If tension headaches are caused by unresolved tensions on the inside, I think the headache I had between Saturday and Tuesday of last week was evidence of tension on a cosmic scale about going back for a third week of summer camp. On reflection it would appear that my body and mind had ganged up on me and decided that I wasn't supposed to be there. I'd already done a really intense but largely successful 12 days at 2 different camps, and unlike when I went the first time and it was all new, this time I felt I had nothing left to prove. Even after a week of resting and doing very little at home, I wasn't feeling at all rested. Certainly neither body or mind seemed to have recovered...
After last Saturday's parkrun, when I ran round in 26 minutes, I could hardly see or stand because of the tension build-up but yet this wasn't warning sign enough to stop me getting on the train to Edale on Saturday afternoon. It must have been the desire to see my friends amongst the other team leaders again which got me on the train because every logical thing in me both physically and mentally was asking me to stay home.
Then I spent most of Saturday evening after arriving back in Edale hiding under a tent during a game of sardines with the other team leaders, and despite the headache I got quite comfortable there, and at that point I might have settled for staying there for the entire week.
Sunday morning I spent about two hours in a room with the other team leaders thinking up a song to introduce the camp rules. The song was good but I felt like a fruit loop just being there.
Sunday afternoon I found out I was doing the Future Leaders group again. Because I'm old, it's a logical thing to ask me to look after 17-19 year olds, rather than asking a 20 year old to do it. I was still feeling pretty crappy so finding out this group was going to be potentially the most challenging of the week didn't go much to banish the tension I was feeling.
Future Leaders is to some extent a misnomer. Despite the fact that some very able and intelligent young people go on this camp, people with aspirations to be doctors and airline pilots, there are also quite a few people who go on it either because their parents have fired them out of the house for a week to get some peace or because they've always come to camp when they were younger and now this is the only camp they're still allowed to come on. Some of this latter group have some serious issues. Either because of learning difficulties or because of medical conditions. Conditions which I don't understand.
It's a challenge as a leader to make a unified group out of people so diverse in abilities that at the one end they can learn the complexities of the human body well enough to become doctors but at the other end they can't understand that if you don't eat you will fall over, or if you go out in the rain with no coat on you will turn blue, or even how to understand the correct way to put on wellies and trousers.
My first attempt at future leaders two weeks ago I bonded with most of the group very quickly, on the Sunday night, when they dressed me up as a woman, a woman named Queen Candy, I felt we were already most of the way there to understanding one another. Although one member of that group was hard going at first, I always felt that he understood what I was saying, even if chose to do the opposite most of the time. But we had an uneasy truce which passed for understanding. And despite the difficulties I always felt there was respect on both sides.
With my new group it wasn't so easy. Although I managed to get them to dress me as a scary looking clown for the Candy Wars of the first night, it didn't run as naturally as on my first week. In fact, things that I was saying and doing naturally and un-self-consciously the first time around, it was like pulling teeth on Week Two. The group were naturally more reticent, and although the group as a whole were lovely, one or two were taking me into territory I've never visited before. At the very least they were taking me into some strange border country between sanity and la-la land.
10 minutes of ADHD training on the training weekend doesn't really equip you for dealing with a full-on case of ADHD. One guy wasn't so much hyperactive as HYPERACTIVE!!!! And I wasn't sure if the deficit in attention was in his own inability to pay attention or a deficit in how much attention was being paid to him.
After the game of Candy Wars, during which I must have looked so scary small children wouldn't approach me, me and the 3 other leaders and the 22 future leaders went up the 94 steps to Kinder Cottage and for reasons I still don't understand, entered into what turned into a 5 hour long game of catch with a juggling ball. The 11 pm noise curfew came and went and despite my best efforts to keep the group quiet, the ADHDers in particular weren't showing any signs of running out of hyperactivity juice. Two in particular pretty much hijacked the game and it became more of a juggling ball duelling missile-a-thon between them to see who could throw the ball the hardest. I spent quite a bit of time during this game pondering a future scenario in which I was going to have to explain to the camp manager Rachel why one of my juggling balls had gone through one of the cottage windows. Thankfully hyperactive kids seem to be quite good at catching missiles so that never happened, although some of the non hyperactive ones seemed to want to jam the ball into the most hyperactive guy's throat. On reflection, me going to bed at midnight and leaving them to it, might have been a mistake, as the game continued on till about 3 am. Full violence never broke out, but as I discovered later there was a definite undercurrent.
