If you’ve walked past one of our Explorers lately and caught a whiff of woodsmoke, don’t worry. No one has taken up smoking. The hoodies just haven’t recovered from going to Denmark yet.
In July, 50 Explorers from Units across York flew out to Spejdernes Lejr, the Danish national jamboree at Hedeland near Roskilde, and camped for a week alongside around 35,000 Scouts from Denmark and the rest of the world. They’d spent months getting ready: racing across York to meet each other, two training camps, a Danish meal cooked for the leaders to judge, and a lot of practice at Danish games. Back home, at the Denmark Jamboree Reunion in the Millennium Building at Snowball, burgers and hot dogs on the go, they sat in front of their parents, took questions, and told us what they’d remember. This is what they said, as near to their own words as we could get.
The journey set the tone. Flights were cancelled, so half the party landed at eleven at night and the other half spent eight hours in Heathrow on about five minutes’ sleep. Then the coach driver refused to turn right. The sat nav begged him at every junction and he ignored it. When he finally made the turn towards the campsite, “we thought we’d won the World Cup”. The bags had been reshuffled after the cancellations too, so ten of them ended up carrying ten tents for the last three miles, main rucksack on the back, daysack on the front, and an eight-man tent each on top of that.
Once they arrived, the pace picked up fast. All that practice at Danish games paid off, up to a point. They had twenty minutes on one of them before they’d been signed up for the national tournament. As the only team from Yorkshire, they decided they were representing the county. They lost the first game heavily, or won it because the other side dropped out, depending on who you ask. Either way, they went easy on the hosts. It would have been rude not to.
They beat the Norwegians at football, which the Norwegians took badly. They sang at a campfire with Danish Scouts and took a bit of York along with them. One of them, who’d never been Scouting outside York before, stepped off the plane into a hall full of Irish Scouts and decided the Irish were the most exotic people there, with Hong Kong practically next door. Someone who said campfires weren’t really their thing had a guitar put in their hands and was told to play something. They played.
And then there was the hog roast. More than one of them picked it as the best moment of the week. “I don’t think I’ve ever spent that long eating dinner.” “The best pork I have ever eaten.” One Explorer got through six mess tins of it, trimmings and cabbage included, which the others found more impressive than anything else that happened all week.
Ask about the funniest moment and they’ll tell you about the kilt. One explorer returned to camp with a kilt. What he swapped for it remains a mystery! They’ll also tell you about the opening ceremony, where a man with long hair and a mushroom shirt spoke for some time in what they later worked out was Danish, while half of them wondered whether the whole camp was going to be about mushrooms. And they’ll tell you about that an Explorer went round at dawn banging pots and pans together, and about the face of the one Explorer who slept through it right up until the pans met next to her head.
The leaders got a mention too. Tracy looked after flight one, and the Explorers now describe her at three in the morning as a scientific experiment in how little sleep a person can run on. Then there was the security queue on the way home, where one Explorer got a message saying the group was at the wrong gate and had to decide whether to be the one to tell her. “My life, or five pounds.”
Underneath the jokes, the thing they kept coming back to was people. Hong Kong, Denmark, Ireland, Norway, Australia. “It was nice to go and Scout somewhere else. I’d recommend it.”
The reunion had a couple of guests of its own. Max Butler, our North Yorkshire County Lead Volunteer, came along, and so did Mike Rouse-Deane, better known as Scoutadelic on YouTube. Meeting Mike made the Explorers’ highlights list in its own right. In their words: “If you don’t know who he is, look him up on YouTube right now and subscribe.”
A week like this only happens because adult volunteers give up part of their summer to go along, sleep in a tent, and bang the pots and pans at dawn. If that sounds like your kind of week, email volunteer@yorkscouts.org.uk and we’ll tell you how to get involved.
