Cambridgeskip

A return to this.... Earlier today I caught up with one of mine that has just come back from Japan. She is absolutely walking on air! She's come back convinced she can change the world all on her own, ah what it is to be 15 and know everything Anyway, she's absolutely determined to go to you chaps in 2019 as part of the IST. Be warned, she can talk for England and is, to put it mildly, rather strong willed.....

I don't know how every country did it but the UK arranged its contingent into units of 36 scouts and 4 adults with each unit travelling on different scheduled flights. In some cases that meant being on the same flight as other units and in some cases on their own. We had 5 from my group there, all now in various states of jet lag!

Yes but that's kind of the point. World Jamborees are not about traditional scout skills or back country camping. It's about interntaional friendship and meeting scouts from other cultures. I've never been to a world one but did a European one in 2005. We had poles one side of us, Israel the other side of them, Italians the other side of us and Ireland the other side of them. Across the track were Swiss and Portugese units. It's a wonderful melting point of different cultures, languages and nationalities and that is nothing short of life changing. No it's not your average camp out but it's something unforgettable.

We're heading to summer camp by train as well next week, it's quite a common site to see this side of the pond. It's quite a fund way of showing the kids off to the great British public! I guess our population density and consequent extensive rail network compared to you chaps does help. We love to moan about our rail system and it's true that it is not up to the extraorindary standards that you see in mainland Europe, particularly Germany, but actually it's pretty good and there are not many places that you can't get either directly too or at least within easy distance of by train.

I've had a Sergeant Major from the army and a Royal Navy officer visit cubs and scouts respectively. On both occasions the kids were slightly in awe of them and a little bit of ice needed breaking but once they got going the questions didn't stop! You'll have a fantastic night.

We didn't have a choice. Scottish law says you can roam where you want but need landowners permission to camp. Local landowners said if we wanted to camp we had to take it home, so home it went. Only exception was if you could properly bury it. Camped on top of rock hard refrozen snow with frozen heather underneath there was frankly no chance of burying it.

As a Venture Scout I did regular winter mountaineering trips to Scotland. When camping above the snow line there were no latrines. You used a sandwich bag and back to base with you it went. High fibre diets seems strangely out of favour on those trips!

Wow! A lot of questions, I'll do my best to field some of them.... What you call merit badges we call actvity badges. To be honest they are quite variable in terms of the standards required and the realistic possibility of doing them. Parascending isn't something you get to do very often if at all! You can find those for the scout (10-14) section here. Something we have which I don't think you do is staged badges which can be taken in any age range from beavers (6-8) through to Network (18-25). You can find them here, There is a lot fo compeition to get the most nights away in your arm! Fund raisers are variable from cake sales to car washing but the most common and most effective is bag packing at supermarkets (grocery stores). My group doesn't have a sponsor at all and that is quite common. We own our own building although we lease the land it is on. It's also quite common to be sponsored by a church or other place of worship and meet in their premises. The input they have to the running of the group is minimal though and most importantly they cannot dictate membership requirements. There are a very small number of "closed" groups which are normally attached to private schools which are allowed to only take members from that school. They are very rare and most districts don't have any. My group the scouts pay £90 per year and that is quite standard. It varies from group to group, some lower some higher but you won't see too much variability. We are as scout lead as it is possible to be with PLs who are 13 or 14! At 14 they move to explorers (14-18)We certainly have a PLs council where they have their say on what should and should not be on the programme. Their age compared to your PLs does mean they need a lot more help and guidance. Ef I get the Pls to chose APLs but I do reserve the right to over rule them, although in practice it is rare that I do so. They often have no conept of how much things will cost or how long it will take to organise so they do need guiding. Explorers tends to be more scout lead. Yes we have a Promise and Law! There's multiple versions of the promise depending on an individuals beliefs and nationalities which can all be found here the Law can be found here. For most groups it would be recited at the investiture of a new member or renewed at st George's Day Parade. Flag up and flag down is farely standard (using the UK flag,very rare to do it with the English/Scottish/Welsh or Irish flags), although it is not done by everyone. We certainly do it at the start and end of each night and each morning and evening on camp. High adventure - that is typically done at county level (I think what you would call Council level?) and what there is varies massively across the country. My county does more or less none where as neighbouring counties run lots of it. Thankfully we are friendly with our neighbours in Hertfordshire who run regular trips to the Scottish Highlands that we get to send kids on. Other groups are less lucky and it can be a struggle to make it happen, particularly in southern England. Counties in more mountainous areas have more going for them. Other counties have other specialisms. Hampshire run 4 wheel drive trips, Essex do a lot of off shore sailing. So quite variable. Multiday back packing is something we have done but you tend to see a lot more of it at Explorer level where age and experience allows it more easily. Hope that helps!

