1809 Spaniards - Regimiento de Burgos

Two further battalions - more fine work by Lee (thanks again, mate!).

This 1809 Spanish army is progressing so well that there is only one more battalion of white-uniformed line infantry still to be painted. There are still a couple of battalions of The Royal Guard to come, and a two battalion line regiment in the 1802 blue and black uniform, plus various grenadier and light infantry units. Then, of course, there will be some cavalry, there are two field batteries to paint up, and after that we are onto odd bods like sappers and more generals and ADCs - it seems a lot when you list it like this, but we're getting there.

Really very pleased with all this - if anyone cares, these are NapoleoN figures, though the mounted colonels are a hybrid Kennington/Falcata conversion, one has a NapoleoN horse, the other has a Falcata one.

Bamburgh Castle Again

Here's that silly old fool Max Foy pretending to fire a big carronade. Ironmongery in
the background includes a 32pdr mortar and some 18pdr iron cannons - all Napoleonic
period. It is instructive to consider what serving one of these things would be like - you
have to wheel it back to load it (unless you have a very tall colleague outside the
walls), run it forward, then fire the damn thing, then reload and run it back into
position. A lot of work. I wouldn't fancy it at all - most especially if some beggar was
shooting at me while I was trying to concentrate. 

This week's problem is a lack of electricity. Because our power travels some distance via overhead lines, some work is scheduled to update the kit, and we have two days in the diary - Monday and Friday - when we have what is described as a Planned Outage (or "outrage" in our terms) from 9am to 4:30pm.

Since we seem to be totally dependant on electricity, wifi and TV and are rather lost without them, we took advantage of the good weather and went for a trip to Bamburgh Castle (on the Northumberland coast not far from Holy Island), which is just 75 minutes down the road from where we live. We got there not long after the doors open, but it was quite busy. We spent about 2 hours there and then retired for lunch to the Blue Bell, at Belford, for fish and chips, and very good too.

Back at home, power was restored only 30 minutes later than the scheduled hour, and we had had a good day out, but it is faintly depressing that we are at such a loss without a mains supply. Now the precedent is set, we'll have to think of something worthwhile to do on Friday. Hmmm.

Hooptedoodle #186 - Alice Is a Singer

This is not Alice - it is someone else

On Wednesday I received a piece of spam email from Alice, from whom I have had no contact for some years (I am delighted to say). There seems to be a virus of some type going about which sends junk portal-scam mail to the entire contacts list on someone’s smartphone, and this is why I heard from Alice. Well, of course, I didn’t really hear from Alice at all, but I was reminded of her.

Alice is a singer, of sorts. Mostly I try to keep my musical activities out of this blog, because I don’t really expect them to be of much interest and they are almost certainly an irrelevance too far. However, as in all walks of life, I have met some colourful people there as well.

Alice represents that much-abused sub-class, the girl who fancied being the singer with a band, but didn’t have the talent for the job. She has the complete profile – pleasant, untutored voice, no grasp at all of musical theory or even of rhythm, and deplorable taste. Oh – and dreadful, unpredictable tantrums. She must have been encouraged over the years by proud parents, envious school friends, drunken workmates, heartless people in the pub on holiday; I doubt that she needed much encouragement - I am confident that she sings like a megastar in the shower. It’s just that she has, to use a technical musical term, not a bloody clue. Not a Scooby.

This is how Alice sees herself, I believe...

I am lucky enough to have met and played with some excellent female singers – Carol Kidd and Maggie Mercer and Melanie O’Reilly were class acts by any standard – but as a species girl singers seem to have more head-crashers and plate-throwers than you would expect. Working with one also involves the more immediate problem that songs you have known and played all your life in the written key of F are suddenly in A-flat (etc).

Alice used to talk about her love of “jazzy” music – which usually got about as far from the Radio 2 mainstream as Billy Joel, Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick, Crystal Gayle. I asked her if she liked, or listened to, Billie Holiday or Ella, and she sort of glazed over and said she would like to sing Every Time We Say Goodbye. So we ran through it – disaster; she could sing the notes, but the phrasing of the first line is tricky – attempt to sing it from instinct and you can easily find you have lost a bit and are now a bar ahead of the band (especially if, like Alice, you are unable to hear the chord changes), with the inevitable traffic accident approaching. I commented that she couldn’t just sing a line of a song, take a breath and immediately start the next line – it was necessary to fit in with the structure, so sometimes she might have to count (silently, of course!) “two – three – four – one” or something and then come in.  Glazing-over time once again – she had no idea what I was on about.

