Nostalgic camp gave me hope for the future

I have just had one of those strange out-ofthe-body experiences. For a moment, I was transported back to my disant childhood.

The catalyst for my Marty McFly-inspired time travel was a visit to the county showground at Detling.

The usual pens of award-winning sheep, cattle and pigs had been replaced by a town of tents where 3,500 woggle-wearing Scouts were making merry at the Kent International Jamboree.

For a while, the Scouting movement had been dismissed as old fashioned and not very PC as boys, and quite a few girls, got to grips with the age-old art of tying a running bowline and mastering the black art of a clove-hitch, half-hitch and sheet-bend.

Yes, memories of evenings spent in a musty-smelling Nissen hut came flooding back.

In the winter, we would gleefully wrap each other in dubiouslooking bandages like mummies to earn a coveted first-aider badge.

In the summer, we’d run riot through the fields trying to track poor old Smithy who had been dispatched earlier with the onerous task of leaving secret signs of twigs in the shape of arrows wherever he went.

At the end, we’d gather in a circle and chant dyb, dyb, dob - Cub and Scoutspeak for do your best followed by do our best.

Alas, I discovered that nowadays that ritual is now a thing of the past.

Instead, I saw youngsters climbing up walls, learning to shoot with guns and arrows and, horror of horrors, being allowed to drive cars as long as their feet could reach the pedals.

Would creator Lord Baden-Powell be turning in his grave? Certainly not.

He would have loved watching our youth experiencing new activities and broadening their horizons.

In these days of shocking narrowmindedness, it is somewhat comforting to know that our future is in safe hands if the Scouts and Guides have anything to do with it.

‘In the winter, we would gleefully wrap each other in dubiouslooking bandages like mummies to earn a coveted firstaider badge’