I hope Ian doesn't mind me jumping in with a few comments here! Mixed scouting works quite well. Girls are still the minority, about 20% nation wide. The groups that were coed before it became compulsory in 2007 (prior to that it was a local option) tend to have a higher proportion of girls. Over all the girls that go for scouts instead of Girl Guides tend to be that bit more "robust", I wouldn't go as far as the term "tom boy" but certainly they come to us for a reason. It would be rare in the extreme to have separate events for boys and girls. Troops and patrols are typically mixed. There is the option to separate the sexes, some (but by no means all) groups that are sponsored by mosques run separate boy and girl troops, but it is certainly the exception. Theoretically boys and girls are allowed to tent together. In practice at scout and explorer level though it is rare. Mostly because the kids don't want to do it! The only time I've had mixed accommodation was on an over night ferry to Holland, cabins had 4 bunks and we had 6 boys and 2 girls on the trip. You see it a bit more often for cubs and beavers. We try and maintain a collection of 2, 3 and 4 man tents so that mixed patrols can take a selection to suit their gender mix. On camps its worth bearing in mind that we simply don't have the space you have! The idea of patrols camping 100m apart is, in most circumstances, utterly impossible. As pointed out by @@00Eagle feel free to browse our gallery here. Note that some larger albums might take a few moments to load! You can also find some official photos from National HQ here. Although some are a little posed and show a rather "on brand" image!

It's every year I think. Don't forget this is something that has just gathered it's own momentum, it's not something organised by WOSM or anything like that. It's just something folks have started doing!

Bit of history...... It has it's roots in the 2007 World Jamboree when following the sunrise ceremony on 1 August (and yes, picked to mark the Brownsea Island camp) scouts were asked to hold their necker/scarf above their heads. The 2011 jamboree in Sweden took the idea on and the idea of everyone round the world wearing theirs sprang from there. As a bit of nostalgia one of my favourite scout photos attached, taken at the closing ceremony of the European Jamboree (Eurojam) in 2005. What 15000 scouts from 68 countries looks like!

A couple of cautionary tales... Back as a teenager I was partof a group of scouts on a 3 day, 2 night trek in Scotland. The weather was quite mild at the start, well above freezing around 12C and I had quite flexible boots on. On the second day I managed to get my boots soaking wet through crossing a river. When we got in our tents that night our leader warned us that the weather was due to turn over night, it would drop well below freezing and we should expect it to be snowing by the morning. Idiot here didn't think much of this and left my soaking wet boots in the porch area of my tent. We woke up the next day to the expected freezing conditions, horizontal snow and yes, my nice flexible boots were now frozen absolutely rigid. Having to answer the call of nature all over your feet in order to be able move them is not a lot of fun. January 2010 and another lesson learned..... winter camp is annual mini jamboree affair held every year at Gilwell Park. That year we arrived with 6 inches of snow on the ground and not expected to get above freezing all weekend. It was only when we arrived that we realised that all our lanterns ran off butane (be prepared and all that jazz eh?). Simple solution though was our stoves ran of propane, so we heated water and stood the lanterns in bowls of hot water to get them working. However..... one particularly dopy kid (bless him) made the suggestion, in all seriousness, that we just hold a lighter underneath the gas cartridges to see if that thawed them out..... He was invited to go and try it but that he might like to walk a good half a mile from the rest of us first.....

If you're on a hike put your water bottles in your rucksack upside down so that the ice ends up in the bottom of it rather than the top. And use plastic not metal!