I first became associated with Alice because she was rehearsing with a pianist who is a friend of mine, and he asked me could I help out – apart from anything else, perhaps I could sort out some of the horrible arrangements in her book and also (let’s be honest here) I was friendly with a pro double bass player who would be even more of an asset than me if he wished to join in. I had some spare time available, so I got involved.

Ouch.

We did a couple of small jobs in local pubs which went OK – Alice was very unsure of herself, and had a fragile, lost quality which went down rather well. But she very quickly turned into a budding celebrity, a monster.

We did a biggish show in a hotel ballroom in a nearby town. She was terribly nervous – especially because her boyfriend’s parents had bought tickets. So she drank about three-quarters of a bottle of red wine before we went on. Horrifying – my bass-playing chum was making his first appearance with us, and he was so furious that he has not spoken to me since. We scraped through the show, largely on sympathy, I think. But Alice was convinced she was now on a rocket ship to stardom. We held a series of grinding rehearsals to sort out and strengthen her repertoire – in fact “rehearsals” is not quite the right term here. A rehearsal is, or should be, a polishing-up of material which you already know. These rehearsals consisted of tentative attempts at hopeless projects – often the same things we had screwed up the week before – and there was an increasing tension, plus numerous hissy fits. At one point the pianist and I were trying to correct the chords in her train-wreck arrangement of Autumn Leaves, and she suddenly started shouting that we should stop faffing about, and just get on with playing it. We protested gently, on the grounds that until we had a sensible version of the piece we had nothing to get on with, and on the more accessible grounds that the audience would know these songs well enough to realise that we were buffoons.

Next appearance was at an outdoor concert at a local seaside resort, in aid of a national charity. It was pouring with rain. I don’t know if Alice had been at the refreshment again, but she was unbelievable. She missed all her starting notes, sang verses in the wrong order, missed sections out - all our rehearsed endings and key modulations vanished without trace. She even introduced a couple of songs with drivel such as “we’ve only practised this song once, so it may not go very well!” – she was, of course, correct, as the forewarned listeners will have recognised. She was also a bit unfortunate in that the rain rendered some of her lyric sheets unreadable. I can clearly remember staring out at the audience, all with their anorak hoods up, sitting in the downpour looking as glum as I felt, and I was hoping like hell that no-one there knew me or recognised me. A paper bag for my head would have been welcome – the only saving grace was that a girl singer gets about 90% of the attention, so the sidemen are pretty much invisible. Even so, I have rarely spent an hour wishing more passionately that I were somewhere else entirely.

I left fairly abruptly at the end, and I phoned the pianist and said I was very sorry, but I really didn’t want to do this any more. Alice was very cross indeed, and was going to give me a piece of her mind for letting them down, but it came to nothing, and she probably didn’t have a piece to spare.

She is still around – she has a Facebook page which promotes her cabaret act, which she still insists is jazzy, and she seems to get work, so maybe she got better. I don’t really care. I hope her phone virus problem clears up OK.

In affectionate tribute to all the wannabe girl singers over the years who have struggled with the gulf between their dreams and their ability, here is the wonderful Jo Stafford, in the guise of the well-intentioned but awful Darlene Edwards, who provides a perfect demonstration of all the trademark clichés. Enjoy.

A Day for Fighting

Initial set-up - Dalhousie's 7th Divn on this side, his Portuguese on his left...

Been a bit busy, not to mention preoccupied, for a week or so, but today I have the table and some soldiers out, and am going to have a wargame this afternoon.

Standard-size Commands & Colors: Napoleonics battle (i.e. without the table extension), but a comparitive rarity for me will be the visit of a guest general, which I am looking forward to. This leads to the following thoughts:

(1) This chap has not played C&CN before, so I had better get my head straight enough to explain the game sensibly and clearly, without getting sidetracked into too much detail or too many pointless stories. Right.

