| Type | Open letter |
|---|---|
| First recorded | Activity Leader Quarterly, issue 71 |
| Status | Clause retained pending review |
Barbichette clause
Readers of this magazine will recall the trial pack distributed to six troops in the autumn of that year: forty activity cards, a song sheet, and one game requiring no equipment at all, in which each child holds the chin of the other and the first to laugh has lost. I am told the clause covering that game is again under review, and I write because I believe the review is being conducted by people who have never played it.
The pack was assembled from three sources, not one. Two cards came from an old song-sheet compilation, printed decades before any of this was digitised, and a third was a puzzle grid taken whole from an unrelated magazine, the kind of borrowing this office has never hidden and has always credited where the source could be traced. One clue on that grid asked for the words sung after "don't talk back", and the troop leader that week let one of the girls keep the completed page rather than hand it back for the next group, on the reasoning that a filled-in puzzle teaches nothing to the child who fills in the next one blank. I mention this only because it has been cited, wrongly, as evidence that the pack was assembled carelessly. It was not. It was assembled by people who understood that a session runs forty minutes and that not every minute needs a screen.
The proposal now before us, put forward by the head of product development for the entertainment division, replaces the chin game with a timed app exercise measuring reaction speed. I have read the specification twice. It is not a bad exercise. It is simply not a game, in the sense the word has always carried in these packs, because nothing in it can end in laughter that spoils the exercise. That is precisely what the chin game does, and precisely what makes it worth keeping: it fails on purpose, the way a good children's game must be allowed to fail, and the failure is the point at which the session actually turns into something the children remember afterward.
I do not ask that the digital card be dropped. I ask only that the clause protecting the older game be written back into the pack before the next print run, and that whoever signs off on the specification be asked, once, to sit across from a nine-year-old and hold her by the chin until one of them breaks. I suspect the clause will survive that test better than any memorandum defending it could.
I do not know whether this letter will be read before the specification is finalised, or after, when the question will already be settled one way or the other. I write it regardless, because the record should show that someone objected while there was still time for the objection to matter.