Vauban's Bits - Painted

The new paint tins have safely arrived, so I painted the new 3D-printed barracks building this afternoon. Pleased with it. When I have a few more bits and pieces ready, I'll try to put together a picture involving more substantial pieces of fort.

With the barracks sitting above the archway, from outside the fort

And from inside the fort - the building itself has a choice of two ground floors - with and without  the archway

The scale mismatch doesn't suit everyone, but this is my gaming scale system - 1/72 scale officer of engineers standing on the 1/100 scale buildings. I've got used to it, and there are some useful advantages

And this is the alternative configuration, with the archway not running under the barrack block

Vauban's Bits

Graham, of the Scotia Albion blog, very kindly sent me some 3D-printed bits to add to my store of equipment for my siege wargames. These have been specially scaled to fit with my old (and OOP) Terrain Warehouse Vauban fort, which has always been short of a few bits and pieces - the manufacturers gave up on this range before it was complete, and subsequently were bought over by another firm whose interests lay elsewhere.

He has sent me a selection of pieces, all very interesting and thought-provoking. The most obvious show-stopper is a fine gatehouse/barracks building - this comes with some extra pieces, to provide a few alternate configurations, so that it can be a barracks and not a gatehouse. The photos are of the gatehouse set-up.

I still have to clean up the printed pieces a bit, and I was hoping to get some paint on quickly, so I could knock everyone (someone? - anyone?...) dead with pictures of the finished kit, but alas, a number of my "scenery" paint pots have set solid. I went to my local hardware store to get in some fresh paint today - got a few of them replaced (I use Dulux colour-matching sample tins), but the base colour for the brown shades was out of stock, so my two tins of Rum Caramel (shades #1 and #2) should be available tomorrow or maybe Thursday. That's fine, but since that is the undercoat colour I can't do any painting until I get them. Watch this space.

Thanks again, Graham.

Spiritual Support

In my search for 15mm scenery which would suit the Danube campaign, I was disappointed to find that all known previous resin buildings are now OOP - JR Miniatures used to do the Essling Granary and the Aspern Church, as I recall, but no more.

After asking around after a suitable church, I found the best option was an HO model railway church made by Faller, which I obtained online from a supplier in Kiel. I reasoned that a 1/87 model of a small church might just about pass for a 1/100 model of a larger church. When I saw the kit the old heart sank (lots of fiddly bits, optional parts, minimal instructions, glue-in-place stained glass windows, and a general assumption that the user has done this before), but Goya very kindly built it for me, and here it is, with 20mm figures to give a sense of proportion.

There is a plan for a trip up north next week, to fight Day 1 of Aspern, so the church will travel with me. I never go anywhere without a church.

Thanks again, Goya - nice job.

Pottery Buildings - probably getting a bit silly now

I mentioned recently that I was not going to buy any more Tey Pottery buildings on eBay, since I have enough for my ECW wargames/sieges (in fact I am going to get rid of a couple of the less useful items) and, to be honest, I'm running out of storage space for the beggars.

I did, however, admit to a strong fancy to get my hands on a specimen each of Anne of Cleves' House (Lewes) and the Mermaid Inn, both of which looked splendid but regularly sold for far more than I was prepared to pay. Sure enough, I was lucky enough to land a nice, cheap example of Anne's house, but I held little prospect of getting the other one, which is much coveted (by proper collectors, in fact) and seldom seen.

Well, last week I was very surprised to see that some fine fellow was selling two Mermaid Inns on eBay simultaneously, at very reasonable starting bid prices. With little hope of success, I placed a modest bid on one and - by Jove - I won it. Even more surprising, the other did not sell at all.

The Mermaid Inn - three views

So here we have the Mermaid Inn, which I understand is in Rye, East Sussex (anyone ever drink there?). I have washed the spider poo off it, but have yet to "improve" it to the house standard, which means detailing the chimney tops, obliterating the pub sign over the door, repainting the ivy on the back (maybe that's the front, mind you...) and applying matt varnish, to get rid of that fearsome shine. This, of course, is why I have to avoid contact with the aforementioned proper collectors...

The real Mermaid Inn dates back to 1420 or thereabouts, though I understand the beer taps have been cleaned regularly since then. A fine addition to anyone's 17th Century town, I would say.

