Assorted Wargames Nostalgia

This post really is just a collection of bits. I was going through a file of old paperwork connected with my wargaming past – nothing very distinguished, but I was reminded of a few things. Sadly, the accompanying photos for the first item were lost ages ago, during the hostilities which followed my split with my first wife (which almost certainly serves me right).

(1) Waterloo Day – yes, today is the 199^th anniversary of Napoleon’s Really Bad Day, and one of the items I found in the file was a sheet of scribblings from a 160^th anniversary Waterloo game I played at my old flat in Marchmont, Edinburgh, with some friends [that’s 1975, ladies and gentlemen]. The first thing that struck me was that, of the players involved – Philip Snell, John Ramsay, Dave Thompson, Alan Low, Allan Gallacher and myself – I am the only one still alive. Good grief – I hadn’t thought of that before. The game was considerably scaled down, but still used inappropriately detailed rules (around about this time I started using Charles Wesencraft’s rules, with all distances halved, but June 1975 is just a little early for that, so I guess we were using a hybrid game which was mostly Tunbridge Wells [George Gush?] with some bits of South-East Scotland WG thrown in). This was probably one of the last biggish games I staged before I started painting hexagons all over my tabletop – we hadn’t thought of Old School yet, though there was definitely some creaking associated with our enthusiasm for what we naively regarded as increased realism.

One thing I remember fondly was that Allan G was supposed to bring the Prussians, since otherwise we didn’t have any, but he actually turned up with Russians, since he didn’t have any Prussians either but hadn’t the heart to tell us. Thus this particular version of the B of W was notable for an unusual lack of authenticity in the OOB. The battle staggered on all day – eventually we agreed that the Allies were beaten, and that was that – we caught the last orders for drinks at the Bruntsfield Hotel and got into the obligatory justificatory arguments. We had decided that the [P]Russians would arrive after 2pm as soon as Wellington threw 11 or better on 2D6 (or “two dice”, as we would have called them at the time) at the start of his turn. As soon as they arrived, Napoleon would start rolling dice each turn, and a French reserve force under Grouchy would arrive on a 9 or better. Don’t ask me where these scientific probabilities came from, but – anyway – it’s academic, since Wellington never managed the requisite dice roll, and his bewildered Russian allies were not called into play, and eventually returned to Dunfermline in their toolbox – I’m not sure if they were relieved or outraged.

(2) Having mentioned the South-East Scotland chaps, I am delighted to have had an email from Mark, in Canada, who knew the notorious George Jeffrey back in the 1980s (rather after I knew him), and was, for a while, a disciple of George’s famed (but little understood, especially by me) Variable Length Bound system, or VLB. This, in theory, is the answer to a great many problems which wargamers have struggled with over the decades, but is reputed to suffer from the slight problem that it doesn’t actually work. Whatever – without making any pre-emptive judgements – I have invited Mark to contribute some notes about VLB, which we have briefly mentioned here before, and he hopes to send me something – excellent.

(3) I found a bunch of photos of my old (early 1970s) Ancient armies, which were dreadfully crude but served me for many years. Now gone – a nice chap in New Zealand bought them on eBay some years ago – their only claim to a place in my heart is that they are – like my Waterloo collaborators – no more. I don’t expect anyone to be excited by my crap painting or my very basic Airfix + Garrison + Atlantic armies, but – if we are to preserve a hallowed whisper for Old School – it is as well to remember that this was the reality. You may notice that my dread of paint-shedding by plastic figures was such that I kept spears and the wobbly bits of chariots etc in the raw plastic, which explains the distinctive vibrant orange preservative obviously employed by the Celtic chariot builders.

I am still quietly pleased by the onager, which I built from balsa, with shirt button wheels (all right, all right), based on the drawings in the WRG’s nice little book. Purists will protest that the Romans did not have shirts, never mind shirt buttons.

Note early view of The Cupboard - I didn't have so many figures in 2001

The occasion commemorated by the first few photos is my first wargame in my present house, New Year 2001. The room is what was the dining room at that time, which has subsequently become the downstairs shower/toilet (so wargames in the bog almost took place here), and my opponent was Malcolm Turner, who – now I think about it – is also dead now. Maybe it’s me then? That will have cut the queue of people wishing to visit Chateau Foy for a wargame, I would think.

The remainder were taken 5 years ago, when I was proposing to sell them.

(4) I also found some vintage, typed casualty tables I derived from the kill rates in Bill Leeson’s reprint of Von Reisswitz’s Kriegsspiel rules, which I am still poring over. These may be too dry even for the standards of this blog, but I’ll see if there is something useful which could be put here.

I think that’s probably quite enough of all that…

Hooptedoodle #137 – Cereal Packet Giveaways

This started off with me reminiscing in an email to Old John about the cut-out masks you used to get on the back of Puffed Wheat packets when I was a kid. So this is straightforward, aimless nostalgia, purely for its own sake.

