Jan 4th
Extraordinary mild weather again. When this blog is read in 10 yrs time, probably the comments on the weather will regarded as the most significant - either we'll be well into Global Warming by then, with England a parched dry land growing olives, or we'll be back to proper cold winters and people will be wondering what all the fuss was about....

News reports from the Girl Guides suggest the organisation is opting for more sex education programmes, talks about drugs and so on. This is the continuation of a trend noted a couple of years ago when a friend who held some position in the Guides contacted me to show me the handbook "Look Wider" which had some gross and silly material which included a pic of a Guide holdfing up a condom, and suggestions that the girls should discuss, for example, same-sex marriages.....There was quite a lot of publicity about all this, but we felt that any criticism should come with practical suggestions, so we mapped out a whole alternative range of ideas for activities, including discussion topics an d ways of involving girls in looking at social and spiritual and political and cultural ideas.....to no avail......

Like millions of other women, I owe a lot to the Girl Guides, and have also in my turn done things like testing Guides for badges....and even had the pleasure of knowing that my books have proved useful in some Guide groups.....

So I feel very strongly indeed that something horrible is happening when a graet movement like this goes lunatic and starts joining in the current obsession with getting youngsters fixated on sex.

Golly, they are getting this all wrong. The whole point about the Guides is that they should be offering something DIFFERENT, startling, fresh, counter-cultural. When Girl Guiding began, at the start of the 20th century, many girls had never had the chance of doing outdoor things like hiking and camping, learning woodcraft and tracking skills, cooking over camp-fires, forming into patrols and organising hikes and expeditions. Many were expected to spend their lives in other people's parlours and kitchens, dusting and cleaning, carrying water in jugs and polishing silverware....others were expected to have more priviledged lives, barely doing any housework and encouraged to believe that a whole range of useful activities were somehow "unladylike". Girl Guiding brought girls together acros the barriers of wealth and social class, introduced them all to the great outdoors and to cheerful ideas of teamwork and service to others. Generations of girls learned First Aid, simple cookery, the fun of being part of a team committed to some enjoyable project, comunity service, and coping with all the minor hassles of life.......Today, girls are slithering back into a modern version of the sort of narrow, indoor lives from which this wholesome movement had rescued them!! They are stuck with endles propaganda which narrows their field of vision, so that it's all sex, pop culture, spending money on trivia, and staying indoors in case some health-and-safety regulation may be infringed. THE ONE THING THE GIRL GUIDES SHOULD BE DOING is ditching any talk whatever about sex, drugs, or other fashionable topic......instead there should be a wholesale re-commitment to the notion of challenging the social mores of the day.....show young people there is a world to discover, with big challenges requiring real skills, courage, and a sense of initiative. Get girls (and boys!) learning how to

- and this is just a list for starters -

camp for a week in the countryside
cook out of doors
cook in an ordinary kitchen using fresh ingredients
care for a bedridden patient
organise an afternoon of games and fun for some small children
entertain elderly people on a regular basis
show people round the local town/city/village noting items of historic or other interest
sing songs for car journeys
play games for use at Christmas or for wet afternons
use a code sch as Morse or semaphore
use Braille
use basic alphabetical Sign Language
acquire a qualification in First Aid
plan and execute a walking-trip covering,say,16 miles in 3 days
recognise the main star constellations
memorise the kings and queens of England from William the Conquerer onwards
know the lives of at least ten English saints or heroes
explain the basic concepts mentioned in the original Baden-Powell Scout promise, including "honour" "duty" and "service".

Phew!

Meanwhile, I've spent today hoovering and cleaning in a house still dominated by stacks and STACKS of Christmas cards, Advent wreath, and other dust-collecting matter.

HAVE YOU BOUGHT A CATHOLIC TIMES YET and done my Quiz??

This evening, we decided to continue celebrating Christmas so borrowed another DVD and watched "Father of the Bride" (starring Steve Martin). It is charming - recommended. (Yes, yes, I know it's sooooooooo 1990s. Doesn't matter. Nice film).

Jamie was given Hilaire Belloc's "Charles 1" for Christmas and has been reading it to me. An excellent read - why hadn't I discovered this book before?