Storage - hmmm. I reckon I'm going to have to get rid of some of my Lilliput Lane houses to make room for these. That is definitely the end of the Tey collection - definitely. I have consciously resisted the urge to make a bid for the (even larger) Alfreston Manor, which is currently on eBay.

So there you have it.

More Pottery Buildings - and another mystery church

Though the rate of arrival is now officially reduced, a few more ceramic "ornament" buildings for my ECW towns have sneaked under the wire of late. From the Tey Pottery "Britain in Miniature" series, I'm now really just keeping an eye open for particularly good bargains on a couple of odd buildings which I fancy; I was very pleased this week to get a very cheap example of the splendid Anne of Cleves' House (Lewes), in excellent order, and at a great price, since the collectors normally really go for this one, and prices are usually around £40 to £50 on eBay. Scrooge McFoy, naturally, did not pay anything like that amount.

I also secured a couple of nice churches - these are not from Tey, but are similar in style, and were made as part of John Putnam's "Heritage" series.

The first is, apparently, a miniature of St Michael's Parish Church, Blackawton, Devon, which building dates from the 14th Century.

The other is simply labelled "Church with Tower", which is certainly true, but the configuration with the narrow circular tower (spiral stairway?) joined onto the central square tower is a bit unusual. Anyone recognise the church? - it really doesn't matter, obviously, but I am gently interested.

All these pictures are lifted straight from eBay (for which thanks), and the buildings will be retouched (a little) and matt varnished (a lot) before they appear on any battlefields.

So - no prizes, but does anyone know the unnamed church?


***** Late Edit - Footnote *****

I've only recently become familiar with these ceramic miniature buildings, so I know very little about them, and don't really wish to know more than I need to understand to get a feel for the ranges and their availability. I am not, I remind myself, a proper collector, since I wish to use them in my toy soldier games rather than deploy them artistically on the piano. 

In case you care, Tey Pottery was founded by Carol Maxted-Massey, who produced various styles of ornamental pieces, at one time working with her brother. The factory was initially at Marks Tey, Colchester, though they later moved to 3 separate factories in Norfolk (at Hainford, Lenwade and Banham). They produced teapots, animal miniatures and painted tiles, but they also produced ranges of miniature buildings - I am particularly interested in the Britain in Miniature series, but there were others (usually smaller in scale), and they also did a number of out of catalogue or special order pieces which appear on eBay from time to time. Out of interest, I obtained a pdf history of the maker, so I have a better understanding of what is out there (and some of it is marvellous). Ms Maxted-Massey moved to Spain in 2002, and production ceased at that point.

John Putnam was a teacher who took early retirement in the 1970s so that he could concentrate on his great passion for ceramic modelling and sculpture. His output included his "Heritage" range of buildings, which became very popular. His factory was at his home, a farm near Blackawton, Devon (hence the choice of the church model illustrated above). His work was popular in the USA, so in later years he travelled to New England in order to add some American buildings to his range. John Putnam died some years ago, and his family moved to Totnes - I believe the pottery concern still exists, but whether they are still trading, and whether any new pieces were ever added, are unknown to me. 

Tey Pottery Buildings – Another Back-Door Collection

A couple of people have expressed interest in the ceramic buildings which I used in my ECW siege testing a couple of months ago. For the most part, these were made by the Tey Pottery company, now defunct, which operated from various locations in Norfolk. The range of which I seem to have become an accidental collector is the Britain in Miniature series, which suits my purposes admirably.

Tey Pottery "Britain in Miniature" - Grannie would have been delighted. The
white-backed buildings in the background make effective town blocks - the
textured-all-round items nearer the camera are more suitable for standalone pieces

I didn’t really need another unofficial collection, but I am pleased with what I’ve obtained, and have consciously cut down on purchasing now, in the sense that I am very picky about what I go for. I note that at the start of this year I wasn’t sure at all about the viability for the wargames table of items primarily intended for your grannie’s sideboard – these are ornaments, let’s make that quite clear – pottery knick-knacks, and they are neither serious models nor exactly accurate.