I’m not an expert or a collector, but I suppose I must have spent many weeks of my life at breakfast times over the years, staring at cereal packets – maybe months. Nowadays my attention tends to wander a bit, but this is partly due to the messages on the packet being mostly dedicated to telling me why I should buy this stuff, disregarding completely the fact that I have obviously already bought it.

There was a long period when all cereal packets had to be themed into some popular TV character, or some cartoon personality they had generated for their own advertising – which at the time I thought was a bit limp, and probably is a useful guide to the point in history when kids were no longer expected to have an imagination. There was also a pseudo-health period – where else could I have learned that the cereal I was eating contained traces of Niacin, which (of course) is the anti-Pellagra vitamin? Just out of interest, did anyone ever have Pellagra? – I’ve always assumed it was very nasty, but I never knew.

No – I’m talking of the fifties [sinister, echoing sound effect]. Out of complete idleness, I spent a little time yesterday looking online for some evidence of some of those memories – naturally, the world of Google is swamped in US examples, probably because Americans are better than we are at nostalgia and because it rarely occurs to them that anywhere else ever existed. I found a marvellous UK site, which is worth a look, here. I borrowed a couple of examples from there, but only to show what a great place to visit it is.

Well I remember the Puffed Wheat “Hi-Hats”, which promised so much yet delivered so little. My first one was the Saturn Space Spy, which was unusual in that it was a full face – most of them were upper face only. I munched my way impatiently through a big pack of PW, gazing longingly at the thing (though I had some misgivings about the fact that it said Space Spy in big letters on the forehead). This is the stuff of fantasy – at no additional cost (as they pointed out), the mighty Quaker company – whose technology was such that every single Puff was fired from big cannons, apparently – had presented me with the opportunity to actually look like a real Space Spy. Fantastic. If you got your mum to give a hand with cutting out the eye holes, and around the sticky-out nose flap – oh yes, and punch the holes for the elastic, and then actually find some elastic – then, at a stroke, your imagination would do the rest and you would instantly - magically - be changed from a kid into a kid with a piece of cereal packet attached to the front of his head.

I believe that I actually cried a bit when I saw the reality of my mask. Even if it had worked, which it didn’t, it would only have worked from the front – although, of course, that is exactly the view I presented in the mirror. The worst of the lot was the cowboy hat. Let’s put this into context…

Cowboy hats were a problem. In fact cowboy outfits were a problem generally. You could buy any number of toy guns, you could play at wiping out the entire aboriginal population of Northern America every day (God forgive us - no wonder we grew up weird), but if you wanted to dress the part you were in for a let-down. Cowboy outfits that you bought from toyshops didn’t look like the proper cowboys in the Tim Holt movies on Saturday mornings – they looked, at best, like Hopalong Flaming Cassidy. I had a stupid black, Baden-Powell shaped hat with a lime green fringe around the brim – lime green? - what was that about? My cousin’s was even worse – it was the same shape, but a festive sort of royal blue, with a cut out tin-foil star on the front – and his cowpoke’s protective “chaps” actually had pictures of cowboys printed on them. Even at 5 or 6, we realized this was a poor show.

You get the idea. Into this authenticity vacuum, Puffed Wheat produced a very convincing looking 2-dimensional cowboy hat that Tim Holt and his chums would have been proud of, and the drawing of the happy boy wearing it, terrorizing his astonished mother and sister, showed that he looked – even from the side – just like the real deal. Although I had cooled on the idea of Hi-Hats after my Space Spy fiasco, I got quite worked up about this one. One Saturday, stuffed with Puffed Wheat, I cut it out, fitted it up, recycled the elastic from the binned Space Spy, took one look in the mirror and it was ditched within 20 seconds. Not only did it look rubbish, but it actually wrapped around the sides of your head like a sweatband – not at all like the illustration. More tears.

These were valuable life lessons, of course – about marketing and about the fact that – in the long run – no amount of imagination will cover up for complete junk!

I remember the multiple series of cut-out vehicles of all types on the back of the Weetabix packets – I’m sure some genius must have designed them, and they were fun, but – again – they were fiddly to make and looked dreadful. One after the other, they were cut out, glued together and binned, I didn’t get upset about them any more, but I was aware that I only liked the process, rather than the end deliverable. The flat wheels, printed on one side only, were an obvious weakness, but in fact the square edges were unrealistic too – in both respects, the veteran car series were better, but the finished product was never worth the effort. It must have served as a good apprenticeship for all these botched toy soldiers in later life, though! I recall that the first couple of series of Weetabix Workshop had a sketch of a boy and his mum looking suitably enthusiastic, but the later ones were more obviously macho and engineering-focused, and mum was dropped - the psychologists were busy, even then.