Broadly that's about right. A standard pack size would be 15-30 cubs with 3-6 sixes. And yes each 6 has a sixer and a seconder. There is such a thing as senior sixer but it's generally a honorary position to mark out an outstanding sixer. The issue re younger leaders - it's not so much the issue being non parent leaders, that in itself is fine, if there is an issue it's normally age itself. I was 23 when I took on the CSL (what you would call Cub master) role and yes I think there was some initial mistrust which is took a year or so to shake off. I passed it on to a 19 year old student when I moved to scouts and we did have an initial problem with parents continuing to come to me with queries about cubs and it took some "house training" to get them to go to her first time. If you want to see what British cubs looks like there's a load of old photos from 2006-9 on our group website. Alas they are all shuffled up out of order because of the way software stripped them off a different site to transfer them over!

One of my young leaders (explorer scout that is a trainee leader with scouts) is half German and when she's in Germany attends a troop in Berlin. She's quite interesting to talk to, and I'd say even if that is true of German scouts you have to remember that they run very differently to the rest of Europe. History means that Germans are very uncomfortable and suspicious of uniformed youth groups. That means that scouting there is very informal and relaxed with very few members even owning a uniform. My scout despite being one of the most imaculately turned out scout in terms of uniform when she's here doesn't own a German uniform. It's variable from country to country on tenting arrangements.They are more relaxed about it in Scandinavia, in the UK it's allowed but not recommended and in practice happens vanishingly rarely although you MUST have single sex changing and showering facilities. In other countries it is simply not allowed.

Odds of this happening are slim in the extreme. WOSM has been increasing reluctant to allow more than one WOSM recognised association in one country. Where they already exist they are increasingly being brought under umbrella bodies such as in Germany. That website is one man having a rant.

Given the levels of gloom and doom around these parts I just thought I'd brighten the day with this. Arial shot of the opening ceremony of the World Jamboree in Japan earlier today. Or was it yesterday? Or was it tomorrow? Not really sure! Anyway this is what 33000 scouts from 162 countries looks like. 5 of mine are among them. Can you spot them?

Do you have a website? If not then add to the list of people you want a webmaster and get a website set up. It doesn't have to be all singing and all dancing. It just has to be a presence that says who you are, where you are, when you are and what you do. And has photos of the fun stuff. It will help your recruitment no end.

I guess it depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you are looking for a public presence to promote your troop then a public page is the way forward. If you are looking for some kind of forum to exchange ideas between members then a group is what you need. Don't just think about being on Facebook because you need to be on it, consider what you are trying to achieve. My group has two. We have a public page for publicity. We also have a closed group which is actually for parents, principally for them to arrange lifts and transport to camps etc. You do of course have to abide by BSA regulations on this which I can't really comment on!

Sometimes to fix something you have to let it break properly. You don't have to resign from everything but if you keep doing everything no one else will ever step in. Decide what you can do and stay sane, then resign from everything else. Stand back and see what happens. Initially everything will fall over but eventually others will step forward. And if they don't and things stay fallen over remember that you have saved your own health and sanity.

Just had a couple of Au Revoir texts from my young leaders off to Japan. They're setting off at 4.30am tomorrow morning so I'm grateful for them choosing to not do it then I'm so jealous not to be joining them but it can't be helped, 3 weeks off work for scouts is simply not feasible.

They're getting the best and worst of the UK on that trip. The Peak district where the camp is happening is lovely and was the UK's first official national park. As for Derby..... not what I would call easy on the eye.....

That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying I'd treat them broadly the same as someone who is volunteering as their son has signed up, or someone who aged out and wants to carry on volunteering. You of course put them through the same background checks and get the same references, that's sensible and, I assume in the USA, what you have to do legally anyway. All I'm saying is that there is no reason to be any more suspicious than someone with an existing link. You may need to give them some extra training if they have no previous links or experience. If so then so be it. Those people are most likely to be someone that wants to give something back to their community for no more reason than they want to give something and scouting sounds a fun way to do it. And from experience those who come in with no previous links are often the most effective. They don't come in weighed down with the idea of "this is how it has always been done so this is the way we'll do it". They come in with fresh ideas and liven things up a bit.

Seriously you'd be wary? Someone turns up who is not just there for the time their kid will be there, instead they want to volunteer for the sake of it? I'd rip their arm off.

I wouldn't call that earned as such. Fact is those are the things that people would do when they join something new anyway, find out who everyone is, how it's structured and what everyone does! Typically it is given, along with county, district and group badges, to the scout as part of their investiture.