Siege Testing - (1) Town Planning

I have a little spare time available, and today I received a shipment of what originally was intended to be an interim solution for the matter of trenches, but the interim solution seems so good that it may become a more permanent solution - I'll say more about this in a later episode...

Since all my reading and scribbling notes have only gone a little way toward developing a working ECW siege game, I think the time is right to set something up on the tabletop and try some ideas out. This is not really going to be a proper game, I hasten to add - merely an extended test of ideas - but I have a few days to work on it.

View over the formidable Bridgegate, looking west - the dodgy-looking suburb
outside the Stockgate is an immediate issue for a military governor, I would say
- it will have to be cleared - this is where trouble starts if the mayor owns
the land. Note the mighty Duke's Sconce defending the North Road.

Tonight I set out a fortified town - tomorrow I'll have to work out the population and the appropriate size and composition for a garrison, estimate what size of attacking force is needed and allocate engineers to the two sides.

It is not a real town - it has a couple of features I borrowed from Chester and Carlisle - it may develop a proper identity later on.

View of the North Wall, seen from the direction an enemy will approach! The
medieval walls, as you will see, have no earthworks to protect them (this is the
situation Newcastle was in in 1644 when the Scots arrived).

With a bit of luck, the backbone of an ECW siege game should be adaptable for Napoleonic sieges without too much grief. I have fiddled about with sieges for some years now, without managing to produce a best-selling siege game - that's why you have never heard of me.

View across the Market Cross, inside the Stockgate, with St Thomas' church in
the distance and the Old Barbican back left. A prosperous town? - I think it will
declare for the King...

More soon...

Hooptedoodle #218 – The Pheasants' Wars

It hasn’t been a severe winter here – it’s been long and dark and wet (for the first time ever, our front door expanded with the damp until it wouldn’t open), but not particularly cold or stormy, yet it is still wonderful to see some sunny weather as the year starts to roll along.

As ever, the bird-feeders are busy all day, and the perching customers, who are clumsy eaters, spill enough to maintain a steady crowd of ground-feeding chaffinches, blackbirds and other fellows who prefer not to eat while hanging onto something precarious.

Which brings us to the pheasants. The Rite of Spring is here, and no mistake. Deer were fighting in our neighbour’s garden this morning (it only looked like a rehearsal, to be honest), and the pheasants have now turned our garden into something very like Jurassic Park.

Algernon - Are you looking at me...?

We’ve always had pheasants here – they have featured in this blog from time to time – they are great characters, some of them, and we usually have the odd one wandering about, but their domestic and nuptial arrangements have always been carried on in private, in the woods behind our house. This year is different – we now have a family who actually live in our garden – in fact a more accurate expression would be “own our garden”. They have taken over. I have previously introduced Algernon, who is normally here anyway (he is the fellow who surprised us by surviving last December’s shooting parties – he returned after I had written him out of the saga). Algernon and his immediate family and friends have now requisitioned our garden. They are entertaining, but they are very noisy, and they are becoming something of a nuisance.

Some things to understand about the ring-necked pheasant, at least as we know it here in the Scottish Lowlands:

(1) They were introduced, centuries ago, from China (or somewhere), they are heavily inbred, and an adult pheasant has about the same intelligence as an average peanut. Officially, the hens nest under hedges and bushes, but in reality they make a very poor job of this, and frequently forget where they have left their eggs (to the delight of hedgehogs and similar). Our resident ghillie (gamekeeper) buys in many pheasant chicks each year – without this, I’m not convinced that natural pheasant demographics would sustain the population. If they died out in this part of the world I would miss them, of course, but what would the local farmers do with all those shotguns during the Winter?

Bad mothers - we will never know who left this egg on the terrace - they
refuse to do things by the book

(2) An adult cock pheasant can grow to something a little short of 2Kg, though they look much more substantial than that. They are aggressive, raucous, and have the aerodynamic properties and natural grace of a Christmas pudding. To put it bluntly, they are very poor flyers.

Note the fight damage on Algy's neck

(3) Mathematics. Algernon has acquired no less than five wives. The truth of the matter is that there are not enough females to go round. At 5:1, there is a desperate fight for mates. Algernon has a dreadful time trying to keep interlopers away from his hens – mostly unsuccessfully. There is a constant, and very noisy, French farce taking place behind our house.