I also remember something called Mornflake Oats, which I assume was porridge – my cousin collected a most impressive looking village and farm which you could cut out and assemble – on good quality art card, as I recall, but we never had the courage to try to build them. There was a slight risk that if they didn’t turn out well it might be down to us.

So much other stuff – freebies which have become little icons of childhood – red plastic British Foot Guards bandsmen – I started collecting them, but gave up after I got five tuba players on the trot. Of course, if I’d had any mates, I could have swapped them.

I recall little plastic submarines which worked with baking soda, a series of small one-piece plastic racing cars, which must have come with Sugar Puffs (later?), since I can recall that they were always sticky and had to be washed.

I tried to find some pictures of proper Hi-Hats, but failed – I found some American Kellogg’s equivalents, but not the real thing from my own history. Anyway, if you never saw them, they were rubbish. Take my word for it.  

Hooptedoodle #136 – Just One More Bus

All right, all right – I said there would be no more, but I’d already secretly made up my mind to get one of these if one came up in the right livery. I know it isn’t a proper, real bus in my traditional terms, but these were being introduced when I was still at school, so it squeaks in.

This is a Leyland Atlantean in the colours of Liverpool Corporation Passenger Transport, on route 82, which travelled between Speke and the Pier Head, and was a familiar sight on Aigburth Road, in my old stomping ground. These must have been introduced around 1962 or so, I would guess, and were the first buses Liverpool acquired which were designed for single-man operation, though the conductors were retained for a good while thereafter (negotiated union agreement?).

It was one of these – albeit on route 86, which had similar termini to the 82, but ran through Allerton – which caught out my racing cyclist chum, Kenny, who used to train by slipstreaming the buses along Mather Avenue on his way to and from school. He couldn’t cope with the automatic gearboxes and superior brakes of the new generation of buses, and he lost his teeth in a brief but decisive misunderstanding.

I am satisfied now that my collection is complete. Unless I spot a nice vintage Leyland in Wallasey colours…

Thoughts of a Toygamer

As an appropriate foreword, here is a clip from a thread on boardgamegeek.com (of which I am a fairly regular reader) which I offer as an example of something I have struggled with for a long time – including a few heart-searchings on this very blog, I believe.

The author of the clip has published this on the Internet, where everyone can see it, and appears even to be quite pleased with his idea, so I see no reason to change any details of it or protect his ID. Everyone is perfectly entitled to express their views (subject to moderation, of course), and it is only reasonable that everyone else is entitled to a free opinion of those views (without moderation), and of the sort of people who express them, and why they feel moved to do so.

Respect all round; fair is fair.

I don’t have a problem with this view – it seems a tad bitchy, maybe, but it’s quite amusing. Equally, I don’t have a problem with Martin’s most recent instalment of his serial emails to me on the subject of the evil that is Commands & Colors, and how it will never replace proper Old School wargaming. Martin has probably never thought of himself as a Toygamer, but he appears to be just that, and will probably be proud of the fact now that he knows.

So what is all this about? What is it that makes us (all of us, including me) pay lip-service to the enrichment which diversity brings to our hobby, while still taking every chance to stick pins in some “other lot”, because they offend some fundamental ideal which we’ve held so long we can’t remember where we learned it?

I don’t feel I ever got close enough to the human race to have a valid view on human nature – whatever that is – so I’ll spare you some embarrassment by grasping the opportunity to keep quiet on that one, but I had a couple of thoughts while shaving.

(1) Is it, in fact, a single hobby? Is a single hobby too straightforward? Do we all need some imagined opposing faction within it, to which we can feel superior?

(2) Are we all a bit defensive anyway, because of the traditional (imagined?) contempt felt for wargamers by the rest of the world? Is it easier to take out one’s touchiness on near relatives?

(3) I’m on shaky ground trying to produce unqualified generalisations about the hobby and its disciples – my own preferences and areas of interest are much too limited for that, and I do not have as wide a general understanding as I sometimes like to think. I can only have a go at analyzing where I am myself, and how I came to think the way I do.

(4) …and, because he deserves it, I’ll have a go at Martin.

As briefly as possible (not least because I have written all this numerous times before):

* I was originally excited by the same books as most wargamers of my age

* I’ve spent a great many years since then trying to make the games as enjoyable as I expected them to be when I started

* I’m still trying, but I’m more pragmatic about it now

* I love little painted soldiers in neat rows – the more colourful the period the better; this love is out of all proportion to any sensible reason for it, but it is a major influence on the types of games I like to play

* I was deeply shocked by board wargames; it took a long time before I would try one, but I was amazed at the clarity and completeness of the rules, the speed and logic of the play, and by the almost total lack of arguments

* However, I found the visual spectacle less satisfactory, and I missed the little men, so I spent the next 30 years looking for some satisfactory middle ground that combined the best of both worlds

* Commands & Colors (played with miniatures, in my case) has gone a long way to filling that hole for me; it doesn’t suit everyone, and it doesn’t provide absolutely everything I need either, but I wish the game had been around many years ago

At which point Martin appears and tells me I’m mistaken and that I have sold out to the enemy. He does it pleasantly and amusingly, of course, and his reasoning has an orthodoxy that I have come to recognise.

