I promise that I will do my best...

When I was a small person, I was in the Brownies.

On the surface, the Brownies are innocent enough. The name conjures up an image of well-to-do, rosy-cheeked youngsters having bags of fun in a healthy, Enid-Blytony way. Camping, and Gang Shows, and good old-fashioned team spirit. Well, bollocks to that. In my humble opinion, the Brownies fucking sucked (I mean that figuratively – we didn’t get round to that sort of thing until we got into the Guides). My stepsister and I were packed off to the Village Hall every Thursday evening at six thirty, to join twenty or so other unfortunates in an hour of enforced jollity and thinly veiled threats. For the princely sum of twenty pence a week subs, we could immerse ourselves in such joyless activities as working towards our badges, our “path” awards (to this day I don’t get that part of it. Why does it matter whether or not I can tie a reef knot? Or improvise a triangular bandage with a tea towel?), or playing games that mostly involved sitting on the floor while other Brownies stamped on your legs. Fabulous. We also had to walk home in the dark past the scary bus shelter. If I think about it now I can still see the imagined shadow of a man with a Very Big Knife that my head would conjure up for me.

The ceremonial side was a little sinister too. To be inducted into the Brownies you had to take part in a strange little vignette which involved pretending to be a child who learned the hard way that the only person in life who would tidy your bedroom was you, in a pretend wood, by a pretend pond, while your parents watched. And as for the god-bothering and general fawning…if I wasn’t promising to “do my duty to god” I was entering into a contract of servitude with the Queen, or standing at a freezing War Memorial on a November Sunday wishing I was at home doing my Spirograph. It was like being in a cult, only without the fun stuff – stealing, religious ecstasy with the aid of hallucinogenics, that sort of thing. I was bullied both by my peers and one of the helpers, but it’s alright because I’m over it now. Obviously. I attended one (one was enough) ill-fated Brownie camp which saw me struck down with crippling hayfever even as I was coaxed off the side of an abseil tower or tied empty barrels together with hairy string in a collective delusion of the power of hope over physics (to say our raft was doomed to fail would be something of an understatement. Anna Welch is probably picking pond weed out of her hair to this day). It wasn’t all gloom though – I attained the heady heights of my Hostess (serving a cup of tea and a biscuit to Brown Owl and Tawny Owl without tripping over my feet or bellowing “motherfucker” instead of asking if they took sugar), Jester (pathetic, embarrassing dance and thirty second monologue shamelessly stolen from Pam Ayres) and Country Dancing badges. I impressed the other Brownies with my in-depth knowledge of banned horror films, and went canoeing in the local swimming pool. And for reasons that are still not clear to me, I went on to join the Guides. The Guides are a little more fascist than the Brownies – I was disciplined on a truly horrendous camping trip to Derbyshire (sunstroke, the promise of wallabies and a prolific nosebleed into the cauliflower while serving lunch) for wearing a blue t-shirt (everything had to be blue. Everything. There is no room for individuality in the Guides) with white stripes on it. I just didn’t fit in (really?) and was finally asked to leave at the age of thirteen, whereupon I filled the ensuing gap in my leisure time with fags, cider and underage sex. Hurray!

So why, despite my scarring memories, am I so keen on Small Person joining the Brownies?

I must be stopped. Oh, and MC Hammer has a blog, apparently. Weird*.


* Please note - "weird" does not necessarily mean "interesting".