Cobden Visit Cumberland |
We only hire THE best writers for this site. Top Scout and regular " I have a Bad Haircut" columnist Matthew Rogers describes what happened when Cobden Scouts managed to scramble a crack team of elite Scout leaders and Ventures to take on some chief scout badge hunters in their own back yard. On my signal.unleash hell....... Its eleven o'clock on a bright(ish) September Tuesday morning. The six of us; Me, Dan Fido, Ads Ollier, Ben Meeky Meeko, Ducky Duckworth and Greg Marsbar, drive to Cumberland cottage where a few select ventures (Ian Corbo, The Togs (3), Ridgway and Hopwood) await us. Andy Togs meets us at the rendezvous point and takes us to our camp area. Our task is to supply the government with in-depth photos and reports of the ventures activities. We set up camp, a simple tarpaulin with our kit underneath and an observation point, opposite the cottage. The river separated our territories. On our side we were safe, on their side we could be caught. If the inevitable happened we were given 3 minutes to get our kit sorted and clear out of the area before the ventures had permission to find and raid our area for 15 minutes. Greg and Adam took first watch for the first 3 hours, whilst the rest of us collected wood and made a fire. Andy Togs made occasional checks on our camp to make sure we didn't kill ourselves. The observations we made included Ian and Tommy's woodcutting expertise, and our first photos were of Ridgway making numerous attempts to storm us. About 5 hours into the challenge we had numerous pages of observations but as of yet not very many pictures. Me and Ben, in army gear, headed for the bracken but Tommy Togs kept up with us. I got debatably caught (Rubbish ed.) and we had 3 minutes to clear camp. Everything bar the tarpaulin was saved, but we had spares to keep kit under so that wasn't too bad. Nothing much took place until early evening, when we realised Hopwood had gone home and the ventures were slowly but surely getting less interested (Probably because you weren't that adventurous or attacking, boring pikey scouts ed.) We all stormed the cottage (Lies all lies ed.) and found no resistance from the ventures, we chatted to them, for a while and came to the conclusion that they couldn't be bothered. We found out later that was a cunning venture plan, we got captured again and gave them abuse for the remainder of the evening, so they stormed the camp and didn't really get anything to important. The night was okay, it rained but we didn't get wet because of the surrounding trees. We slept in sleeping bag inside survival bags. Throughout the evening we slipped down the hill we camped on (BIG MISTAKE!). By morning we were soaking wet and our water supply was slim so the purification tablets we had we used to purify the river water. We cooked stew and numerous cupasoup, not too mention hot chocolate. By nine o'clock the ventures had awoken and prepared us, very gratefully, sausage sandwiches. The game had clearly finished so we collected our belongings and cleared the campsite, so it looked like no one had ever been there. We were taken home and all have a well-deserved rest. Overall the camp was seemed to be enjoyable and a well worthy experience. The films are yet to be developed, although one is thought to be water damaged, so the government needs to decide whether the mission was a success and the price they will pay for such highly classified information. With this report not being at all biased Tommy Ridgway gives us his straight talking, no bull venture view: "We caned them. They didn't do backwoods properly with Trangias and polythene. We got bored and were trying to get our pictures taken in the beginning. Then they were too tired and went to bed at 8:30, just as we'd got the chopper with infra red up in the sky. In the morning they had used up all their film so they didn't bother playing and they woke us up too early, also not one of them set foot in the cottage till the game was over. Pikey lying fuzzballs." There you have it. The scouts want it to be an annual event.myself I'm not so sure.. |