One word? When seven would do…

Way, way back in about March or April I told Davies about a Campcraft Sleepout course happening at the Sustainability Centre this weekend. It was pretty much perfect timing given we’d be there from that weekend camping anyway for our annual Everyone-else-has-gone-back-to-school week and just a few days before his birthday. Davies loved the idea as a birthday present so we booked and paid for it.

As the date drew closer I was starting to feel a bit odd about being Davies’ nominated parent – I had in my head it would be more of a ‘lads and dads’ type event. I wasn’t remotely fazed at the idea of being the only female but I was a bit worried that Davies might feel strange having me there if everyone else had their dads. But he chose me for his own reasons and frankly if he’d chosen Ady I’d have been feeling like I was missing out as I am really interested in the Bushcraft stuff too.

We’d packed light – a rucksack each with water bottle, packed lunch, spare pants, pjs and clean top for the next morning, waterproof trousers and jacket, knife, fork, spoon, cup, plate and bowl, tooth brush and toothpaste. We had a roll mat, a sleeping bag, a roll up pillow and a blanket each and that was it. A far cry from my Princessy self of a few years ago who would go nowhere without an en suite bathroom ;).

Saturday morning saw us up early, fed and watered and ready for the off. We’d got my car pretty loaded up with all but the front seats taken out although I later realised we’d not packed very sensibly as we had all the tents, kitchen and so on for the week but none of the spare clothes :rolls: We gave ourselves plenty of time to allow for traffic so we were there a good half an hour early. We had a brief walk around, rang Ady and Scarlett and finally wandered back up to the centre to meet up with the rest of the group. There were 17 of us in all: Davies and I, J (a child psychiatrist) and his daughter E (12, youngest of 3 girls, hates outdoors, bugs, fire etc) there on a bonding weekend because he works crazy-long hours and doesn’t have enough time with his daughters, N (another Nic, there were 4 of us!) and his son J – N was a gas man and J was his 8 year old son, he had another, younger child and his wife had booked the sleepout for him and J, A and her granddaughter A, she was recently divorced and was doing a lot of Striking-Out-On-Her-Own including course in permaculture, spoon whittling and so on and had booked this course for her granddaugher and her, V and his son O, not sure what V did but I had the impression he wasn’t living with O full-time. O was lovely, 15 and really into his bushcraft, told me all about how he’d met Ray Mears once, really knew his stuff and was one of those teens who give you hope for the next generation, a mother and son who’s names I never learnt but were really nice, I think she was a single mum and her son who I think was very tall for his age rather than very old had been failed by the school system and was about to start some one to one special measures teaching with a different school before her last, last resort of Home Ed and two sisters in law (one was married to the other one’s brother) J and A with a son each and an extra friend of the two cousins, all boys. A was very nice, J was nice but had a very annoying habit of doing that Australian going up at the end of each sentence to make it sound like a question which really grated on me after a while. She’d taken redundancy from IBM and set up a dog walking business? Which she really enjoyed? And found very fulfilling? And us. And Sean the Bushcraft man who we’ve met over the years there several times and his new sidekick John-with-a-beard who turned out to be a fellow Home Educator.

All signed in we first went to camp hq to drop off our stuff and then had a bit of a tour of the site. Davies and I know the site really well after so many visits but learnt loads nonetheless with all the little snippets of history Sean threw in. We finished down the other side of the green burial site where John-with-a-beard took over to teach us about squirrel shelters. We were given the tip that shelters are best placed facing east where the sun rises, so warming them in the morning and shown how to work out east using a normal wristwatch and the sun before splitting into 3 groups and getting on with building a shelter while John came round and oversaw how we were doing. We were in the smallest group – Davies and I with V and his son O who had already decided they’d be sleeping down in their self-built shelter in the woods. Possibly if we’d not been working in a group with someone who was planning to do so Davies and I might have considered it ourselves. But it did mean the pressure was on the four of us to really do it properly.

