As leaders we experience a huge sense of involvement and family, a fair degree of responsibility and frequent exasperations, as much with the parents as the kids.
The meetings are markers in the week, starting the week with the young Beavers on Mondays and heading towards the weekend with Scouts on Thursday. Life's too short for me to fit in the pesky Cubs too.
I will readily admit that some nights it feels like a real chore to drag myself out of the house and propel myself to our scout hut, all of 400 yards away. But almost always this reluctance dissipates when greeted by the enthusiasm and expectation of a group of youngsters.
They are not all angels, they are not all future leaders of Scouts, councils, political parties or even criminal gangs, but they all have some potential to unlock.
A child who fell out of tree on one of our camps is now following in his aunt's footsteps and training to be a stuntman - you never know what skills you might pick up along the way, even if it's how to fall over.
The highlight of our year is the annual group camp, where all sections gather for the weekend to have fun and sleep under canvas.
The role of camp cook and "camp mother", as one leader dubbed it, falls into my willing hands.
I relish the opportunity to cater for a lot of people in a field with limited facilities. Mad.
We have made massive changes to our kit over the years, but the camp kitchen, for cooking and eating is a glorious old canvas marquee.
We have progressed to pop ups for the sleeping tents; there are no brownie points, excuse the pun, for making life difficult.
My cooking facilities comprise 4 gas hobs, with 2 mini if I'm being generous, micro if I'm being truthful, ovens. That's very small, not microwave..... we are powered entirely by gas.
I do have some extra portable stoves, but there's not really anywhere to put them.
We also have Fiery Fred, a truly terrifying piece of kit. Fiery Fred has been with us as long as anyone can remember. He is a bitumen burner, as once used by road menders, a powerful gas burner that sounds like a rocket launch and which can boil a massive pan of water in the time it takes to sing a round of Ging Gang Goolie. Scary, but invaluable.
Last weekend, I made 1½ gallons of hot chocolate on Friday night, then offered 45 hungry, early morning risers a choice of 3 cereals, apple and orange juice and a full English of 2 sausages, 2 rashers of bacon, scrambled egg and baked beans for Saturday breakfast at stupid o'clock in the morning. The dawn chorus was not the melodic lilt of blackbirds and song thrushes, but a 4:30am alarm call from a rook colony.
This is where our frying pans came into their own. 4 pans on the go, 2 cooking bacon and 2 cooking sausages. No need to add oil, superb heat distribution and a cracking all round performance. Once I'd finished, we lit Fiery Fred, boiled a pan of water, sluiced out the pans and they were clean and ready to go again.
We have replaced biscuits with big bowls of fruit, to which everyone can help themselves and this disappears like snow in summer. Even allegedly fruitophobes get stuck in when they don't have to ask and there is no alternative.
By Saturday tea time they are all ravenous, a combination of lack of sleep, excitement, fresh air and adventurous activities are great for building up an appetite.
Saturday night tea was a chicken casserole with peppers, sweetcorn, tomatoes and onions that I had prepared in our cast iron casseroles at home, topped with "SFC", Sue's Fried Chicken - a riff on Southern fried chicken, prepared at home in a 13" wok and heated/ crisped up in the micro-ovens.
Sunday breakfast is a repeat of Saturday, pans working overtime again.
Sunday lunch was barbecued burgers and the (few) leftover sausage and bacon from breakfast. You've heard of the cheeseburger, we did those; you may have topped your burger with bacon, we did that too and we also created the sausage burger - burger plus sausage (with ketchup, naturally) in a bun, so the sausage burger is now officially "a thing", at least on Scout camp. That said, the group next to us were snacking on water melon and fruit kebabs ......... and all their Scouts were as clean at the end of the weekend as they were when they arrived. #missingthepoint
Scouts is a terrific opportunity for boys and girls, but it is also enormous fun and provides endless satisfaction for the adults who volunteer as leaders and helpers.
If you are interested, contact your local group and find out what's on offer and what you can do to help.
© Netherton Foundry 2017
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