Some points (for and against) and things to watch for, if you have half a mind to acquire some of these miniatures:

(1) They suit me perfectly – they have a cheerful, almost playful brio which I find very appropriate to accompany toy soldiers – the Britain in Miniature (BiM) series are (mostly) to an approximately constant(ish) scale which I would describe as “smallish 15mm”. I deliberately use underscale buildings with my 20mm figures, because the smaller footprint is more acceptable (given the constant paradox of incompatible ground and figure scales), and because I believe a cluster of undersized houses looks more like a village than a single representative structure which matches the figure scale.

(2) Tey’s BiM range – if you are selective – will fit nicely in a 17^th Century setting. The buildings are, mostly, what in ship model terms would be called “waterline” representations, without bases or landscaping, and can be combined into effective town blocks which would be difficult and expensive to achieve otherwise. Be careful with sizes – the churches are too small for my taste, and the Countryside Collection and a few others contain smaller-scale items – anything which is obviously a generic cottage usually will not match.

(3) They are readily available and splendidly cheap – on eBay you can pick up nice examples for just a few pounds (they are available on US eBay, too though slightly dearer). Typically, I obtained lots for about 3 to 5 pounds each, and was the only bidder. On occasions, an attractive off-catalogue or commissioned item will attract heavier bids, so I normally duck out when the going gets tough. It’s only a hobby, for goodness’ sake…

(4) They are ornaments – they are delicate (though not too bad, if you store them sensibly) and they are glazed to a high gloss. Being a very bad person, I give them two coats of acrylic matt medium – if I need to do any touching up, or obliterate any anachronistic shop or pub signs, I can do that with acrylics between the varnish coats. I expect serious Tey collectors to be outraged by my destruction of their collectors’ value by this varnish business, but these things are plentiful, the value is not great and they are mine anyway (heh heh) – consider it equivalent to converting original Hinton Hunt figures!

(5) Some serious bad news – many of these pieces are untextured and plain white on the back, so have to be placed with care to make a convincing street scene, but this doesn’t cause me any difficulty. This can be a fairly confusing aspect of collecting Tey buildings – some of them are textured and painted all round – these tend to be detached-style buildings rather than sections of town blocks – and I mostly go for these now if I can. Some of the buildings have changed during their production history, so I have (reluctantly) been forced to learn more about the catalogues than I might have wished – in particular, Anne Hathaway’s Cottage appeared in a number of versions, some of which had plain white backs and some, like mine, are finished all round. Yes, I know, this is getting nerdy. 

So, overall, if they suit your purposes (or porpoises – thank you, Jonathan), these guys are cheaper and handier and quicker to deploy than wargames-specific  resin buildings, lighter and more robust (and less irritatingly cute) than Lilliput Lane or David Winter houses (though I cherish a fair few of those, too), and I find they bring a pleasing, colourful vibe to my siege activities, which really benefit from a bit of scenic interest. I still need specialist Hovels houses and similar, but as a bulk buy to make an easy, flexible town the Tey houses are great. Buy them selectively, keeping a careful eye on sizes and they do a nice job. For matching churches, I have found the most satisfactory source is the products of Sulley’s Ceramics, but these are rarer and more expensive.

At a whimsical level, I find it deeply amusing to set up a town which features Shakespeare’s birthplace, the Bronté family’s parsonage, the Rows of Chester, the Siege House (Colchester),  John Knox’s House (Edinburgh), and all manner of famous tourist sites – all in the same spot. Fantastic – I should wheel out one of my miniature tour buses to show off the rich heritage! I am cutting down on watching eBay now, but I keep an eye open for Anne of Cleves’ House, the Mermaid Inn and a few others. No – of course I am not a collector.

More Old Crockery

My new collection of used pottery ornaments was recently on display in the photos of the ECW Siege of Middlehampton test game, and it attracted some favourable comments. As I've mentioned, I have taken a liking to Tey Pottery buildings, which were produced by a now-defunct firm based in Norfolk, were made in a fairly constant scale, in the region of what I would call 15mm, and are readily available at pretty low prices on eBay. I think this is a decent, low-cost way of getting in extra buildings - cheaper and less work than buying in resin castings and painting them up, and possessing a lot more charm and general brio than industrial MDF.

