Been there, done that, got the badge to prove it.

Byline: LAURA DAVIS 

THERE was a man lying in reception looking distinctly corpse-like when I entered Daily Post Towers last week I peered at him, he didn't seem to be moving, and I was just about to dash to the nearest telephone box to transform into First Aid Girl when I noticed a security guard sitting obliviously at his desk.

"There's a man collapsed on the ground!" I had opened my mouth to holler at him, when the body sat up and I realised he had just been fixing something under the floor. The blue overalls should have been a dead giveaway.

Lucky for him really, as the last time I had a first-aid refresher was at Guides, when a bossy patrol leader nearly broke my wrist as she twisted me into the recovery position.

I wonder how many people are wandering around the country ready to spring into action upon spying a man with a dislocated shoulder or a foreign body in his eye, with a few handy tips gleaned in a Scout hut as the sumtotal of their medical experience.

Mind you, if the current generation of Girl Guides had their way, the First Aid badge would be defunct, along with most of the others sewn proudly to the sleeve of my blue blouse.

Recently asked what sort of badges would be relevant to the modern Guide, they said surfing the internet, assembling flat-pack furniture, standing up to boys, reducing their carbon footprints and safe sex.

It's a far cry from the bellringing, musician and rambler subjects that I tackled in my early teens - there wasn't much entertainment in Formby, discounting necking mixed spirits in the park or throwing sticks at red squirrels.

I was far too environmentally conscious to start taking out endangered species, so instead concentrated on a range of after-school activities, which somehow led to the moment when I nearly poisoned my Guide leader with an overdose of salt.

Fortunately, I had been unable to resist sticking a spoon into the gooey sauce at the edge of the Double Dutch Chocolate Pudding baked for my European badge (I was ignoring the "double" part of the title under the laws of poetic licence and was passing the cake off as a traditional Netherlandish recipe), so it was me who ended up drinking six pints of water at the same time as frantically rustling up an alternative dish.

I needn't have bothered as I failed the badge anyway, having been shamefacedly unable to name 10 members of the European Union, their language, colours of their flags and currencies.

Before Guides came Brownies, and before that I was a member of the Woodcraft Folk - an educational movement that, in its own words, aims to build a world based on equality, friendship, peace and co-operation.

It was like a more right-on version of the Scouting movement, involving noncompetitive games, casual clothes and music corner, where we all merrily and uncomprehendingly sang along to Little Boxes, by Malvina Reynolds, which - according to Wikipedia - "lampoons the development of suburbia and what many consider its bourgeois conformist values".

There were no badges in Woodcraft, because it was very much focused upon the importance of taking part, and anyway there was no uniformto sew them on to.

But, had there been, I would imagine the modernday Guides suggestion of ecowarrior would have gone down very well.

For light relief, we were treated to all two verses of Dorcus, the tale of a girl who gorged herself on a diet of marmalade, jam, potted meat, Spam, lemonade and ginger beer and ended up suffering from severe indigestion.

You could hear our vomiting impressions for miles as each foodstuff reversed up her digestive tract.

I can still remember all the words.

It's just a shame that the dos and don'ts of CPR haven't stuck in my mind so easily.

I nearly poisoned my Guide leader with an overdose of salt

[e-mail]