By: Blonde Two
I am a firm believer that mixed teams work the best. Now I know that this might sound ridiculous coming from someone is clearly one half of a very strong team of Two Girls; but we Blondes, as the authors, must be considered as separate from this discussion.
Girls and boys bring different ingredients to the team cake. You can make an edible cake with no eggs but it will be a bit flat. You can eat a cake without butter icing but it doesn’t melt quite as smoothly in the mouth. Put a team of boys together and they may be faster. Put a team of girls together and they may be more aware of each other’s needs. These are just examples of different traits and sweeping generalisations but you can do the maths. Boys + girls make (no, not babies, not on my shift!) boys + girls make a strong team.
Sadly we are a bit short on girls this Ten Tors season. They are outnumbered by the boys but, you may not be surprised to hear, are not in anyway overshadowed. I gave them one of my favourite talks this week. It was the “girls stick together” talk and included instructions on “how to share tents with boys”, “how to deal with women’s issues when camping” and “how to go to the loo together at night”.
Most of our teams in recent years have been mixed. In the interests of balance, I am hoping that this year’s will be too but there is still everything to play for.
You seem to need a huge range of skills to organise your expeditions. I wonder if a male leader would be capable of giving such advice to the lads – only with the backup of good professional training I reckon.
I would be interested to know what is the format of your Ten Tors event. Is it the means of achieving an award, and is it competitive?
Now you have done it. An excuse to talk about Ten Tors. Too good for a comment, I will write a blog post later. Our male leaders seem to be pretty good at odd advice too but years of experience is needed to attain an acceptable level!
I have a lovely vision of long lines of girls all glued together with super glue, marching hand in hand across the moors – – –