Now it’s cool to be a Scout

Last updated 11:35, Thursday, 01 May 2008

THE fact that there’s a waiting list to join the Scouts shows that today’s teenagers still have plenty of get up and go and aren’t all couch potato computer addicts playing the latest violent games.

In this mollycoddling age, where health and safety requirements threaten to strangle the sense of adventure for which Britain used to be famous, it’s good to know that youngsters still want to take part in daring activities.

This is the gang mentality that we ought to be encouraging. There’s clearly been a massive shift in emphasis from the traditional naff image of singing silly songs round a camp fire and making paper darts.

Now scouts go caving, quad biking, gliding and parascending. There are more than 465,000 Scouts in the UK with 100,000 volunteer leaders. About 15,000 new members joined last year.

In fact Scouting has become so popular there aren’t sufficient volunteers to cope with the numbers of boys and girls wishing to join the movement.

Scouting never appealed much to me as kid. All whittling and woggles. But when I hear what today’s Scouts get up to, it makes me wish I was young again.

As a parent I suspect you would rather your kids were swinging through the trees and leaping off fells on paragliders than sitting in their bedrooms playing the latest Grand Theft Auto games on their consoles.