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Once everyone had finished we all went and gathered round each shelter and then John came and tested them all by straddling them with his 18 stone weight. They all stood up to it too 🙂

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Back to camp base for a cup of tea and our packed lunch. There were a couple of kelly kettles which were sufficiently interesting to one of the lads to have him keeping them almost perpetually on the boil and offering cups of tea every 20 minutes or so. Having never refused a cup of tea ever I drank quite a bit! 😆

We sat round the campfire eating lunch and chatting and inevitably learning a bit about each other. Predictably our Home Ed status came up pretty quickly and the whole WWOOFing idea was soon out there too, making me something of a novelty / curiosity / person to come and poke with questions :). Well me and J the child head doctor who was also popular to ask questions of :).

Next we split into two groups to learn some knots (quick release, timber hitch, adjustable AND I can still remember them all 🙂 ) and chop down some sycamore to strip and carve into pegs to create our shelters. Davies and I were with Sean this time. We’ve met him several times before on visits to the centre and he always does a firestarting talk at the Greenfair. He is an excellent teacher, really patient and ready to show you over and over again if you don’t grasp something at first giving you the impression he has all the time in the world to show you. He was particularly good with Davies who struggled with one of the knots, mostly I think due to having such little hands and stood with him doing it again and again until Davies got it right and could do it again.
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We started with knots and then went off to lop some sycamore before bringing it back to make into pegs. We had to cut them to size, check over them to see if there was a logical top and bottom and place for a notch depending on knots in the wood and then taper one end, flatten the other and create a notch for cord to be captured. We were all given very sharp knives and shown the right way to use them to create a small pile of pegs each.
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Next we were issued with a hoochie (best link I can find online to show it is here) which were actually packaged ones with integral guy line and eyelets but could have been easily made if needed. We were shown a variety of methods of pitching including both sides down in a sideless pitch, both sides up propped with wooden poles, or one side up, one side down. Davies and I went for the later with one side pitched to the ground and the front open.

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At this point we had to make decisions about where we were planning to actually sleep later. Davies and I were the only ones who didn’t decide to put a tent up at this point. We did have a little tent in the car but we were already feeling we’d wussed out slightly by not planning to sleep in the woodland shelter so we wanted to get a real survival type experience. We had a small groundsheet with us which covered enough ground to put our roll mats and little pillows on, topped with sleeping bags and blankets. We thought it looked very cosy 🙂
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There were a few hammocks to have a go at putting up and getting into too – Davies really liked it, I didn’t have a go as I was not at all confident at my ability to get back out again with any dignity 😉
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Then it was time to prepare dinner. A vast array of food was brought out including 3 chickens, several packs of bacon, potatoes, sweet potatoes, leeks, onions, carrots, tomatoes, mushrooms, parsnips, lentils and tinned tomatoes. We established that no one was vegetarian so there was no need to make anything meat free and then one team took care of cooking the chickens in an ammo box on the fire adding the bacon towards the end of cooking. The rest of us took on peeling and chopping veg to go in the big iron pot to hang on a tripod over the fire. J sidled up to me and muttered about hating lentils, I agreed I also hated them and so when noone was looking we hid them 😆 😆 I was quite staggered to see how little pretty much all of the kids and several of the adults knew about food prep – surely it doesn’t get more basic than peeling and chopping veg? We added some water, stock cubes and herbs and bunged the pot on.

Another hour or so of sitting round the fire tending to the food, whittling wood and chatting or finishing off setting up camp – and of course more tea drinking. Davies wanted to make a wand for Scarlett so Sean lent him a knife as his own was pretty blunt, helped him choose a good bit of wood and cut it and then coached him on some knife skills and showed him some techniques.

Next we did some sensory awareness games and talked a bit about tracking. Sean explained about peripheral vision and using all our senses and we played a game where a blindfolded person stood in the middle of the circle armed with a water pistol with a bunch of keys at their feet. The rest of us had to creep towards them and grab the keys without being heard – any noises made by us resulted in the water pistol being squirted in that direction. We had a couple of games of that before it was time to get ready to serve dinner.

