Maverick Award

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 local Foodbank, and help out at their monthly textile sales, where we sell second hand clothing to raise funds.

My Beliefs

I have written about this in detail already - here's a link - and enjoyed this part the most I think. I have always loved nature and looking for creepy crawlies, birds and reptiles, so decided to make a more conscious effort to make my back garden a more nature-friendly space. It was already pretty good, but through research I am gradually making it even better and thoroughly enjoy spotting which animals are in the garden and which plants are in flower.

My Skills

In order to complete this section I chose to improve my skills at drawing with a ruler and compass, focusing mainly on Islamic geometric designs as I have had an interest in these for years. To this end I signed up for a monthly course on Patreon with a lovely teacher called Samira Mian, and have been impressed with how my skills and confidence have grown.  I also stumbled across some pictures of crop circles on the internet and have used my skills to deconstruct them and recreate them on paper - clearly the aliens are geometers! One of my last projects was recreating a crumbling design that I found inscribed on the outside wall of Winchester Cathedral; this took quite a while to deconstruct but was very satisfying to draw.

My Adventure

This was trickier and may not seem adventurous to some; I live on an Island which isn't very crowded, and the traffic rarely moves faster than 40mph. Since Covid hit I haven't had much opportunity to leave with my car, or visit crowded places, so for my adventure a friend and I went to stay in the New Forest for a weekend. I drove, trying not to hit any ponies in the dark, and the following day drove to Winchester along the M3 motorway (70mph!!) and then attended the very crowded Christmas Market in the city centre. This was an excellent day out and quite exhilarating after being used to a small town. The next I drove back to Winchester on the M3 in pouring rain and howling winds, and we spent a day at the Science Centre which included a session in the planetarium for our Stargazer badges. It is a fascinating place to visit. We then drove back to Lymington, caught the ferry and returned to our sleepy little Island.

My Challenge

For this I chose to learn the basics of Python programming as I had been waffling on about doing it for years and had bought an instruction book. The programming was not particularly difficult but the book was very dull, which made the challenge harder. I have now signed up to do '100 Days of Coding' on Replit which is better.

Finally...

I had my interview with Charly (who is lovely) and told her all about the above, and she agreed that I should pass. Yay! The Maverick Award has been a great way to focus in on projects that I was perhaps half-heartedly doing already and has given me a good sense of achievement, particularly with the My Beliefs and My Skills sections. 

Oh yes.. 15 points for #TeamNelson