Unsurprisingly on Monday morning I still had the headache, and if there's any combination of activities which are guaranteed not to improve a headache, it's first of all climbing up a wet wooden pole and jumping off, then getting stranded up the high ropes for the second time in two attempts and having to be rescued by an instructor and then crawling through some holes on top of a windswept moor weaseling-style. By Monday evening I was a wreck. The only guy worse off than me was the ADHD guy who wouldn't eat or wear a waterproof, who was by this time blue and in a silent coma. Despite several attempts to explain the laws of cause and effect to him, he hadn't grasped that no food and not wearing a coat in the pissing down rain can have these consequences.
At the staff meeting on Monday night I was ordered to take some time off on Tuesday, and try and get myself well. Otherwise I may as well go home. You would think this knowledge of not having to go canoeing would have helped me relax but when I woke up on Tuesday morning my head felt like it had been in a vice all night. Never one to miss free food though, I managed to drag myself down the 94 steps to breakfast. I went back to bed after that. It wasn't the most relaxing morning though, as I lay in bed groaning. 12 people coming in and out getting ready for an expedition, and 20 excited kids outside doing archery, and the cleaners trying to clean the building. Something had to change.
I decided sleeping wasn't working, so the thing to do was to go for a walk. And this was when my week started to turn around. I was too unwell on Tuesday afternoon to go abseiling with my group. I still was feeling like something the cat dragged in, but if there are any advantages to feeling like a weak and wobbly mess when you're supposed to be looking after a group of teenagers, it's in knowing that the people around you are fully supporting you. Despite feeling like a giant useless jelly of never-should-have-come-back-to-campness, no-one treated me like this at any point. The other 3 Future Leaders Scott, Vicky and Toni picked up the slack in the group without complaint and I also found I suddenly had a group of people hugging me and encouraging me every time I saw them (the Hugging Group was mostly Rachel A, Toni, Emily and Ursula, but others such as Chris gave me high-fives). If ever you feel like a waste of space mess who shouldn't be somewhere, being around people who love you is definitely the antidote.
For Tuesday afternoon's walk with Emily I decided to walk to the village of Hope, and I hoped it was a metaphor for my week. I wanted to go there in order to nurture the hope that there was hope, the hope that all my good work in my first 12 days of camp wasn't being undone, by the physical and mental blancmange I'd turned into. And that was when the sun came out, and Emily was so lovely to be around, and I started to feel like I was on holiday and not in summer camp anymore, and I went to the shop in Hope and stocked up on chocolate and energy drinks, and then we found the most amazing play park, with climbing frames and swings in the shape of exercise equipment and one of them which was my favourite was like having Robocop's legs, and as I stayed swinging there for about 15 minutes, I started to feel like someone had pressed the reset button, and I laughed and I relaxed, and I started to feel well again, and to know that I was still me, and even if I needed people to remind me to be myself, it wasn't going to be a disaster after all.
And we got a lift back to camp, and everything started to look different. My group seemed happy to see me, and in the evening we went bracken bashing, which was mostly sitting around laughing and using bracken bashing as a euphemism for some awkward night-time activities which had been going on in the boys' dorm on night one. And I almost felt like myself again.
And Wednesday all day was my team's expedition, and I realised I would be able to go on it after all, and the sun stayed out, and we walked all day, and it wasn't like the first expedition I'd been on two weeks before where my feet got shredded in borrowed boots because this time I'd brought my own, and where I thought the instructor was trying to kill us by taking us down a waterfall. The views this day were beautiful, and the conversation was easy, and I realised that because I'd been ill and focused on the negatives for the early part of the week, I'd failed to notice what a great group of young people I was with, and for the second day in a row I felt like I was on holiday. And when we got to the campsite, the cooking by Trangia was well organised, and after having a day off, I had energy spare to help clear up the dirty dishes, and then the ADHD kid who didn't understand cause and effect had to be sent back to camp HQ because he wouldn't eat or wear warm clothes, and so he was in a silent coma again, and despite the many attempts to advise him throughout the day that this is exactly what happens when you go walking without food or warm clothes, he still seemed surprised. And in the early headachey days of Sunday and Monday when I might have thought that this was my fault for not being able to explain things to him, I realised that sometimes you may as well just stick your head in bucket of cold porridge as talk to some people, because they simply refuse to listen.
And even the ones that listen, and I mean listen in the sense of hearing the words you are saying, can't understand what the words you are saying actually mean. And this is not your fault. If you try to talk to people with respect and compassion and gentleness, but when you look deep into their eyes and realise that there is no-one at the driver's seat, it's not your fault.