You see, my friends (whisper it) – Martin has also struggled with the disappointment which much of his wargaming has generated, but he has dealt with this by going back to the original books and starting again – back to the time when he was still excited. I can see a flaw here – it is something to do with failing to learn from history. If I were to go back 30-odd years – good heavens, it’s 40 years now! – I would recognise all the holes and shortcomings in the game which led to all the blind-alley tweaks and improvements and the eventual realization that boardgames had something which was useful and (more whispering) sometimes better.

I’ve got them all here – Featherstone, Wesencraft, Young, Morschauser, Grant. I really enjoy them – so much that I have actually replaced a couple of them that I had sold on eBay in a rash moment. But this is nostalgia, for the most part. Particularly Wesencraft’s Practical Wargames, which was the biggest influence on my developmental years – I sometimes have a mad urge to play a game using Wesencraft’s rules, but when I stop and consider how it will be – all the morale testing especially – I usually go off the idea.

So do I play a lot of board wargames, then? No – I own a good few, but seldom, if ever, do I play them. I recently bought a decent old copy of Ariel’s The English Civil War on eBay, entirely because it is considered an excellent instrument for conducting solo compaigns as a framework for miniatures battles. I haven’t used it yet. By the time I had checked that all the (rather dull) cardboard counters were present and correct I couldn’t face it. All those counters – all that effort to sort them out, change a 20-point cavalry counter for a 10 and a five and 3 ones after each action – as a solo experience I find this, I regret to say, dismal. I live in hope that I shall shake off this lack of fortitude and get on with it, but I find that handling large numbers of cardboard counters is a great chore, while – strangely – I will happily arrange cupboards and boxes and tables full of painted toys all day long.

Discuss. I also have to point out that the attraction of the cardboard squares is not helped by my dwindling eyesight, nor the fact that my fingertips appear to be changing into elephants’ feet.

Martin, meanwhile, is feverishly setting up games which look exactly like the photos in the original Charles Grant (Sr) books, and even fighting those same battles, in his rush to recapture the thrill. Good for him. He knows he is right, too.

As ever, I haven’t really got anywhere here, other than confirming that there are a lot more questions than answers, but often the consideration of the questions is useful. Or at least it passes the time until I can’t remember why I was doing it in the first place.

Which reminds me that my original intention was to say a few words about a book I am reading on my Kindle. It is Simulating War, by Philip Sabin, and I believe I was prompted to purchase it by a comment on one of the blogs I read – I can’t remember exactly where I heard of it, but if it was your comment then thank you.

I’ve not really got very far through it yet, but have found it fascinating. Sabin discusses many aspects of the theoretical modelling of warfare, and compares the approaches and relative success of professional strategists, educators and hobbyists, and the various strengths and weaknesses of paper layouts (which we might describe as boardgames) and computer games, which, briefly, he considers to have been less successful than expected, since they are market and technology led, and tend to be designed bottom-up. The criterion for success here is not commercial profitability, but Sabin’s central theme of the optimal balance between realism and playability – a subject which we could all bore the legs off donkeys with for many years.

I offer no kind of review here, other than to recommend the book if this is the sort of thing you find interesting. I did notice, however, that occasionally I found myself pleased because he had expressed something which I feel myself, but rather more skillfully and convincingly than I could have managed. If I am honest, I was especially pleased at the occasions where he was criticising some “other lot”. At other times I found he was sticking pins in my lot, at which point I would say to myself, “ah, he doesn’t really understand that”, or “that’s true, but it doesn’t really apply to me…”

That other lot have much to answer for.

Hooptedoodle #128 - Nose-stalgia? - not what it used to be

When I was a young chap, my grandfather (who lived in Paris at the time) once sent me a bottle of Chevalier d'Orsay after-shave lotion as a Christmas gift, and a fine big bottle it was, too.

In those days, Paris was a lot further away and a lot more exotic than it seems now, and this after-shave was fantastic stuff. Maybe fantastic isn't the word - maybe fantastic is not what we (or the copy writers) are looking for in after-shave - but it was the best after-shave I ever had, anyway. It was a very fresh, lemony scent, with sort of herbal things in it - don't expect me to start using words like "notes"…

Anyway, I was as frugal as possible with this, my very-best No.1 after-shave, and it lasted for years, but eventually it was gone, as was my grandfather, and I never managed to get any more. So I moved on, and I forgot all about it.