(2) It also means that I had better brush up on those nippy bits in the rules that seem to fade when I take my eye off them – “Combined Arms” combats; whether units can retreat through woods or fordable rivers (yes); the correct rules for attacked Leaders to escape through an enemy unit. Must also remember to drop any house tweaks that I am testing at present. Mustn’t come across as a charlatan or an idiot.

(3) And it means I shall have to avoid putting my visitor off the game; I do not necessarily wish him to adopt C&CN as his rules of choice for life (don’t be silly), but I would be sad if my enthusiasm proved to be a turn-off (which, whisper it, is not unknown).

(4) It also means that the game had better have some reasonable degree of balance. In a solo game, this matters very little, but it is more necessary with a visitor, since he might be demotivated if the outcome were a foregone conclusion. Worse still, rules newbie or not, he might thrash me (which, also, is not unknown).

(5) Which directed my attention back to GMT’s published scenarios, and the user-generated scenarios on the internet site. I didn’t find anything that quite fitted the bill – the scenarios are all good enough games, but I’ve played most of them before, I have a slight personal bias against some of them in that they bear little resemblance to the historical battle which they are claimed to represent, and it seems uncomfortable, to me, to set out to play a defined portion of a larger battle (the adventures of the French left flank at Salamanca, for example, which I am sure is an excellent game, but feels rather like eating only the potato chips from the salad). Yes, I realise this is stupid of me.

(6) So I eventually came up with something of about the right size and layout, and fiddled around with the OOB until the sides looked reasonable. Two French divisions under my old chum Loison, with cavalry support and a couple of batteries, will attempt to secure an important river crossing on a supply route, and drive away the Anglo-Portuguese Seventh Division (under the Earl of Dalhousie, who in reality was probably not contemporary with Loison in this theatre, but who cares), which also has some horse and a few guns.

I think it looks OK. The armies were selected, to some extent, by considering which units haven’t had a run out recently - hence the presence of the 4eme Vistule, the Garde de Paris and the splendid Chasseurs des Montagnes in Loison's bit of VI Corps. Also, since his own is not available, Dalhousie has borrowed the Portuguese brigade from the 6th Division. It's all right - it's a game.

Action at Iravez, October 1811

Anglo-Portuguese 7th Divn (Maj.Gen Earl of Dalhousie)

1st Brigade (Lt.Col Colin Halkett)

1st & 2nd Lt Bns, KGL & Brunswick-Oels Jaegers

2nd Brigade (Maj.Gen JHC Von Bernewitz)

51st Foot, 68th Foot & Chasseurs Britanniques

3rd Brigade (Br.Gen Rezende}

8th (2 Bns) & 12th (2) Portuguese Line & 9^th Cacadores

Cavalry Brigade (Br.Gen Madden)

1st & 11th Portuguese Cavalry & 5th Drgn.Gds (attached)

McDonald’s Troop, RHA

Arriaga’s Battery, Portuguese Art.

Total: 5 infantry, 6 light infantry, 3 cavalry, 2 artillery

French Force (Gen de Divn Loison)

Division Foy

Brigade Chemineau

6e Leger (3 Bns) & 69e Ligne (2)

Brigade Fririon

39e (2) & 76e (2) Ligne

Art à Pied

Division Vilatte

Brigade Thouvenot

28e Leger, Garde de Paris & Chasseurs des Montagnes

Brigade Soulier

17e Leger, Grenadiers Provisoirs & 4e Vistule

            Art à Pied

Cavalerie

Brigade Maupoint

4e & 20e Dragons, 15e Chasseurs à Cheval

            Total: 9 infantry, 6 light infantry, 3 cavalry, 2 artillery

C&CN: Possession of villages at both ends of the bridge gains 1 VP.

River is fordable throughout, but artillery and wagons must cross at the bridge – French mission is to secure the crossing for supply trains, and drive Allied troops back.

Each side has 6 cards; 9 VPs wins the day. Dice for choice of first move.

I've Given This Some Thought

More from the Dice Fetish Labs

Following my post on D4's, Ross made a jocular reference to D7's.

I had another look at the Dice Shop's website - good grief - I must stop this.

There are at least 3 different shapes of D7 which you can buy. There is also a D11...