If you have someone for example, who cannot understand simple instructions or how to do simple things in the right order, it may not be your fault. If someone is given a bin bag for his clothes, and a sleeping bag liner for his body, but chooses to sleep in the bin liner, or if he's given a bag to put his tent in and a bag to put his sleeping bag in, but he chooses to put the sleeping bag back in the tent bag, or if he's told to put wellies on before he puts his giant overtrousers on, but does this in the wrong order, maybe there is something slightly wrong with his comprehension skills, rather than your explanation skills. Not definitely, but maybe.
The evening of Wednesday, after the blue silent guy was taken back to camp, we played Head-Torch Frisbee. Just to be clear, this is not played by throwing a head torch to each other as if it were a frisbee, this is a game of frisbee played in the dark, whilst all wearing head torches. One of the advantages of bringing a medical student with you, as we did, is that she hit upon the innovation to the game of pointing the head torches downwards to illuminate your own face rather than pointing them outwards so as to blind both the throwers and the catchers. Largely due to this in-game improvement we advanced our sequence of consecutive catches from a dismal 1 in a row for the first 10 minutes to an epic sequence of 28 catches in a row, before we had to go to bed at 10 pm. For reasons I don't fully understand, this was one of the proudest moments of my week. In fact, for someone who is often bewildered by the complexity of some games played at camp, the fact that we derived so much enjoyment throughout the week from simple in the moment catching games was yet another reminder to me this summer of how the best things in life remind me of the simplicity of being a child, when just having a bike or a ball is enough, and nothing further is required.
Thursday morning we headed back to camp, and in the afternoon we went caving. I enjoyed it a lot more this time than when I'd been on it two weeks before, and one of my favourite parts was the part where we sat quietly in the dark, in complete pitch darkness, with no light whatsoever. As someone who used to be scared of the dark, it's nice to sit in the blackness and not be afraid. By this point, I was feeling completely comfortable with everyone who I was sat in the dark there with, and glad to have had the chance to get to know them all. Once again, the blue guy was still back at camp.
On Friday I went home, and I guess what I was left to reflect on from my 3 weeks of camp is whether this is the right kind of work for me. And I still don't know. I'm no more comfortable being a children's TV presenter / Butlins redcoat type than I was a month ago. I still don't like singing and dancing all that much, although I'm a lot more comfortable than I was in women's clothing and make-up. But I do love being with young people, at least I loved being with the young people I met this month. I loved talking to them and getting to know them, and trying to find out what makes them tick. And I'm not just talking about the campers. I also loved the other leaders.
Possibly I grew to love them even more in Week 3 because when I needed them the most, they carried me through. When I felt useless and out of sorts and not myself and incapable of giving much to them, they took over and they loved me instead. At least it felt like love. And maybe that's why I needed to come back again for another week.
I don't believe that success and failure, victory and defeat, or strength and weakness exist in isolation from one another. All of them are mixed up together. And sometimes when we get too much of one we don't realise how close we are to the other. Because it was a week of extremes I was reminded of the phrase from the Bible 'When I am weak then I am strong'. And the mental and physical collapse of Sunday and Monday made the comeback of Tuesday to Thursday all the more meaningful to me. I suppose I should be grateful the good parts came last, rather than the other way round.
Maybe I had too much success, too much strength in my first two weeks, and I had an inflated sense of myself as a result. Because in the first two weeks, despite my initial reticence, I felt pretty strong and self-confident. There might have even been moments when I was too full of myself. Too ready to talk and to tell my stories and to try and be funny all the time. If this last week taught me anything, it's to tread carefully. To pay more attention.
Week 3 was certainly the most humbling of the three. The challenging behaviours I encountered at time left me completely non-plussed and clueless. Not being listened to or if I was listened to, not being understood, reminded me that I'll never get through to everyone, that not everyone will respond to me in the way I intend, that despite the gifts I think I have, I may never find common ground with some people.
But the ones I did get through to, the ones I did make a difference with, the ones I really got to know, who made me laugh or who I made laugh, who I spent time in a cave with, or up a rope, who I played endless games of catch with, who I played Grab a Granny, or Princes and Princesses with, who I walked 40 minutes each way to the watersports centre with, or who I just spent endless hours talking crap with, they're the ones I remember and they're the ones who made my life better than it was before.
And even though I didn't know it before I went, they were the reasons I went to camp.
 |
| Is this the way to Summer Camp? |
Then I spent most of Saturday evening after arriving back in Edale hiding under a tent during a game of sardines with the other team leaders, and despite the headache I got quite comfortable there, and at that point I might have settled for staying there for the entire week.
Sunday morning I spent about two hours in a room with the other team leaders thinking up a song to introduce the camp rules. The song was good but I felt like a fruit loop just being there.