After that I suppose I must have gone through the Brut years, the Lynx years, the Ralph Lauren years, the Calvin Klein years and eventually found myself back at the Boots'-own-brand, £5.99-a-bottle years, as one does. Not having thought about it for decades, one day recently I suddenly remembered Chevalier d'Orsay, the Contesse looked it up online, and - merveilleux! - found that it is still made, and someone in the UK sells the stuff by mail order.

Not a big deal, admittedly, but my life is less glamorous than it once was, and the prospect of having the postman deliver an instant trip back to my 20s was at least a little bit exciting. There is nothing, I contend, more capable of firing up memories than one's sense of smell, so I invested in a little olfactory time travel - black magic and wicked spices, just for the hell of it.

The package arrived, and I have been using it since that day. It is, of course, eau de toilette in a modern sprayer rather than splash-on after-shave, and it really is very pleasant, but - you know what? - it doesn't smell the same. I did a bit of poking around online, and I understand that Parfums d'Orsay withdrew the old stuff, and relaunched it in 1995, using more modern ingredients (I quote from their website).

Using what? Why in Purple Hades did they change the ingredients? If they wanted to change the ingredients, they should have changed the name, you would think, in case they disappointed some ancient former customer who had been hoping for an authentic, soul-tugging whiff of his long-dead past. Even the world of pongs, gentlemen, appears not to be what it was.

Anyway, it's very pleasant, so one mustn't grumble.

Hi-ho, hi-ho – plus Stephen and Buddy

…it's off to work we go

The prospect of getting back to some siege gaming (an activity which – strangely – was actually discouraged by my Peninsular War campaign) has got me sifting through the boxes of not-quite projects to get some more engineering and supply units finished off.

First hit was an easy one – a little group of British infantry pioneers, individually based. Right away, I have to admit that these are not really a siege-type unit – there will be proper sappers and miners for that later on, with the regulation brown bases. These fellows exist primarily because it seems like a good idea, and there is already in existence a French equivalent. Next admission is that I don’t actually have any rules to allow the pioneers to influence the game, but now that I have a unit for each side I am more likely to do something about that.

They are, as you will see, from Minifigs “interim” range – the one after the S-Range and before the current range of clinically obese chaps. There isn’t much available in metal in this scale. My French sapeurs are a mixture of Kennington and Falcata castings, which gives some variety of poses. I had intended to use S-Range Brits for the pioneers, but the S-Range pioneer is a disappointingly weedy looking sculpt, who looks as if he is struggling with his axe, and might have trouble sharpening a pencil. So it’s the intermediates – these are BN55, vintage circa 1974?

Since this is an informal collective (pool?) of bods from various regiments, they have mixed facings. If you want someone to lose that gate for you, or to help with building a bridge, these could be just the fellows. I regret that there are no beards on show, but the castings have no beards. I tried painting a beard on, but the effect was funnier than I had hoped.

Subject 2: Stephen Fry

Of late, I have given up trying to paint soldiers with the TV on. Wearing my painting glasses, I cannot see the TV, never mind work out what is on the screen, so these days I listen to music while painting. This weekend it has been the usual mixed bag – Mississippi John Hurt (brilliant, but after 20 minutes it all sounds the same, and is always in the same key, which doesn’t help), Buffalo Springfield (disappointingly dated, and not as good as I remembered), Herbie Hancock (excellent – I played River, which is an album of Joni Mitchell’s music, with guest vocals provided by numerous worthies, including Leonard Cohen and – erm – Joni Mitchell), Cassandra Wilson (terrific, and sexy in a slightly weird way), and a boxed set of Mendelssohn’s symphonies. Intuitively, it seems odd that Buffalo Springfield seemed more dated than Mendelssohn, but hey.

One of the things I did not watch on the TV was Stephen Fry’s QI show, which makes me decidedly uncomfortable. If you haven’t seen it, it consists of a sort of bogus panel game, which is entirely designed to perpetuate the legend that SF is the cleverest fellow on the planet. The panel members do not always sit easily in their role as stooges, but the show can be very amusing nonetheless.

It’s hard to put my finger on why Stephen’s public image grates with me. I actually quite like him – he is unpredictable and witty and frequently endearing. I just get very fed up with the constant force-feeding of his TV packaging as a National Treasure – fed up in the same way that I became fed up with the constant overexposure of David Jason and the late John Thaw (great talents, both) on British TV in past years.

No amount of TV is going to make me accept that Mr Fry is an intellectual, or a great scholar, or Oscar Wilde, or Dr Johnson. My attention is limited – I will find it more convenient if he remains a comedian, an occasional writer and – to be brutal – a TV personality. I am happy with him in that more digestible role.