Algernon is starting to look very ragged, and it’s hardly surprising. When his ladies are feeding, all together, he stands guard – often on one leg – glaring about for threats, real or imagined. This frenzy reaches its peak in the early evening. Two days ago, after tea, my son and I were outside doing some work on one of the bicycles when suddenly all hell broke loose. Algernon chased a rogue male right across the garden, and they both crashed head-on into the timber fence between our garden and Zebe’s, next door. If we had had a pond it would have had ripples on it from the shockwave. Then the fight spilled over into the woods – the fugitive escaped, but The Bold Algy collided with a tree trunk, and staggered back to his garden in rather bewildered triumph. The females were running about the place, shrieking, throughout.

This is not the sort of incident you can choose to ignore as you sip a relaxed glass of wine on the terrace – it’s really pretty alarming. No doubt things will calm down quite soon. Algy’s hormones, or his memory, will lose interest, or maybe he will injure himself seriously, and life will return to something a bit more normal.

On a gentler note, we have seen some more old friends in the garden. We haven’t had Blackcaps here for years – well they’re back; the Contesse has yet to get a decent picture of the female (who is similar to the male, but has a rusty-brown cap).  We think the Siskins have moved on now, but I thought I should put up some nice photos of them. Blackcaps are a variety of warbler, I understand - we don't get any other warblers here, so they are special visitors.

Mr Blackcap

Mrs Blackcap is a little more shy - she's just visible inside the fat-ball cage, with
a performing Bluetit trying to attract attention at top left

And some more Siskin shots...

Oh, how lovely, they all murmured.

Elsewhere, I saw about half a dozen Avocets flying over the farm fields - they are not really supposed to be around here - certainly I've never seen them before.

Avocet - library picture

Max Foy's Mad April Prize Competition - Results!

Thank you very much for the excellent response to the photo competition – I got a total of 37 entries, which is (by far) the best ever.

The standard was really very good indeed – I am most impressed. Just about everyone placed the camera within a few kilometres of the actual spot. The most common causes of lost marks were (1) being a bit short on gratuitous artistic content, and (2) making no attempt at the question about dying at this location. The more accurate the identification of the actual place the better, obviously. Thanks again for all the effort that went into this.

The photograph was taken in Italy, near the top of the footpath from Sorrento up to Sant’Agata sui due Golfi – the bit of roadway in the foreground is part of the Via Talagnano, just below Sant’Agata itself. We are looking very slightly east of due north, over the town of Sorrento, straight across the Bay of Naples towards Vesuvius. The pale line below the volcano is the sprawl of the suburbs of Naples – Torre del Greco and Torre Annunziata – along to the left is Naples itself. Since you can just about see Naples from this point, it seems logical that it would be just about OK to die up here – see Naples and die – vedi Napoli e poi muori.

There were some interesting references to people dying during the Pompei disaster, to the local Sirens, and – especially – the ancient Greek necropolis on the hills near St Agata, which was subsequently buried under the convent of Il Deserto. However, I was simply looking for the Naples quote.

I offer my humble compliments to all who entered - it took a good while to sort out a finishing order. After much head scratching and chewing of my pencil I decided - and it wasn't easy! - that eight of the entries were sufficiently outstanding to form the final list of prize winners. I have email addresses for some of you anyway, but could the following fine fellows please send me a blog comment (if you didn’t already enter by email!) stating your current/preferred email address – I shan’t publish these, obviously, and will delete them after perusal – you may encrypt the address as you wish – assuming I can still work it out!

1^st – Chris Grice

2^nd – Michael Peterson

3^rd – Steve-the-Wargamer

4^th – nundanket

5^th – Steve Curry

6^th – Gary Amos

7^th – Wellington Man

8^th – Francisco Goya

I’ll contact each of you in turn, listing the prize lots which are still available and asking you to make a choice from what’s left. This may take a week or two, but that gives me a chance to get my collection of boxes and bubblewrap sorted out.

Thanks again – over to you.

Max Foy's Mad April Prize Competition - Update

This is just to thank everyone who has submitted an entry for the photo-quiz (I've had a great response this time), and to remind anyone who wishes to have a go and hasn't done so yet that the closing date is 23:00 UK Summer time tomorrow (17th April) - also please remember that you must be an official follower or regular email correspondent of this blog to enter, and if you wish to enter for glory only, and are not interested in the prize lots, please say so, and you can be entered in Category B.

No supplementary clues were required this year, though I can confirm that the place in the photo is neither Scarborough nor Gallipoli. You see me above, considering the excellent submissions to date - great fun.

New Trotman Book - and a nerdy question

Delighted to say that Jamie the Postie brought a parcel today which turns out to be the keenly-awaited new Spanish Army title by Gerard Cronin and Dr Stephen Summerfield, published by Ken Trotman - this one covers the cavalry, foot guards and artillery of the early Peninsular War.

Haven't had a proper read yet, but it looks just as good as the infantry title. Excellent - very pleased.