Sunday afternoon I found out I was doing the Future Leaders group again. Because I'm old, it's a logical thing to ask me to look after 17-19 year olds, rather than asking a 20 year old to do it. I was still feeling pretty crappy so finding out this group was going to be potentially the most challenging of the week didn't go much to banish the tension I was feeling.
 |
| Sometimes after 2 weeks at camp what you really need is a full rebuild.... |
It's a challenge as a leader to make a unified group out of people so diverse in abilities that at the one end they can learn the complexities of the human body well enough to become doctors but at the other end they can't understand that if you don't eat you will fall over, or if you go out in the rain with no coat on you will turn blue, or even how to understand the correct way to put on wellies and trousers.
My first attempt at future leaders two weeks ago I bonded with most of the group very quickly, on the Sunday night, when they dressed me up as a woman, a woman named Queen Candy, I felt we were already most of the way there to understanding one another. Although one member of that group was hard going at first, I always felt that he understood what I was saying, even if chose to do the opposite most of the time. But we had an uneasy truce which passed for understanding. And despite the difficulties I always felt there was respect on both sides.
 |
| Do you want a balloon? Go on I dare you to try and take one.... |
10 minutes of ADHD training on the training weekend doesn't really equip you for dealing with a full-on case of ADHD. One guy wasn't so much hyperactive as HYPERACTIVE!!!! And I wasn't sure if the deficit in attention was in his own inability to pay attention or a deficit in how much attention was being paid to him.
 |
| Here's an idea. Why don't you eat something, then get into bed and close your eyes. It calms me down every time.... |
Unsurprisingly on Monday morning I still had the headache, and if there's any combination of activities which are guaranteed not to improve a headache, it's first of all climbing up a wet wooden pole and jumping off, then getting stranded up the high ropes for the second time in two attempts and having to be rescued by an instructor and then crawling through some holes on top of a windswept moor weaseling-style. By Monday evening I was a wreck. The only guy worse off than me was the ADHD guy who wouldn't eat or wear a waterproof, who was by this time blue and in a silent coma. Despite several attempts to explain the laws of cause and effect to him, he hadn't grasped that no food and not wearing a coat in the pissing down rain can have these consequences.
 |
| I can hear myself talking, but I'm not sure the message is getting through...... |
I decided sleeping wasn't working, so the thing to do was to go for a walk. And this was when my week started to turn around. I was too unwell on Tuesday afternoon to go abseiling with my group. I still was feeling like something the cat dragged in, but if there are any advantages to feeling like a weak and wobbly mess when you're supposed to be looking after a group of teenagers, it's in knowing that the people around you are fully supporting you. Despite feeling like a giant useless jelly of never-should-have-come-back-to-campness, no-one treated me like this at any point. The other 3 Future Leaders Scott, Vicky and Toni picked up the slack in the group without complaint and I also found I suddenly had a group of people hugging me and encouraging me every time I saw them (the Hugging Group was mostly Rachel A, Toni, Emily and Ursula, but others such as Chris gave me high-fives). If ever you feel like a waste of space mess who shouldn't be somewhere, being around people who love you is definitely the antidote.
For Tuesday afternoon's walk with Emily I decided to walk to the village of Hope, and I hoped it was a metaphor for my week. I wanted to go there in order to nurture the hope that there was hope, the hope that all my good work in my first 12 days of camp wasn't being undone, by the physical and mental blancmange I'd turned into. And that was when the sun came out, and Emily was so lovely to be around, and I started to feel like I was on holiday and not in summer camp anymore, and I went to the shop in Hope and stocked up on chocolate and energy drinks, and then we found the most amazing play park, with climbing frames and swings in the shape of exercise equipment and one of them which was my favourite was like having Robocop's legs, and as I stayed swinging there for about 15 minutes, I started to feel like someone had pressed the reset button, and I laughed and I relaxed, and I started to feel well again, and to know that I was still me, and even if I needed people to remind me to be myself, it wasn't going to be a disaster after all.
 |
| Sometimes when things aren't working too well, you need a little extra help... |
And Wednesday all day was my team's expedition, and I realised I would be able to go on it after all, and the sun stayed out, and we walked all day, and it wasn't like the first expedition I'd been on two weeks before where my feet got shredded in borrowed boots because this time I'd brought my own, and where I thought the instructor was trying to kill us by taking us down a waterfall. The views this day were beautiful, and the conversation was easy, and I realised that because I'd been ill and focused on the negatives for the early part of the week, I'd failed to notice what a great group of young people I was with, and for the second day in a row I felt like I was on holiday. And when we got to the campsite, the cooking by Trangia was well organised, and after having a day off, I had energy spare to help clear up the dirty dishes, and then the ADHD kid who didn't understand cause and effect had to be sent back to camp HQ because he wouldn't eat or wear warm clothes, and so he was in a silent coma again, and despite the many attempts to advise him throughout the day that this is exactly what happens when you go walking without food or warm clothes, he still seemed surprised. And in the early headachey days of Sunday and Monday when I might have thought that this was my fault for not being able to explain things to him, I realised that sometimes you may as well just stick your head in bucket of cold porridge as talk to some people, because they simply refuse to listen.
