It’s the 100th Birthday of the Scouting and Guiding Association…..

My Guiding experiences didn’t start well, I joined the Brownies when I was 9 and as I was already 5’5” I was taller than Brown Owl and there was no uniform available….probably a good thing on reflection….So I left pretty quickly and thought the Guides were crap.

Then some ten years later I was at Uni and needed some more experience with kids in order to teach them after graduation….So I ended up as a Brown Owl……

Mostly this was a pretty boring pastime …. But it ticked all the boxes for teaching and kept me off the streets and out of the pubs…..until I went to Guide camp with a friend who ran a Guide unit…..

I didn’t know Lorraine very well, but we had spent some time together in India; she had got monumentally drunk while we were in Agra (where the Taj Mahal is) strangely she was stinking drunk at around 4pm…it was after this that she told me actually she was diabetic…she hadn’t been drunk…just very hungry….

Anyway, I met up with her back in the UK and went along on her Guide camp where she was in charge of cooking and stuff….Friday evening the camp starts, lots of tent erection going on – Lorraine and I decide that we must go to a supermarket (read Pub) to get some more supplies. About three hours later we return feeling refreshed and find our tent has been put up by some very kind 12 year olds, yay! Kids all fed and in their tents the grown ups break out the gin….This is something they don’t tell the parents, but it is an unwritten Guiding law which says that when the kids go to bed you have to drink spirits…generally Gin and Tonic (as the older leaders are generally ladies from the Home Counties…or at least a certain type from the middle to upper classes). So we keep up the law and keep on keeping up the law until around one or two in the morning, by which time the girls have all (finally) gone to sleep and we are in a fit state only to drag ourselves into our sleeping bags in our tent and pass out quietly.

As I had just had a very hard week of teaching, the following morning I was not keen on getting up at around 6.30am which was the appointed hour for Lorraine to rise as cook….she didn’t move, so bugger it, I thought and turned over for another half hour or so….Someone called out for us to get up and left us mugs of tea too (nice these Guides), but still she didn’t move and I was too lazy to shift myself….Eventually at around 8am when all the girls were running around and someone else had made a start on the cooking I thought I might show my face. Lorraine was still out cold…..and at that point I realised, yes, she was out cold…….She’s diabetic and we had missed supper the night before because we were in the pub…..oh, shit…..

I tried first of all poking her ….always works for me…but no luck, she still didn’t wake up. Then I remembered the tea….so pulling her head and shoulders onto my lap I tried to get her to drink the tea (Yes I know this was a bloody stupid thing to do…it was many years ago and I was still drunk). She started to come round a bit…good…Then I remembered that Lorraine always carries emergency supplies with her – kit kats, lemonade, sugary stuff like that. So I rifled through her back pack and found what I was looking for…a small bottle of lemonade, Hooray! I thought….but when I tried to get her to drink this she spat it out….Hmmm…..

By this time some of the other Guide Leaders had realised things were not well, someone organised a car and we managed to bundle her into it and made for the nearest hospital…Which didn’t have an A & E so we decided to try the next one (again, I know this is bloody stupid too…as any medical facility will deal with potential diabetic comas…and they could have got an ambulance for us too…). Fortunately by the time we get to the next hospital Lorraine had started to come around naturally – a bit of the sugar in the tea coupled with her own metabolism, so it was just a quick check up, a Mars bar and we were good to go….

It was only on returning that Lorraine told me that the bottle of lemonade was actually her vodka stash…..left in a lemonade bottle just in case some of the girl guides saw it…..

Which goes to show that the Girl Guides are always prepared…..