Subject 2 - I recently acquired a few of these chaps - this is a British Artillery driver, as you will see, from the Minifigs S-Range series (long, long ago...), and the particular reason I was quite excited to get these, along with their limber horses, is that they give me a chance to further the constant struggle for Creeping Elegance, and replace the draught teams from my British ammunition caissons, which are all Lamming castings at present - nice, but just a touch overscale. Such a change would mean that I could feel much more comfortable parking the caissons near the limber teams. Slight fly in the ointment is that you will notice that this driver has a pistol holster on his right hip. I hadn't really thought about this, but it has been suggested to me that only the drivers in the Rocket Troop had pistols like this, and that the driver castings might be from the S-Range Rocket Troop set.

Now you may feel that I could just brass this out, and claim that it is a well-known fact that caisson drivers wore pistols too, but I thought I would check if anyone knows about this. Any thoughts? It would be a dreadful thing if an army which is already stuffed with errors and anachronisms were to drift any further from the true path. That would not be proper Creeping Elegance at all.

Subject 3 - this was borrowed shamelessly from someone's Facebook page, and I apologise for the low-res picture, but I liked it - seen on a Glasgow baker's van...

Hooptedoodle #217 – Julie & Steve – where do dreams come from?

Thoughts over coffee on a foggy morning.

I awoke this morning with a tune running in my head – not an uncommon occurrence, in fact, but sometimes puzzling. This morning’s tune was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it, so I tried to concentrate. It was obviously the bridge from some well-known standard song or other, and I knew the song, if I could just identify it. Bad news with bridges from standard songs, of course, is that many of them are interchangeable – you can substitute the middle section of a different song, and a lot of people will not notice. This is common practice for an ageing pianist friend of mine, whose memory is not what it was; these days, bless him, he is still working – he does a solo spot on Monday nights in a vegetarian restaurant – and his unorthodox musical arrangements are all right in such a context, but the combination of his fading memory, his increasing deafness and his growing reluctance to listen to what anyone else is doing makes him a dangerous man to do a gig with. That was a digression.

Back to this morning.

The words “a cottage for two” seemed to belong with this fragment of tune, and after some more runs-through [correct plural form?] I convinced myself that I could sort of imagine Julie London singing it, in a slightly breathless way, but I still couldn’t work out what it was. Eventually, after breakfast, before I lost the thing altogether, I dug out my Julie London CDs (and there are a few) and I found it. It seems I had woken up humming (in my head) the bridge from “Give Me the Simple Life”, which is a so-so sort of song – the only recorded version I have is on a middling (and little-known) album called “Julie at Home”, and it’s probably one of the less memorable tracks on that album.

So it is a song I have not heard in 12 years, I would guess, and have not thought about during that time. If someone wanted to play it, and gave me the key, I could probably busk my way through it, and I would probably remember the bridge when we got there, but otherwise it doesn’t mean anything to me. So why was it on my mind this morning?

Hmmm.

I am reminded of an occasion a little while ago when I woke from a dream in which I was having a conversation with a chap named Steve Platt. Nothing worrying or threatening about that, but Steve Platt in my dream was about 15 years old, and wearing the same blazer and spectacles as he was the last time I saw him, at grammar school in the 1960s. Strange? – Steve was not a particular friend of mine, I had very little to do with him – after age 15 or so he went off in a different class, to study Arts subjects, when I did Science. We never had any fallings out, played no sports together – hardly any interaction at all – I didn’t particularly admire or dislike the kid. If someone had now shown me a photo of my school class at that time he might be one of the half dozen I couldn’t remember a name for. So what was he doing, in such clear focus, in my dream half a century later?

It doesn’t matter, of course, but it’s kind of interesting. Somebody told me once that the human brain does a lot of re-organising of itself while you’re asleep – this is a healthy and necessary activity, and dreaming is part of this. People who do not dream are liable to develop mental and nervous disorders – prolonged reliance on sleeping pills can result in such a condition. The reason we cannot remember our dreams is, apparently, because they do not use memory in the same way as our conscious thoughts do – it also occurs to me that it would drive us all crazy if we could.

I suppose I dream most nights – most of us do. I don’t know how long I dream for, but I must have spent many thousands of hours of my life humming tunes and meeting ex-school chums during adventures which I could not remember the following day. OK – if that’s how it works I have no problem with it, but the nightly defragmentation job (or whatever it is) must get to some pretty dark corners if it comes up with Steve Platt or the bridge from “Simple Life”. Idly (of course), I wonder about it.