I have to put my hand up straight away and admit that I have been applying matt varnish to the things, in order to use them as wargame scenery, which should rightly appall any serious collectors, but am well pleased with the little 17th Century town centre I have built up with them.

The one obvious gap in my town is the lack of a cathedral, or at least a big parish church - in all of John Speed's town maps, the churches are the key points, and districts and town gates were commonly named after the religious buildings.

The off-the-shelf Tey churches are rather unimposing, but they also did special commissions, and one such appeared on eBay a couple of weeks ago. I was rather taken with it, decided I would be prepared to go as far as £12 or so to provide spiritual enrichment for my ECW townsfolk, and looked on as the auction closed on the Sunday evening. Hmmm. There was a sudden rush of interest at the last minute, and the church sold for £125 or thereabouts, which proves it was quite a nice church, I guess, but I hadn't thought it was as nice as all that.

Anyway - water under the bridge - I wasn't bothered, but I've kept an eye open to see if any similar items came up. Sure enough, one did, within a week - not Tey, this time, but a very similar size and format. This one stayed within my price range, I bought it and it arrived this morning.

I haven't got the dreaded matt varnish on it yet, but I thought I'd show it off a bit. The 20mm Les Higgins drummer in the picture would have to stoop a little to get in through the doors, but that's exactly the size of buildings I like, to keep the footprint down. This is from Sulley's Ceramics - new to me, very similar to (and frequently confused with, I think) Tey Pottery buildings - nice, isn't it? Maker's label on the underside gives an old-format UK phone number, which must date the model earlier than 1995 - I'd say 1980s, but I'm guessing.

The original church is in Suffolk, I understand - if anyone recognises it, please give me a shout! Also, if you recognise it as the trinket that used to sit on your mother's piano, give me a shout anyway.

Still in the Spares Box, with Mike and Whiskers

Whiskers developing his technique - in fact, I imagine Whiskers as rather more bald than this

Almost exactly two years ago, I scored one of my biggest-ever hauls on eBay, and bought in a load of ECW figures which came from the estate of a chap in Northern Ireland who had recently died - his entire collection, which was enormous, was sold by a local charity shop. I only bought a stack of his ECW troops - all SHQ and Tumbling Dice 20mm - but there were literally hundreds of them.

The big surprise at the time was that they had very obviously been painted up and organised to fight Montrose's campaigns - since that was exactly what I wanted them for, I had seen that there were a lot of Scottish troop types in the collection, but it wasn't until I started checking out the flags that I realised what I had.

The figures were quite nicely painted, in a very plain style, but I was a bit shocked to see that they had been heavily coated with some kind of ship's varnish - these figures were definitely intended to stand up to some severe, industrial handling, I would say. I set about identifying figures which would restore most easily, and which were of most immediate use for my Montrose project, and I did some retouching, and a great deal of applying matt varnish to tone down the finish, and rebasing, and I was pleased with the results. The episode generated a lot of very plain, rather dull Scottish and Irish soldiers, which provided a fine addition to bulk up the splendid Covenanter units which Lee Gramson had already painted up for me.

All good - I've done some Montrose things now, and intend to revisit this again soon. While I was spending a few late nights in 2014, getting these ex-eBay fellows ready for the armies, I got to know the previous owner a bit better. Of course, I have no idea who he was, but at 1 a.m. when I was preparing figures for the prescribed matt varnish I would find myself chatting to him - I called him Mike, in the absence of other suggestions.

"Well, Mike," I would say, "this one's got cat hairs stuck on the varnish as well - you should keep old Whiskers out of the painting room.." and so on. I developed a technique of loosening the cat hairs from the varnish with the tip of a penknife, and then removing them with tweezers. A strange way to spend a long evening - this is almost certainly why I started talking to Mike. As time went on, it became a house joke that I had gradually changed my mind, and that I now believed that Whiskers had done the varnishing himself - perhaps with a little guidance from Mike.

Well the horses are pretty ghastly, but they should paint up simply enough, and that
gives me the better part of two new regiments of rather understated Northern horse

Since I've recently been rooting around in the Spares Box, I found another load of the ex Mike & Whiskers ECW boys, and I realised that there are a lot more in the heap which would usefully restore in the same way. So for a couple of evenings I've been washing and debasing and removing the cat hairs. Since these figures are probably a bit worse than the ones I selected for refurbing last time, there are a lot more cat hairs - in fact I have now begun to believe that Mike did the varnishing, but that he applied the varnish with Whiskers, rather than a brush.