I helped carve a chicken and serve up and we had a pretty good meal of buttered rolls, veg stew, roast chicken and roast potatoes. Someone had brought along marshmallows so we cut some more sycamore switches and stripped the bark off and sharpened the ends to make perfect toasting sticks for those. We washed up (Davies did our plates and bowls, unfortunately his drying up afterwards left something to be desired so they ended up collecting loads of leaf litter and twigs :rolls:) and then headed over to the woodland classroom for some firestarting practise.

Most of that Davies and I had covered before, either at Forest School or at Sean’s own firestarting talks at Green Fairs over the years but he did a really good half an hour or so talking about different firestarting techniques throughout history and handing round iron pyrite, flints, firesteels, various types of matches, maya dust, cotton wool and vaseline and so on. We were then sent off to collect some birch bark and given fire steels to make sparks to light it. We all tipped our started little fires into the main fire in the classroom to have jointly lit it for the night. We were shown charcloth and told how to make it along with newspaper soaked in candlewax and it renewed Davies and my intention to create a tinder kit each ready to carry for fire starting.

We were then taken back down to the burial ground and shown a good place for badger watching as a hide had been created from a wattled fence. Clearly you wouldn’t actually see any with them not being true and all but the sentiment was nice ;).

By then it was nearly 8pm so we walked back over to the camp where Sean and John had a last hot drink with us before leaving us to our own devices. The mother and son made a decision not to stay the night so bid us all goodbye and headed off, the father and son who were staying in the woods left to bed down there for the night and the rest of us settled round the campfire.

As it got dark people gradually drifted off and the children who were still awake were off playing with torches which just left myself and two of the Dads – N and J. J who was very quickly becomming my new best friend then broke out a flask of sloe gin he’d made himself and several shot glasses to share round. I’d not taken any alcohol with me worrying there wouldn’t be a chance to drink it and then I’d end up taking covert swigs from within my rucksack thereby confirming my private worry that I am infact an alcoholic so this was very welcome :). We had a very interesting conversation about what life is all about, I was questionned more about Home Ed and WWOOFing.

Davies was off playing with J, the other smaller boy, who he’d really hit it off with and they were enjoying doing stuff with torches. It started to get properly dark and they came back so we all called bedtime. I was wondering if not putting a tent up or indeed the sides of the hoochie down had been an error as it suddenly seemed very open to the elements, but Davies snuggled straight down and was asleep in minutes.

I predictably lay awake although I must have dozed. All of the tea came back to haunt me and I ended up struggling out of my sleeping bag three times for a wee, the final time managing to wee all over my pj bottoms too which meant I had to get back into the sleeping bag just in my pants 🙁 I laid for a bit longer having checked the time (4am) and decided as soon as it was light I’d get up and dressed, get the fire going and make some tea but I eventually did drop off and next thing I knew it was 730am, broad daylight and several people were already up – which made getting out of my sleeping bag and into some clothes pretty tricky ;).

Davies and I congratulated ourselves on making it through the night 🙂
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and packed up our stuff before going to join the others round the campfire for pancakes cooked on the fire for breakfast. I have serious frying pan and casserole pot for cooking on the fire envy :). We were rejoined by V and O who had managed the night in the woodland shelter and by J and his daughter E who had been freaked out by a spider at bedtime, gotten very upset and so they’d decamped to their car in the carpark for the night instead. We cleared everything up and gradually people headed off leaving just Davies and I. Sean and John were last to leave and said we could carry on the campfire, leaving us some more firewood aslong as we spread it all out before leaving it later.

Davies and I finished our experience with some sitting round the fire, whittling some wands and chatting about everything we’d done, the new stuff we’d learnt and the things we want to try next. It was a really good experience, Davies loved it and has added further to his list of things he wants to learn and kit he wants to acquire. I was really proud of him for being so up for everything on offer, loved having the time just the two of us and would definitely do it again.

Meanwhile back at home Ady and Scarlett had been to Wildlife Explorers in the morning, visited the supermarket for their individual favourite dinners, eaten together, had baths and had a sleepover watching Harry Potter in our bedroom before heading over to meet us which is where we get to 10am on Sunday morning and the beginning of our holiday. But that’s for a whole other blogpost :).