I hasten to add that I have huge affection for the old Jeeves & Wooster series he did with Hugh Lawrie, which remains one of the very brightest gems of British television in my humble opinion. In fact, now I come to remember that I have an Amazon gift voucher which someone very kindly sent me for Christmas, I must have a look to see what boxed sets of DVDs are available for that series. While I’m at it, I should check out what there is of the old black-and-white Tony Hancock shows. You have to be careful with this – it would be awful to be confronted with the fact that – like Buffalo Springfield on Saturday – these shows are not as good as I think they were. Tricky stuff, nostalgia.

One of the very strangest bits of Stephen Fry was when they sent him on a trip to America – touring in a London cab. His visit to Chicago included an interview – in the cab, naturally – with Buddy Guy, the great urban blues legend. The idea of Fry empathizing with Buddy’s recollection of what life was like for an impoverished black musician in 1950s Chicago is bizarre. I suspect that they could have achieved a comparable amount of empathy by getting Stephen to travel round Chicago in his taxi with a grizzly bear – he is affable and enthusiastic and correct, but these worlds never quite collided, did they?

Hooptedoodle #120 – Definitely the Last Bus from Birkenhead

The final couple of 1/76 buses for my non-collection.

This Liverpool Corporation Leyland “Titan” type PD2 is another common sight from my childhood. For some reason, LCPT is one of the few bus operators for which I can’t find sensible fleet information on the internet – I guess this model is of a mid-1950s vehicle.

The Birkenhead Corporation Guy “Arab” is another personal nostalgia bomb. This is a relative oldie - the original vehicle which this depicts was supplied to the Birkenhead fleet in 1946, and the old-style municipal paint job was officially updated in 1951, but in reality a great many of the older buses were left like this – a bit like military dress regulations, I suppose. Since it remained in service until 1957, this would still have been trundling along the New Chester Road and around Rock Ferry when I was a boy. Guy Motors were based in Wolverhampton, and the wartime utility-style coachwork for this particular vehicle was by Park Royal, of London. Once again, a bus that looks like a proper bus – would anyone dream of naming a bus an Arab now, I wonder?

Unless I come across a Wallasey bus from the right period in this scale, that’s all for now, folks.

I am quietly pleased to observe that the number of hits on this blog has crept over 200,000 – I wasn’t going to mention it, but felt it was only polite to thank anyone who has read any of my ramblings during the last few years for their time and patience! So – thank you.

Hooptedoodle #119 - Eye of the Beholder

Lower Slaughter, Cotswolds - seems nice...

Even by my standards, this may turn out to be an unusually pointless post. Starting from nowhere in particular, it is likely to end somewhere similar, having passed through yet more of the same. If you wish to read it I’ll be pleased to have your company, and would welcome any thoughts you may have, but don’t say you haven’t been warned…

Yesterday I was idly reading over a forum thread to which I do not subscribe, and in which I have no special interest, but it got me thinking. Fleur d’Ennui, as Django’s tune is called.

The topic was What is Beauty? – with specific reference to landscapes. For some reason it reminded me of an occasion, years ago, when I used to visit the Cotswolds on business. I liked the Cotswolds, and it was not an area I was familiar with. Though I was, in my own right, exactly the same pipsqueak that I have always been, I represented a very heavyweight client of the people I was dealing with at the time, and thus I was lucky enough to be taken out to some very pleasant eating places.

Some village or other - seems nice...

One sunny evening I was taken to a place near the village of Bradford (which sticks in my mind because it was very different from the large city with which it shares a name). We parked the car a little distance from the hostelry we were visiting, and walked along the road to it. On the way, I stopped and took a photograph (lost years ago), because I thought the view was so lovely. A country road, curving in a gentle S-bend, over an ancient bridge and then up a little hill into a wood, with a stone-built coaching inn on the outside of the bend.

After I’d taken the photo, I started wondering why this particular view appealed to me. Did it remind me of somewhere? Was it like the illustrations in some picture book which I loved as a child? Was there something instinctively attractive about it? Did it conform to some learned standard of design? Did it seem like a pleasant place to live (or dine, in this case)? What?

First thing about beauty, I guess, is that you have to let it wash over you – just enjoy it. If you over-analyse it the wheels fall off. Still, I was intrigued.

Trin Valley - seems nice...

I am also reminded of Billy Connolly’s fine tale of taking his then-small children on holiday in the Scottish Highlands, and trying to get them to be enthusiastic about the scenery. It strikes a chord with all parents – past and present – but it also gets us back to this idea of a received concept of beauty.

“This is a mountain”, said Billy, “isn’t it lovely?”

His kids were unconvinced. A mountain is a big lump of rock and stuff, folded up and maybe a bit battered, eroded by the wind and the rain and covered in vegetation. That is the way the above-water bits of the planet behave – a mountain is just a lump – there are lots of them. Why should it be lovely? Why should this one be any lovelier than, say, that one? Billy’s kids thought the whole experience was less lovely, and much less interesting, than Sesame Street on their camper van’s portable TV.