And oodles more artillerymen - just the job for the sieges - more than enough...

It's going OK - we are now ready for a bit of touch-up, and then the matt varnish can start. I need to paint up a few extra cavalry figures from scratch, to make up the numbers, but I hope to get a couple of additional Scottish/Northern units of horse out of this, and I will have more gunners than I will ever possibly need - certainly I will have plenty to man the forthcoming extra artillery for siege games.

Topic #2 - more pottery ornaments ready for sieges...

I previously gave a glimpse of some of my new Tey Pottery houses - this little side-project is shaping up very nicely, and I have the makings of a presentable 17th Century English town centre, such as I can lay siege to. So here's a slightly bigger glimpse...

More Siege Topics

I now have work in hand to produce effective trench sections, after some years of just thinking about it, and also to fabricate support pedestals to allow troops to man the city walls when their bases are deeper than the walkway – all clever stuff, but this will require a little while to produce something worth looking at.

In the meantime, I have been tinkering with some new pottery houses (all right – ornaments, if you must) which seem to be shaping up nicely to form a 17^th century town centre, and – since I had the brushes out – I have finally eliminated those ghastly red roofs from my Eco castle.

The Eco castle - now treated with RedRoof-be-Gone

I had been offered a wide range of advice – I’ve been urged to leave it alone, or completely repaint it, or do something in between, so I have produced a good British compromise – I’ve left most of the castle unaltered, and have repainted the roofs and touched in the windows to clean them up a bit.

I have also painted the swimming-pool coloured moat section under the drawbridge – it is now a charming shade of mud, and I poured in my new-and-trendy Decoupage medium, which – in theory – should set to form something looking like water. This last step isn’t looking too promising at present – the medium contains a surpising quantity of bubbles. The received wisdom is that these should disappear as the medium dries, but they do not seem to be doing this – which may be related to the fact that the medium does not appear to be drying.

Oh well – it may all turn out wonderful. If not, I assume that the medium will dry eventually in some form or other, and if necessary I can repaint and varnish or whatever. Let’s wait and see. I refuse to be pessimistic about it.

Down in the street in 17th century Chester, or some such place?

Just a glimpse of how this might look, with the old citadel looming in the background

Back to the pottery houses – these are the OOP Britain in Miniature series, by Carol Tey, who produced them in Norfolk for a while. Not all the range is suitable, but a few of the items are a useful size, and have a nice, stylised (almost playful) look which I think goes well with toy soldiers. They are, it goes without saying, my usual underscale mismatch with the 20mm figures, but they look OK (it also goes without saying). It is a dreadful thing to admit, but I am carefully applying matt varnish to these Tey houses – it improves the look enormously, though it would very much upset serious collectors. I have picked up these pieces very cheaply on eBay. It amuses me that the range is such that my besieged town is likely to contain a very high proportion of British tourist sites – all in one small area – Chester’s Rows, Ann Hathaway’s cottage, a number of inns and historic guildhalls from Norfolk – I even have my eye on John Knox’s house, which should fit in well, and no-one will notice…

Maybe.

I got hold of a good secondhand copy of Stuart Asquith's Guide to Siege Wargaming, and have been looking it over. Apart from the appendix in Chris Duffy's Fire & Stone, and the Battlegames articles by Henry Hyde which use many of the same mechanisms (especially the fast/slow time switch), all the books I have ever read about having a bash at a siege on a tabletop give you a lot of good information on how real sieges work, and more or less leave you to work this into a playable game yourself. This is the hard bit - that final step is a big one - it is the space where the PowerPoint slide says "at this point a miracle happens". Asquith's book is potentially good and useful, but it is of this type - there is a lot about sieges, but a few implied leaps of faith about making an entertainment out of the matter. No problem - I am quietly confident - I am seen to be smiling enigmatically.