I have the impression that sometimes I have recurrent dreams, or bits of dreams – especially in terms of finding myself in a town or a place which I recognise, and do not like, though when I have woken from the occasional recurring nightmare I have been fairly sure that they were not real places I remembered from real experience – they were some synthesis which I recalled from previous dreams – or maybe I just dreamed that I recognised them.

Anyway – that was this morning’s pointless ramble, over my coffee. These things intrigue me, in a casual sort of way, but surely you must have something better to do than read this? Have a good day, whatever it is.

Max Foy's Mad April Prize Competition

It’s been a while since I had a clear-out, so here’s Max Foy’s Mad April Prize Competition. If you can bear it, I’ve gone once again for the photo-detectives format, which has produced a lot of entertainment (for me, anyway) on previous occasions.

First of all, then, here’s the quiz photo. The photo is one of mine, so you won’t find it on Google Image. It was taken in midsummer, in Europe, at about 11:15am, after a fairly strenuous walk up through woods from the town below.

Please, what can you see, and from where was this photo taken (as exactly as you can make it)? Also (and importantly), in a sense, why is it just about all right to die up here?

As ever, I shall judge entries on a totally unfair, subjective basis, and many marks will be available for humour, unnecessary detail and implausible stories – a hilarious incorrect answer is quite likely to score as highly as a glib one-liner giving the correct GPS reference.

The Goodies (I hope this lot is interesting…)

Books

Lot 1 – Signed Copy of Bernard Cornwell’s “Waterloo” – mint

Lot 2 – “Out of Nowhere – A History of the Military Sniper” – Martin Pegler – minor shelf wear, otherwise perfect, clean copy

Lot 3 – “The Sleepwalkers” - Prof Chris Clark’s highly-praised account of the political slide into WW1 – pretty much mint

Lot 4 – Michael Glover’s “The Napoleonic Wars” (exc cond) plus John Keegan’s “Mask of Command” (a little brown around the edges, but decent nick).

Lot 5 – “The Smoke and the Fire” by John Terraine plus John Foley’s “The Boilerplate War” – both in vgc.

Lot 6 – Biographies – Vincent Cronin’s “Napoleon” (goodish cond) plus a paperback edition (vgc) of “The Green Dragoon” by Robert D Bass, an (American!) bio of Bloody Ban Tarleton, the notorious Scouse cavalryman

Lot 7 – Alternative Napoleonic History – David Hamilton-Williams’ two much-criticised works – “Waterloo – New Perspectives” (hbk vgc) and “The Fall of Napoleon – the Final Betrayal” (pbk – vgc). Too much has been said about the mystery surrounding the true identity of DHW, his credentials and his tendency to quote himself as a source. These books are very entertainingly written, provide some challenging interpretations of the history, and – let’s face it – say some things which needed to be said. Keep the salt handy, but these are great fun – don’t make them your standard references, though.

Toys & Games

Lot 8 – A good little Spanish boardgame - "2 de Mayo" (about the 1808 revolt in Madrid) – complete and in exc cond – plus a toy bus(!) – all right, this is the wrong scale for my collection, but a lovely 1/50 1950s-style Corgi Leyland Tiger in Ribble colours (NW England) – complete with COA – the model is mint, the box a little distressed.

Lot 9 – “The Hunters” – excellent Consim Press game about WW2 U-Boat warfare – punched, but complete and in perfect cond.

Lot 10 – “Empire” Napoleonic wargame system (1^st edition? – 1990 anyway) plus the companion “Empire Campaign System” – both complete and unpunched, boxes a little scuffed at the edges.

Lot 11 – 6 boxes of Italeri set no. 6030“Battlefield Accessory Set” – a lifetime supply of 1/72 scale gabions, gun positions, temporary bridges, fascines, chevaux de frises and so on. Left over from yet another Grand Plan of mine which was overtaken by events – perfect.

Regulations and Stuff (please do read this bit)

Send entries to me, please, before the closing date (23:00 UK Summer Time, Sunday 17^th April) – you can send as email to the address in my profile, or as comments to this post (which I shall not publish). You must be an official follower of this blog, unless you are a regular, non-Google correspondent known to me. If you want to have a go at the competition but you don’t want any of the prizes, please say so and you’ll be entered in Category B…

When the days are accomplished, and I’ve decided which entries entertained me most, I’ll post some names of winners, and we can start a background dialogue of who gets what – I’ll rank the winners, and the top of the list gets first choice (I hope this is going to work). One slightly niggardly rule, if you don’t mind – I’d appreciate it if winners could help me out with the postage – I promise I’ll do the mailing at the cheapest effective rate, but sending parcels of books to Foreign Parts can be a bit of an overhead.