Clare's Rebel Badge Blog

I completed my Bronze Maverick Award this month - very exciting, and I feel I should share my adventure with you.  My Community For this I ran a Warhammer Club after school for Secondary School students with an interest in the hobby. I have been doing this for some years with a fellow Rebel, but this year decided that the club needed to be more structured and the kids needed to be given a focus and more responsibility. To this end we created the 'Council of Doom' for the older students so that they had a say in how the club was run, and took responsibility for teaching new and less experienced students about the joys of Warhammer. This worked well until they had to go to revision classes instead. However, younger students took up the mantle of responsibility and organised our resources cupboard to a degree I am incapable of, and continued building our 'Age of Sigmar' army in readiness for the Armies on Parade competition in the autumn. I also started volunteering for my...

It's A Wonderful Life I had never watched this movie before, and as it was on in December I thought I would view it for my Christmas Challenge Badge. This is a gentle tragi-comedy from 1947, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The acting was pretty good as was the scenery, and I had forgotten how atmospheric black and white film was. James Stewart made a great lead as George Bailey, and was backed up well by Donna Reed as his wife, Mary. George was a building society owner in a small American town, whose nemesis was the rich and cantankerous banker Mr Potter; Potter made George's life difficult at every turn, eventually threatening to ruin him and causing him to seriously consider suicide. Obviously at this point, George was saved by his guardian angel, Clarence, and made to see what a difference he made to everyone's lives.  All ended well with the townspeople saving George from ruin. Lovely, and not a bit cheesy! Odette Biographical drama from 1950 about Odette Sansom, a French w...

I believe that private gardens and public spaces should be havens for wildlife, as well as being pleasant for humans, with imperfect lawns containing patches of long grass and wildflowers, weeds in the borders and between the cracks in the patio. So many gardens are sterile and clean, perhaps for convenience; I understand this - people are busy and don't want their kids or pets getting muddy and making a mess, don't necessarily have the skills to maintain a garden or think that these skills are not for them or something they could not learn. I realise that this is a gross generalisation, but one that I experience often with friends and colleagues. I decided to investigate what wildlife and plants I actually had in my small town garden (c. 85m2), and to then research ways in which I could improve the habitats therein to encourage more wildlife of all shapes and sizes, and to provide a wider range of plants. So far I have noted nearly 140 flowering plants as well as trees and sh...