One thing that this book certainly brings home is the dreadful loss which the demise of Gallia miniature buildings represented - there are many photos of Gallia fortress pieces and so on, in both 25mm and 15mm and they are - well, fantastic, actually. I've never seen such a thing on eBay - this book was published 1990 - I have no idea when Gallia ceased production - anyone know?

A Weekend Miscellany...

The Gothenburg, Prestonpans

First thing to note is that I found some missing photos from Wednesday's ECW game - nothing startling, but I'll tack a few on the end of this post. It seems that my camera had stored some of them in a folder I didn't know was there...

On Saturday I drove through to Prestonpans (yes - that Prestonpans), which is just down the road from here, to attend the Scottish Battlefields Wargames Show, which was staged upstairs in the Gothenburg pub. I was there early, since there had been concern that the small venue and the lack of parking space might by a problem - in fact, unless it picked up later, the attendance may have been a bit disappointing. Nice little show - there were a number of appropriately themed games, including some in which visitors might take part. I think there were about 7 trade stands, and maybe the same number of demonstrations, so there was a pleasant intimacy about the proceedings.

I liked this 10mm version of Flodden, presented by the Glasgow Wargames people, who
 - as always - were affable and enthusiastic and patiently informative

Some of the 10mm unsung heroes of Flodden

It was good to get a chance to speak to Graham Cummings, who was there selling his wonderful Crann Tara miniatures range (wow - these are seriously beautiful figures), and I was also very impressed by a new, Edinburgh-based venture, Supreme Littleness, which is Michael Scott's laser-cut MDF service. I've been sort of half-looking at MDF buildings for a while, and though they get quite a good press, I have not been convinced. Well, I think I am now. Michael does all sorts of interesting fortifications and buildings, in various scales down to 3mm - I was surprised at the scope really. He was inviting suggestions for new products and expansions to his range, and I intend to get back to him with some requests for 15mm scale earthworks, which he doesn't do at the moment. Here's my picture of some of the bits and pieces - from bases and game markers to medieval towers - which he had on show. I recommend a squint at his website (linked above). The 3mm village pieces are especially good.

Supreme Littleness - for those who have yet to be convinced about MDF...

It was also good to meet up with my shadowy friend Goya - I knew he was arriving when his security men and handlers came in to check that the CCTV was switched off. He brought along some impressive examples of his painting and conversion work to show me, and - just to give a glimpse of how the other half lives - I learned that he has found that the wire from champagne corks is perfect for fabricating replacement bayonets and sword blades in 20mm scale. The important point here is that Goya is teetotal - we may picture him ordering cases of Bollinger, so that he can pour the evil stuff down the sink and furnish enough sabre blades for his light dragoons project. Now that, you have to admit, is classy.

I took very few photos in Prestonpans, not least because I wasn't really speaking to my camera at the time, my confidence having been shaken somewhat by Wednesday's problems.

I got home to find that the postie had delivered my last two fortress components - a couple more gates, on which I have now daubed paint in the house style, so that they may take their place in the FORTS box.

One on the left is from JR Miniatures, the other is by Kallistra

And, finally, some more pics from Wednesday evening...

The Covenanters get a pretty clear run at the hill, if they can just get through that
pesky stream...

...and the capture of East Boldon didn't take long - more wet feet

General view, from the Royalist side, with the Scots getting their assault organised

Last effort from the King's horse, with Sir Chas Lucas about to be laid low for his trouble

Another general view, Scots on the left, just before the end

The Star-Fort (2)

With clear signs that the painters and decorators are still around, here's the finished fort, in its ECW "sconce" role. I included some cannons and a couple of officers to show how the scale mismatch works - 15mm buildings vs 20mm armies.

The occupants are obviously impressed by how modern the design is - it will serve as a shining example for the next 200 years...

I intend to have a squint at Chris Duffy's books on fortification, and search online to see how these forts appeared in reality - could it benefit from a garden shed, or a wine-cellar, or something? Starbucks? Looks a fairly unforgiving place to spend any time, especially under fire.

Note that the Roundhead soldiers are making a token show of aggression for the camera.

Big Brown Lumps - The Star-Fort (1)

Yesterday I finished off the first phase of building-varnishing and got the bits of the Battleground star-fort deflashed and scrubbed up, and applied the first two coats of brown base colour. The picture shows the situation after the second coat - some pinholes still be be touched in, but this is much better than the state after the first coat, which looked like a join-the-dots exercise (the paint being the dots, by the way).