...and I even found a D2...

...which leads me to wonder how we ever came to invent the coin.

This is wonderful - it gives me hope for the future of human ingenuity, but I really must limit the time I spend looking at this stuff.

One thing I realised, which was pretty obvious really, comes from the fact that it is possible to make a nice, reasonably shallow pyramid based on any regular polygon you wish - thus the double D4 from the previous post is two 4-sided pyramids, base-to-base. The thing I hadn't thought of is that, if you round the corners a bit and make the base circular, you can have dissimilar pyramids base-to-base. Thus a 6-sider on top of a 5 sider will give you a D11, and so on.

That's clever, and potentially useful, but a bit lame compared with regular 100-siders and all that, and if the two pyramids are more than slightly different I think I would be suspicious of the fairness of the die.

That's enough. Have to go and lie down for a bit.

Hooptedoodle #185 - The ABC Man

Last month Ian Allan passed away, one day short of his 93^rd birthday. Who? Well, in his way, Allan was one of the most famous and influential men of his generation.

Ian Allan (left), in his early 20s - checking facts

You see, he more or less invented trainspotting in the UK. Well, he didn’t really invent it, but the books and enthusiasts’ guides he published (and which the company he founded continues to publish) organised it and codified it, and have been the backbone of the Nerd World since 1942.

Allan was born in 1922 in Horsham, Surrey, and educated at St Paul’s School. An accident at an Officers’ Training Corps camp when he was 15 resulted in the amputation of one of his legs, and he was not greatly gifted scholastically, so by 1942 he was employed in a clerical department at the Southern Railway, a humble role which, as it happened, suited him perfectly. He was fanatically enthusiastic about all things to do with trains and locomotives, and, since his employers refused to have anything to do with the project, he published at his own expense a booklet describing all the rolling stock of SR, and was rather shaken when all the copies sold out very quickly, necessitating a further printing. He went on to produce successful booklets for the other British railway companies, and the first edition of his volume on London Transport systems sold out all 20,000 copies within 4 days of going on sale. After that, things really took off.

In post-war, rationed, miserable, penniless Britain, Allan had provided the basic tools for an inexpensive hobby which became a near-religion, claiming the attention of vast numbers of boys (of all ages). In 1949 he and his wife founded the Ian Allan Locospotters’ Club, which eventually had some 230,000 members. His little booklets covered a remarkable number of titles, originally on railway topics, but later on trams, buses, aviation, all forms of road transport, shipping, military subjects, model-making – you name it. About half the kids in my class at grammar school were trainspotters – at weekends, on railway station platforms all over the country, there would be little groups of enthusiasts, each with a knapsack containing a flask of tea and a number of Allan's precious ABC books, so that “spotted” locomotives could be marked off in the lists.

Trainspotters at Newcastle, 1950

Just as well his mother never knew...

My cousin Dave had an astonishing number of the bus books – and I do mean astonishing. He was an easy kid to buy presents for. Not only was it necessary to have the booklet for every known vehicle fleet, but constant change in those fleets would require new editions every couple of years, and, naturally, they would be snapped up as soon as available. Though the individual books were only a couple of shillings each (in my day), they would form a major investment for the true disciple. Dave and I spent many hours at the Ribble bus sheds, in Liverpool and Preston, scribbling numbers into notebooks. I guess my unsophisticated tastes were honed at an early age…

Allan was always an enthusiast

Ian Allan Publications are still going strong – their output is glossier and more ambitious now, but they still seem to hold the same important place in the hearts and minds of transport fans, and their reputation for accuracy and quality still holds. Allan also produced market-leading monthly magazines on railways, buses and model railways, which I believe are still going strong, and at various times he bought the Hastings Miniature Railway and the Great Cockrow Railway (near Chertsea). He was honoured with an OBE in 1996.

If you wish to see how influential ABC books were, just have a look on eBay – any day, any week, almost any subject.

My old school chum Andy “Cocky” Roche once announced that he had seen a girl trainspotter at Carlisle station, but this was greeted with total (and somehow reassuring) disbelief. Anyway, if he had seen one, she would most certainly have had one or more of the ABC books with her; thanks very much, Mr Allan.