Were they wrong? It’s a funny one – some things please me – some images can almost reduce me to tears, but I don’t understand why. All right – show me a photo of my own children, especially when they were little, and my pupils will dilate (or whatever) and I get a lump in my throat, but that’s largely hormones and things. Why the reaction to pictures of places? I seem to have a fondness for views with water in them, and there are probably certain other repeating characteristics, but where does it come from, especially as a reaction to places which I do not know and which mean nothing to me? Are we born with these feelings? Is it learned? – for that matter, and more sinisterly, is it taught?

Verwallsee, Tyrol - seems nice...

If we widen out the topic, we get into all sorts of consideration of why we all like what we like (scientific overtones), and the whole issue of “taste” (which introduces less palatable issues like background and upbringing, and the dreaded whiff of snobbery).

In truth, I suspect that if I understood more about this I might not be a happier person – I fear that I might not enjoy what I had learned, especially about myself. It does interest me though, if only in those safe moments when I know that there is no risk of my finding out any more about it.

Best strategy is probably just to enjoy what you enjoy, and don’t worry about it too much. So I’ll just try to do that. 

And, since I mentioned him, here's Django 

Hooptedoodle #117 - more buses - still not a collection, though

Another couple of buses have arrived. Again, I am sticking firmly to specimens from dates and places that mean I would have seen them as a kid. Sorry the photos aren't better quality.

Birkenhead Corporation Leyland PD2 with MCW coachwork, early 1950s.
This is exactly the kind of bus we used to get from the Mersey Ferry terminal at
Woodside to my Uncle Ernie's house in Bromborough.

When I was five we went for a rare holiday in the Lake District. The local buses that
took us to places like Cartmel and Pooley Bridge were Ribble single deckers, just
like this Leyland Tiger

Hooptedoodle #116 – not quite a collection – someone else’s hobby

This is a modern photo of a preserved Liverpool Corporation bus from the
1950s - hence the modern car and the lack of flat caps on the passengers

I recently surprised myself by treating myself to some lovely little 1/76 (HO) scale buses. This is an odd thing to do – I was never a true bus enthusiast – at least not on my own behalf. My cousin, who was the same age as me, just lived and breathed buses from about age 7 onwards. He had all the Ian Allan books, and as a boy I spent many long days with him at exotic places like Preston bus depot, underlining the numbers of the vehicles we spotted in his books.

Simply by osmosis and exposure to his enthusiasm, I grew up knowing all sorts of nerdy things about specialist coachbuilders, and odd Liverpool Corporation buses which had aluminium bodies, built by Crossley on AEC chassis…

You get the idea. Cousin Dave and I even assembled a small fleet of Dinky Toy buses, but the available selection in those days was very poor – Dinky made one generic double-decker which might have been a Leyland (we did have one, rare pre-war Dinky casting, and that seemed to be a Guy), and it was available in badly-sprayed green and cream or badly-sprayed red and cream.

Our little fleet disappeared into the toy boxes of younger relatives ages ago, but for years I kept an eye open sufficiently to be casually aware that the only HO scale buses I ever saw in UK shops were red London Transport Routemasters – usually in a twin-pack with an out-of-scale London taxi for the tourist market.

My cousin died a good few years ago, so my model bus ogling days are long gone, but recently – when I was looking for old photos of the Crosville buses to Chester in the 1950s – for this blog, in fact – I accidentally discovered what is on the market for collectors now. Wow. Very largely because I couldn’t help thinking how Dave would have loved them, I spent a couple of days gazing at all sorts of provincial exotica on the Internet, and eventually bought a few, with the very firm resolve that this would not be the beginning of yet another unofficial collection. I have restricted myself to buses that I used to see as a kid in Liverpool area – this is what real buses will always look like for me, in the same way as the cigarette cards of childhood are how real footballers look. Inculcation – you can’t beat it.

I still have one coming in the mail – that is a 1950s Leyland single-decker in the colours of Ribble, such as I used to see on rare visits to the Lake District. The ones that have arrived thus far are set out here; welcome to the land of the Not-Quite Bus Nerd.

These weren't too common in Liverpool - Ribble used to run services between
Liverpool and towns in Darkest Lancashire. We used to visit the big Ribble
depot in Skelhorne Street - behind Lime Street railway station - and saw
a great many Leylands like this (the destination town of Leyland is where the chassis
were made)

Early 1950s Crosville-owned Bristol bus, route 116 from Huyton to Liverpool Pier Head.
You could get on a Crosville bus to travel between stops within the city of Liverpool,
but the services were primarily to places outside the city, and the fares were a little dearer than
the "Corpy" buses

The single decker Crosville service between Liverpool Pier Head and Caernarfon
ran through the Mersey Tunnel, and was the best way to get to Rhyl and the
other North Wales resorts. On a Tuesday, most of the women in Flintshire
seemed to come on this bus to visit Liverpool market 

This is the business - the real deal from the early 1950s - an AEC Regent III
in Liverpool Corporation Passenger Transport livery, on route to Penny Lane.
Buses will always look like this to me. My cousin lived at my Nan's house,
in Briardale Road, which runs into Penny Lane - we knew the
Wavertree/Smithdown Road area served by this route very well.
Goodness me - I can stare at this for hours.

