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Christians At Buckmore Park

From: stephen rainsbury
Sent: 02 July 1999 01:53
Subject: Re: First night at camp - HELL

A few years back, at another Buckmore Weekender, the lads asked if there was
anything they could do to help the Warden because they wanted to get their
"Buckmore Award". He suggested helping one of his lads build a camp fire for
a visiting Christian Youth group (The Crusaders) all 250 of them.

We built an 8 foot high fire from old pallets, and finished just as the
Christians (jolly nice people by the way) were taking their seats. (At 
Buckmore the camp fire is in a natural arena with banked seating, and timber
fronts.)

We lit the fire, and they invited us to stay.

Their leaders stood in front of the fire, said a few words, and whipped out
some guitars.

Half way through the first song the fire really took hold, and the wind
started to blow. By the end of it the leaders were edging away from the
fire. Sparks were starting to dance.

The Crusaders started handing out sausages on sticks for each person to cook
in the fire, the scouts sat open mouthed, good embers were at least two hours
away.

A few more words, a few more flames, and a warning from me to the Crusaders
that nylon shell suits were not really the order of the day. By now the 
leaders were standing in the front row, which had been vacated by people
moving away from the fire, which was starting to roar.

Next song. Church leaders were nervously eyeing the fire behind them and
Michael only rowed his boat ashore once before the singers were in the
second row.

All attempts at sausage sizzling were abandoned and the Church Leaders
started turning nasty about the fire being too big, from where they stood in
the third and fourth rows. At this point the edge of the first row was
starting to smoke.

I don't know about your troop, but ours has a particular way for putting out
fires, but I don't think the Christians would have helped out, which is a
shame because 250 little bladders may have just done the trick.

At this point I decided the best plan was to collapse the fire and drag out
some of the logs, the fire agreed and promptly fell to bits.  Half the
Christians thought it was devine intervention and were impressed,  the
others that the whole flaming incident was the work of the other bloke.

Logs rolled out and stopped at row 1, which was now alight, but the fire was
lower, had nowhere else to go and because it had lost its shape the wind
couldn't fan it.

All of the Christians were now standing in or behind the back row, convinced
that this was mouth of the gateway to hell, and had given up all attempts at
singing, clapping, cooking sausages or toasting marsh mallow's, so they went
home, and didn't say thankyou! Ungrateful swine!

Not wanting to waste a good fire, we sat there until 3AM cooking anything we
could simply because the embers were the best we had ever seen. 10AM next
morning, row 1 had disappeared, there was a 20 foot ring of ash and the
middle was still too hot to touch. One of our finest achievements.

I wonder if they went back the next year?



				

					

						

							
						
						

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