> I have been a Girl Guide (Girl Scouts in the U.S.) leader for 10 years now and next weekend I'm cooking for 40 people and co-ordinating the meals for 60 more in a total of 3 kitchens. I don't have a catering background, I'm a mom who cooks for 5 on a regular basis. If I went to a camp like the one you described, I'd sit around in a deck chair drinking coffee too!!
> All the leaders usually work very hard to make sure the campers have a good time...after a weekend camp, it usually takes us a week to recover!
> I don't think that makes me boring...

I more or less *had* to be in the Guides right through school, because my mother was involved on the committee. I didn't like it at all, mostly because it seemed quite unrealistic to me. We spent a lot of time doing utterly useless things, such as learning how to make little tripods out of bamboo canes to hold your dish-washing basin on top of when you were camping. To my way of thinking, camping does not involve carting along a basin in which to wash your dishes, or indeed more than one dish, let alone trying to build a complete kitchen benchtop unit out of a type of wood which does not occur naturally anywhere in this country.

We also spent a lot of time learning how to tie knots which 98% of the troop had known how to tie blindfolded and with one hand behind their backs more or less since birth, seeing as all of us lived at a beach and came from boating families. The solution was to give us increasingly difficult and useless knots to learn. I have worked on a fully rigged 19th-century-style barquentine and even *I* can't think of any earthly use for some of the knots they made us learn.

I also have dark memories of some of the so-called games, which included having to knit a scarf for a mouse using cotton thread and two matchsticks. And then there was the scientifically labelled leaf collection. We will not go into details about how thrilling the leaf collection was.

The thing I liked most about it was when I was very little. The junior section of the Guides, in those days (mid 1970s), wore unbelievably cool uniforms which looked like a small girl's version of a WW1 uniform, if you can imagine such a thing. It was brown/olive drab and had epaulettes and button-down pockets on the chest and a big leather belt with pouches and all sorts of d-rings and thingamajigs to hang stuff from. You had to make sure your brass badge and belt buckle was polished. As an eight year old, I spent a lot of my time sniffing Brasso fumes and leather polish, which may explain a lot.

They changed it to a nice feminine turquoise blouse and skirt combination with a polyester neck scarf shortly after I left and I'm sure things have never been the same since.