Hey Blog! This one is going back to the very thing that gave this blog its name – the Shed!
To start on a very unusual route, the Welsh Scouts have a badge called the Dragon Award. You have to camp out at least once every month of the year to get the Bronze Dragon Award, and then you can continue and get the Silver, but I’m only doing the Bronze at the moment. I have done camps in most of the autumn months and in January with Scouts, and I also camped out over into my birthday, albeit only a few miles away! I am planning to finish the award this year, so I decided to camp out on the last night of March (the only night left after the rest of the month had gone by), which meant I had to use THE SHED! This is the first time I have slept in it (though I didn’t get much sleep) but as I said to Mum and Dad when I went in, “This is what I built it for!”
There isn’t space for a bed in the shed, so I had to use the hammock, which is very useful. There is however one difficulty with sleeping in a hammock, which is that it is curved, and once you’ve been lying in it for a while it’s not comfy to have your spine bent! For this reason, I spent the few hours of sleep curled up and trying to lie sideways to flatten the hammock. There is also the problem of some of the hammock being tight, and some being loose, so you have to be careful not to fall out if your head is in one of the sags! Then you have to deal with the sleeping bag sliding along because your head’s too heavy, but despite this it was a lot of fun, and I recommend it to anyone who has a shed! I made sure I was armed in case of burglars, with my club and half-whittled wooden letter-opener lying handy!
I took my phone, the keys to the house (in case there was an emergency), and a couple of magazines out to the shed. The secret password to let my parents in if they wated to was “Bed-in-a-Shed”. I created a makeshift land-based sailboat simulator when I was learning to sail, the tiller of which I have since modified into a latch for my door, which is really useful as it can only be opened from the inside and therefore I can choose who to let in – for instance, only those who knew the password! They didn’t use it, but I did sneak back into the house in the middle of the night to fetch my branded Home-Ed-in-a-Shed water bottle as I felt I needed a drink. By morning I was up in time for the Dawn Chorus, when all the birds wake up and sing, and then went back to sleep again for about an hour (difficult with the sunlight starting up). Then I went in. I had a plan to spring an April Fool on my parents, seeing as it was April Fools’ Day, but unfortunately they were up, so I couldn’t.
By completing my March camp I have got all months except April (which I have a plan for), May, June (which I also have a plan for), July, August and December completed for my Dragon Award. Yes, that is half the year not done, but is the glass half empty or half full? It’s up to you to decide.
To all those shed owners, I totally recommend camping out. It’s worth it. I could hear the frogs in our pond croaking all night, there was a dawn chorus to listen to, and if I had been up a little earlier, I would have seen the sunrise. One of these days I may go back out there, but for now, I hope you enjoy your shed!