Banished: Into the Bundu

At last! My long-awaited week at the outward-bound learning facility has begun. Having felt future-pangs of homesickness last night, I set off with determination, and a notebook and camera with which to record my ongoing mission, to boldly go, investigate new worlds, and do the thing where the towel slips off after the showers because my dressing-gown wouldn't fit in the suitcase. Everybody else's suitcase was bigger than mine and I got an extra hug goodbye from BensMum and we all stood around looking like new recruits who hadn't been assigned a battalion yet.

Jof will miss me terribly which is why the fridge is full of Champagne, I expect.

The weather is due to be challenging with rainstorms and windy interludes, and I have chosen 2 postcards to send home. As per tradition, these will arrive home 2 weeks after I do, a window back in time.

This gives them a week to do all the laundry before the Friday Laundrystorm, so today they destroyed a garden shed (belonging to one of Jof's work-friends) to make wood for the Scout campfire.

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Hello Muddah, hello Faddah, here I am at ... Stubbington Study Centre. This massive expanse of Hampshire countryside has been temporary home to half the people in the county at some point and they all loved it. We were split into houses (Fox, Badger, Kestrel and Owl) and I was a Fox.

Then we got our dormitories (Ash, Beech, Birch and Willow) and I was an Ash in a group of only 4, other dorms were 5 or 6. The red bunks are nice and I bunked with Ben. The clothing stores are so simple even we could operate them. Then we got a taster session which was information about birds.

The extensive grounds and facilities include: a roundhouse with animal skins and stuffed creatures of land and air: a hard court, football pitch, lots of fields and woodland including one called Badgerland where I wasn't allowed, and a playpark. The playpark is epic and has swinging baskets and a turning disc that I called 'Alien DNA' and an obstacle course etc. There is a chicken coop and that's where we get our morning scrambled egg but only once it's been through the hold-it-up-to-the-light fertilisation test. Also we played Launch-the-Egg with padding and packaging that you could buy depending on the points you got during the quiz and one of the launched eggs landed on the chicken coop and scared them which is a real scarred-for-life in-your-beak tragedy if you're a chicken.