A long way to go, but it is shaping up nicely. The idea is that it should be capable of being an outwork for a Napoleonic fort (e.g Fort Ragusa), or a half-section could be a hornwork of some sort, but also it can serve as a sconce for the ECW (it may not be strictly authentic for this last role, but I'm happy with it, so please do not look askance at my sconce...).

So the plan is: final brown base-coat touch-in to lose the pinholes, then drybrushing with mid grey, baseboard green, medium khaki and a very light breath of light khaki to make everything dusty - followed, of course, by two coats of matt varnish - this is a heavy beggar, and is going to get bumped a bit. After all that I can tidy away all the debris and paraphernalia and get the dining room ready for the Battle of Boldon Hill on Wednesday. Oh yes - my fort pieces are now in very nice new plastic storage boxes, so a load of old broken cardboard boxes can go away for recycling. There's another planet saved.

Speaking of which...

Last night we had an excellent take-away Indian meal from our friend Mohammed's restaurant in the village, and, unusually for us, afterwards we got the log stove blazing, and managed to prise my son away from his computer for long enough for us all to watch his new DVD of The Martian.

Matt Damon visits - erm - Jordan, in fact

Wow - what an excellent film - enjoyed it thoroughly. If it has a faint weakness of plot, I might suggest that the second half of the story is relentlessly and obviously heading for a happy ending, but the spectacle is more than consolation, and the scientific threads hang together well enough to gratify elderly viewers who cherish delusions of understanding these things (a very little bit). I am not a film "buff" in any sense at all, but I understand that it is now necessary always to attach references to previous work by the cast and crew, so I shall list a few personal fave contributors, with a very partial wargamer's view of what they have done before (i.e. what I've seen and enjoyed). Director is Ridley Scott (The Duellists - has to be), and the cast includes Matt Damon (Saving Private Ryan), Jeff Daniels (Gettysburg) and Sean Bean (anything but Sharpe).

I was pleased to be reminded that Bean, is, after all, an excellent actor when he isn't slouching around being rugged.

By the way, I speak with some little authority on the film industry since, apart from being not quite related to Christopher Plummer (previous reference to private joke), I also used to have a relative who claimed to have appeared as a bush in the Dunsinane scene from Polanski's Macbeth, so I'm quite an insider really - please notify Hello! magazine that I am up for the odd interview if the money's right.

Eureka

All hail to Jim, who correctly insisted that the gatehouse building in the previous post was from the old SHQ/Mayhem/Eureka range (still available, I think). I dug out an ancient pdf of a catalogue, and we see that N01, the Stone/timber townhouse and gate, is the very chap. Interesting that it appears in the North European range - I feel this building sits more comfortably in one of Napoleon's German campaigns than in an English medieval/ECW context, to be honest. [I must start painting up an Austrian army, immediately.]

I can only guess at the age of the pdf - maybe 2005 or so? - but it strikes me that the Eureka prices (in Australian dollars, of course) were pretty eye-watering at the time, considering you could get the same products from SHQ in England for an awful lot less. Just saying.

Varnish update: I've been cracking on with an industrial-scale varnishing operation, and have done all my new fortress pieces and all the ECW houses. Next I shall do the Peninsular houses and the Vauban pieces. First I tried Ronseal matt clear varnish - I would love this to have worked, because there is a pleasing inverted snobbery aspect to using something as vulgar and as workmanlike as ordinary DIY paint, and also because any product which offers a finish tough enough to walk on after 3 coats is certainly strong enough for my toy houses. Sadly, though it went on nicely and is easy to use, it doesn't dry to a completely matt state - it is faintly satin. Thus I retreated my test pieces with the product I should have used in the first place - DecoArt Media Ultra-Matte Varnish - £4 for a 4 fl.oz pot from Hobbycraft. I bought 3 pots, and at the present rate of progress that will be enough for several lifetimes - excellent varnish - water-based, dries quickly and, though it goes on milky, it dries completely clear - no hassle at all. This is the right stuff to brush-finish buildings. It has a faint smell of pilchards, but I can get used to anything...