By: Blonde One

Inventing and playing games is becoming a bit of a Blonde speciality and on our recent wild camp we excelled ourselves (well, in our heads anyway!). We have kept numerous DofE groups happy and distracted from their tiredness and achy feet with all sorts of word games that can be played ‘on the go’. A never ending favourite is the alphabet game: you have to name something on a chosen topic from each letter of the alphabet in turn, e.g. towns – Axminster, Buckfastleigh, Crediton, etc. This is probably the best game as it’s easy for everyone to get involved in, it has endless possibilities and can be as hard or difficult as you like.

On our recent wild camp we invented a few more games that literally had us crying with laughter (when we should have been sleeping peacefully). I admit that our sleep deprived brains probably found these games much funnier than they would normally have but they worked at the time.

We first discussed the intricacies of the English language and pondered why the pluralisation of fox and box requires an es to be added whereas an ox turns into oxen. Our 2am selves found this quite a funny thing and were entertained for a while. Our quirky language was explored further as we made up haiku poems about the night. These are 3 line poems with 5, 7 and 5 syllables in the lines. Our favourite one begins ‘oi you Mr Fox’ and ends ‘ get out of our tent’. I can’t quite remember the middle 7 syllable line except that that’s when the hysteria started!

The last game was the funniest by far and may get a little lost in translation, so forgive us if we sound just a little bit mad to you! With only the faint blue glow of a glow stick we decided to play ‘guess that noise’ to distract us from our fox scaring activities. Blonde Two correctly guessed that I was applying lipsyl and putting on my glasses. I correctly guessed that Blonde Two was taking off her watch and snapping her dry bag closed. You’ll have to take my word for it that at roughly 4am this was a ‘tears of laughter’ inducing game! The proper hysteria began though when I built up the tension for the next noise: advising B2 to listen really carefully as she might not get it. I then switched my torch on! Perhaps the now brightly lit up tent gave the game away!