By Chloe R and Zara M, Year 10 Journalist Leads 

To all you younger pupils out there, there will be a time where your Head of Year will bring you to an assembly to undergo the right of passage, being the Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) talk. To summarise, DofE is a 6 month long process where you do periods of volunteering, physical activity and skills with, of course, to round it off, the infamous DofE expedition. The expedition is renowned for a reason and is full of great memories and crazy times for you and your friends, and so on Tuesday 13th of January, Year 10 underwent the treacherous training process for it, and here is our knowledge for your future endeavours.

The first activity we took part in was cooking our lunch in our DofE groups on a trangia outdoor stove. Despite the pouring rain, we got into our groups and set up our stoves to prepare boiling the water for lunch. For reasons beyond our group’s control, we bought various pot noodles to cook and we thought we would be on top of our cooking game, Gordon Ramsey-esque with our chicken and mushroom, spicy kimchi and Tteok-bokki. Unfortunately, we would be proved wrong… pot noodles need to be cooked with boiling water, for the noodles to become, well, noodles and we believe that that was where we made our first mistake. We made ours with lukewarm water, as our trangia’s flame had been damaged by the biblical rain. So, the noodles were half cooked, raw and somehow burnt all at the same time. Not to mention the warning from Ms Arnold that if we were to bring pot noodles they would be crushed instantly by the sheer weight of our load on our expedition, and if we bought porridge for breakfast it would explode and make cold, rainy porridge in our sleeping bags. Anyways, we all felt slightly uncomfortable after eating, as feeling a concoction of dry pot noodles in our stomachs was not appetising at all. The feeling was eventually defeated by drinking copious amounts of water and we definitely learnt a lesson about what to bring on the actual trip!

One of the most memorable moments of the day was when we stood on the astro and put up the cold, rain-soaked tents as fast as we could, before Mr Gallagher could get any more drenched. Despite the panic, fiddly poles and numb fingers, we managed to get ours up without (too many) difficulties. I’m not sure we would fully trust the tents we put up to stay up through the night, though. We had a remarkably fun time with this and definitely came out with lots of memories and hopefully on the actual expedition we will have better luck with that! Though we have our doubts…

Our last activity of the day was a first aid course from some external teachers. Whilst being short, and sometimes slightly unrealistic for our DofE expeditions (defibrillators don’t usually pop up in the woods), we still had a great time and learnt skills which will help us in an emergency situation. With the help of our instructor David, we took turns putting our partners into the recovery position, practiced various safety precautions and tried to wake up our ‘unconscious partner’. With over 30 Year 10s in the sports hall, this was carnage, however it is something we will certainly remember for future use.

Coming up, we have an orienteering and map reading trip in early February, a practice expedition in March, and then our assessed expeditions in June. Despite the slight difficulties we encountered in our first practice, we cannot wait for the next trips to develop our skills! DofE is such a fun memory making experience and we are so lucky to have this opportunity. Let’s hope that there is a lot less rain, and we survive the expedition even without pot noodles!