Codebreaker

I started reading How the Girl Guides Won the War for Rebel Book Club and was fascinated to read that Brownies collected cotton reels, which were then used to hide secret messages in. Cue me writing a coded message and hiding it in a reel.

I did a bit of research and found steganography was the art of hiding things in plain sight. It's half term so I had time to have a go at this. I had grand plans but had to scale back several times, as my crossword idea turned out to be way harder than I thought. Much screwed up paper and a couple of random letters in lieu of answers later and I finally finished.

Since I'm giving three methods a go, my third is the simplest - use a cotton bud to write in lemon juice, wait for it to dry and read by holding it up to a light bulb.

Well on my way to the badge now, I decide that, although I have said I won't backtrack, I have been to Bletchley and the War Museum, so I'm claiming that clause.

I kind of know the phonetic alphabet. I'm often asked to spell tricky last names over the phone at work and, despite the odd (ahem) "personalisation", it always ends up Oscar Kilo. The bestie and I practised this together. While we were fairly confident in the end, I'm sure my menopausal brain will soon return to my more creative method.

I've been to a few escape rooms and found them fun. I recently solved a murder mystery at Valence House Museum (I've blogged about this previously) and the bestie and I have done a paper-based escape, while the bloke and I did another. I cannot in honesty claim to have been lees than useless at these paper-based escapes.

The last clause for me is the code wheel. We made up some printed out wheels and tested each other with little messages. We have another prepped to make up a different code but that will keep for another day.