are unaware that Portugal are actually the UK’s longest standing military allie meaning that we might not actually have an issue with their submarine. People unaware that with UK, France and Portugal all being part of NATO that our navy probably knew it was there anyway. People who are unaware of how EU fishing quotas work and think the French are stealing “our fishâ€. People who think the 200 mile territorial limit for economic activity should extend off the south coast meaning that most of northern France is within UK economic waters. And most crazy of all people who think that leaving the EU will somehow mean that fish in the English channel will increase in number over night and we can fish as much as we like without devastating fish stocks. In other words most of the commentators don’t seem to have 2 IQ points to rub together.

Quick look and it looks just like the comments you'd expect on The Daily Mail website this side of the pond. Really not worth worrying about. Morons.

Funny you should say that.... There's a scout campsite called Tolmers just outside London which I used to go to a lot as a scout as it was hikeable from where my troop met. During the Second World War it had been requisitioned by the army as a training camp and so had a number of old pill boxes and similar dotted round the edges. I remember investigating the interior of one as a kid and finding someone had left similar magazines!

While this may sound a bit tongue in cheek I am actually serious. This kind of story is some of the best PR you can get. Like it or not scouting does have a reputation as being a bit nerdy. Something like this gets in the news and suddenly, regardless of the facts, teenagers start to sit up and take note of what is actually going on.

Broadly it's countries that used to be part of the British Empire eg Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, South Africa plus all the random islands around the world that are still British overseas territories, bailiwicks and other strange sorts. Eg Jersey, Falkland Islands, Ascension Island. Some former colonies chose not to be, most noteably your good selves! There is also The Repubic of Ireland although Ireland was a constituent nation of the U.K. rather than a colony*. There's also at least one country (I forget which) that chose to join the commonwealth despite not having been a British colony. Many of the commonwealth countries also still have the British monarch as their head of state. Canada and Australia still do, Pakistan doesn't. I hope that explains it. *the position of Ireland in relation to the Uk in different times in history has the potential for almost endless debate and arises great passions among lots of people. Let's just leave it as being a long, complex and at times tragic history.