And even the ones that listen, and I mean listen in the sense of hearing the words you are saying, can't understand what the words you are saying actually mean. And this is not your fault. If you try to talk to people with respect and compassion and gentleness, but when you look deep into their eyes and realise that there is no-one at the driver's seat, it's not your fault.
 |
| Hey Jim...if you're back here, who's driving the car? |
The evening of Wednesday, after the blue silent guy was taken back to camp, we played Head-Torch Frisbee. Just to be clear, this is not played by throwing a head torch to each other as if it were a frisbee, this is a game of frisbee played in the dark, whilst all wearing head torches. One of the advantages of bringing a medical student with you, as we did, is that she hit upon the innovation to the game of pointing the head torches downwards to illuminate your own face rather than pointing them outwards so as to blind both the throwers and the catchers. Largely due to this in-game improvement we advanced our sequence of consecutive catches from a dismal 1 in a row for the first 10 minutes to an epic sequence of 28 catches in a row, before we had to go to bed at 10 pm. For reasons I don't fully understand, this was one of the proudest moments of my week. In fact, for someone who is often bewildered by the complexity of some games played at camp, the fact that we derived so much enjoyment throughout the week from simple in the moment catching games was yet another reminder to me this summer of how the best things in life remind me of the simplicity of being a child, when just having a bike or a ball is enough, and nothing further is required.
Thursday morning we headed back to camp, and in the afternoon we went caving. I enjoyed it a lot more this time than when I'd been on it two weeks before, and one of my favourite parts was the part where we sat quietly in the dark, in complete pitch darkness, with no light whatsoever. As someone who used to be scared of the dark, it's nice to sit in the blackness and not be afraid. By this point, I was feeling completely comfortable with everyone who I was sat in the dark there with, and glad to have had the chance to get to know them all. Once again, the blue guy was still back at camp.
On Friday I went home, and I guess what I was left to reflect on from my 3 weeks of camp is whether this is the right kind of work for me. And I still don't know. I'm no more comfortable being a children's TV presenter / Butlins redcoat type than I was a month ago. I still don't like singing and dancing all that much, although I'm a lot more comfortable than I was in women's clothing and make-up. But I do love being with young people, at least I loved being with the young people I met this month. I loved talking to them and getting to know them, and trying to find out what makes them tick. And I'm not just talking about the campers. I also loved the other leaders.
 |
| Here are some of the people I loved spending my summer with.....who carried me through when things were going wrong |
I don't believe that success and failure, victory and defeat, or strength and weakness exist in isolation from one another. All of them are mixed up together. And sometimes when we get too much of one we don't realise how close we are to the other. Because it was a week of extremes I was reminded of the phrase from the Bible 'When I am weak then I am strong'. And the mental and physical collapse of Sunday and Monday made the comeback of Tuesday to Thursday all the more meaningful to me. I suppose I should be grateful the good parts came last, rather than the other way round.
Maybe I had too much success, too much strength in my first two weeks, and I had an inflated sense of myself as a result. Because in the first two weeks, despite my initial reticence, I felt pretty strong and self-confident. There might have even been moments when I was too full of myself. Too ready to talk and to tell my stories and to try and be funny all the time. If this last week taught me anything, it's to tread carefully. To pay more attention.
Week 3 was certainly the most humbling of the three. The challenging behaviours I encountered at time left me completely non-plussed and clueless. Not being listened to or if I was listened to, not being understood, reminded me that I'll never get through to everyone, that not everyone will respond to me in the way I intend, that despite the gifts I think I have, I may never find common ground with some people.
But the ones I did get through to, the ones I did make a difference with, the ones I really got to know, who made me laugh or who I made laugh, who I spent time in a cave with, or up a rope, who I played endless games of catch with, who I played Grab a Granny, or Princes and Princesses with, who I walked 40 minutes each way to the watersports centre with, or who I just spent endless hours talking crap with, they're the ones I remember and they're the ones who made my life better than it was before.
And even though I didn't know it before I went, they were the reasons I went to camp.
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