Log book entries from Glip's log
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29th -31st December 1983 Ardentinny Christmas Camp
Leaders: Glip and Tommy Boag
PLs Colin Spiers, Roderick McCrorie, Callum Gillespie, Alan Fletcher
APLs Derek Spiers, Ross Gillespie, Stuart Dalrymple
Scouts Mark Sinclair, James Gatherer, Kris Timmons
Weather
Rather unkind with mostly rain. We did get a bit of sunshine on the 30th which allowed out on the hill but the wind remained strong and cold for all three days.
Thursday 29th December 1983
We all assembled at Scout Headquarters first thing in the morning and loaded up the van. There was some delay because James Gatherer and Derek Spiers had boobed the date and didn’t realize we were leaving today! James arrived eventually, but Derek arrived on Friday morning much to everyone’s surprise.
Several to-and-fro trips were required between 99 Newark Street, Scout Headquarters and 116 Forsyth Street before all games, equipment, coal supplies etc and been collected. Eventually, we set off and tried our luck at Caledonian MacBrayne. No luck! We were faced with an hour’s wait so we went to Western Ferries instead and got a couple of free tickets which was nice.
The weather was atrocious so everyone was allowed a prolonged stay at the amusement arcade in Dunoon. I beat Tommy again at our annual game of pool, but only because he potted black in the wrong pocket. Before this, we had been perfecting our skills at this year’s computer game as brought by Merry, which involved tipping concrete bags into lorries and things without overloading. Quite fun.
Once everyone was crammed back in the van (Mr Blair’s incidentally), we carried on to Ardentinny and reached the hut about midday or early afternoon. We unloaded in an orderly fashion and spent the rest of the afternoon (after lunch) on a game of football – a Tommy select versus a Glip select. The former won quite easily, but great fun was had by all.
While preparations were in hand for dinner, I drove into Blairmore with CJ holding the back doors shut in order to get some more goodies for tomorrow nights feast. En route, we picked up a couple of locals and gave them a lift into Blairmore.
After our meal, we play board games–Cluedo, Formula One, Risk and Monopoly. The Chair Game, Murder, and finally Vegetable Snap finished the evening off at some ridiculous hour.
Friday 30th December 1983 Am Binnein (1560’)
We were woken to the sound of hammering on the hut door. Worried that our mini van was blocking Forestry Commission workers to their huts, I rushed to the door to find Derek complete with rucksack, along with father who had brought him over on the ferry.
Breakfast went ahead and since the weather was clearer, we decided to go up Creachan Mor looking for snow. Laden with sledges, we must have looked rather funny to the couple of females who watched us set off. Before trying our sledging, Tommy led us up the Smugglers Path and then to the Shieling, which was a pile of stones and produced a common cry of “Is that it?”, heavily flavoured with disgust.
From here, we traversed up and along the slope to Am Binnein, fighting to keep our sledges under control as a very strong, cold wind tried to haul them out of our grasps. I was quite impressed, in fact, that everybody got to Am Binnein, so I immediately awarded it as an Everest height. There was no snow, but it was quite sheltered on the south slope, so we grass sledged here with success. Roderick flew on occasions which is quite something to behold.
Peasant, Rosco and Merry tried their luck further down the hill. We fooled around here for a while. Tommy and I satisfied ourselves watching the others and admiring the snow-topped Arrochar mountains. Eventually, a snowstorm drove us down into the forest on the South East slope of the shoulder. Here, we had lunch, then dropped down to the track........ The party split here. Some, including Roderick and Derek, follow the track back to the hut, while the rest of us, including Tommy, Glip, Ross, Mark, Kris, Merry, and Peasant, headed through the forest to the shoreline, then followed the shoreline back to the hut.
Frankly, this day must have been the most active day at a Christmas Camp ever. And it was not over by any means. We thought of having a game of non-stop cricket, but it was too cold and after half an hour of kicking football and tennis ball into the river and recovering them, we had a game of football which Tommy’s team won again.
Incidentally, when we got back to the hut, we found a note from some local girls who were interested in meeting us! Unfortunately, we were up the hill at the time they mentioned. Shame!
The party began after dinner with one side of Beetle as usual. We also had the following throughout the evening.
*Town anagrams (made up by BooBoo)
*Guess the Tune (Made up by Bomby and although quite easy resulted in very low scores)
*Adverts (made up by Fletch I think) (This game could be dropped next year I think)
*Chocolate eating on throwing a six
*Balloon crab football (highly successful again)
*Round the world
*Top of league etc
The feast was held in an ordered fashion. Certain things were rationed and sweet things were kept off-limits for 10 minutes. This worked well, but subdued the atmosphere a bit. Maybe we could have a frantic rush on the sweetie mix alone to add some excitement next year.
During supper, we had the usual circle games, then pit at some daft hour again.
Saturday 31st December 1983
Another late rise. Weather was atrocious, so indoor activities were the order of the day. We spent the day on circuit teams consisting firstly of;
1. Merry’s computer game
2. Ping-pong balls into a bucket
3. Bagatelle
4. Tiddlywink golf
5. Drive
6. Football game
7. Flying caps
8. Noddy’s Ringo
Drive took too long and was dropped eventually.
Despite starting reasonably early, we were pushed for time and struggled to complete the circuit.. Lunch and clear up proceeded as the circuit carried on for example.
We arrived in time for Western Ferries, having driven through gale-force wind and torrential rain, only to find they had just decided to stop running because of the weather. We went along to Caledonian MacBrayne’s, but we had about an hour’s wait for that ferry.
The crossing wasn’t bad because we were running with the waves.
We didn’t escape illness this time either. Kris was in his pit during most of Friday evening, but managed to get up for Saturday’s activities.
The three days went off successfully, but somehow I felt they were stale. Maybe we need a change of format? On the other hand, they were only stale as far as I was concerned because I’m so used to it. To the Scouts, it was still pretty fresh. Maybe we should keep the same format but have some new aspect to it all. Like what? A uniformed dinner? Outdoor camping? New games? Canoes? Different venue?