Hooptedoodle #114 - The End of Another Year - Tony Brooks

Well, you may find this hard to believe, but it seems that yet again I have failed to make the New Year honours list. I had sort of hoped that maybe the letter on the official headed notepaper had just been delayed in the Christmas mail, but the lists are out and – I just have to accept it – I’m not mentioned.

You’d have thought just a measly CBE or something wouldn’t have been too much trouble or expense – they don’t have to go daft – I am humble enough to accept crumbs from the royal table with good grace. In case you are wondering just why I might merit some kind of recognition from a grateful nation, I wish you wouldn’t keep bringing that up – I can only respond that I seem to be at least as deserving as many who are on the list. Not that I spent much time reading it, you understand.

There’s a lady who has been a very famous actress for a great many years – you know the one – she was in that TV series we all used to watch years ago – what was it called, again? – that other fellow that died recently was in it, too – what was his name? And then she was in lots of other things – she was always on TV, in our living rooms – she was like one of our family, and we all loved her. Anyway, they’ve made her a Grand Dame, or a Wicked Stepmother or something. So now, in addition to being wealthy and famous she is elevated to the peerage.

I think that’s wonderful. There’s also some chap that has been a big wig in the finance industry for a long time who is now Sir Big Wig – he looks like another deserving case – a knighthood is probably one of the very few things he couldn’t afford to buy. Well – now I come to think of it, perhaps he could. Maybe that’s where I’m going wrong.

I did spend enough time with the list to note that there are also a few people on there who have been rewarded for their work for charity, or their contribution to scientific advance and stuff like that, but I wasn’t very interested in them – I’d never heard of them – no-one ever mentions them at the hairdresser’s – and I rather regard them as faceless do-gooders. The papers don’t bother much with them either, which just goes to prove something or other. It would be churlish to begrudge them even their lower-profile honours – I mean, good for them – but it does add weight to my argument that there seem to be enough places available (I’m sure that’s not the right word) for them to have squeezed me in.

Not to worry. Rise above it. I shall enjoy my continuing anonymity, and the distinction of being one of the last people in the UK who are not famous.

Moving on, I have to observe that this is a strange time of year – we appear to be obsessed with looking back over the year and producing lists of things. TV is stuffed with this – The Top 50 Most Pointless List Shows of 2013, and similar. I guess we must like this kind of thing, though it has been suggested that it is just a very cheap way of re-running old clips into a botched-up show and giving Harry Hill or Jimmy Carr something to do. Switching on the TV last night, the Contesse and I were shocked to see a news announcement of the death of Mel Smith, the comedian and writer (I’m not sure if he was an MBE or anything) – our shock being heightened by the fact that he also died during the Summer, so it was yet another re-run. That’s one problem with re-runs – if you don’t watch them from the start, and don’t pay attention, it can become very confusing – you can get hold of the wrong end of all sorts of sticks, and this is a very easy time of year to get confused.

Given that every meaningless statistic in the world is now at copywriters’ fingertips, and everything that was ever filmed (including out-takes) is stored away somewhere, it must be possible to create a TV show of some sort at hardly any cost at all. A major contribution to helping with the Economic Depression, or depression of any sort – at peak viewing hours, the whole family can sit on the sofa, break out the catering sized bags of Doritos and watch yet another show which cost hardly anything to produce. Ideal – we will also get to sit through the advertising breaks (mostly ads for low-quality sofas and for Doritos, in fact, just as a lifestyle check), and if the story line or the information content is not demanding that’s OK; it matters less if Maureen misses most of it, checking her texts, or if we get distracted by a parallel discussion of some other show that we failed to understand previously – you know, the one with that bloke in – what’s his name?

On this general theme of recorded statistics and old pictures, one of my Christmas presents was a book called Poetry in Motion, the autobiography of one Charles Antony Standish Brooks, better known as Tony, who was a great hero of mine when I was a small boy. He was, of course, a remarkably successful racing driver back in the bad old days when motor racing was mostly a ghastly pastime for young men who found the end of WW2 had made things too boring. I loved the sport, even if it was too frequently a public cremation ritual, and still have a great interest in the earlier years of Formula One – I have a hefty collection of books and old films.

Brooks was a bit different. He was exceptionally gifted, but even back in the 1950s it was obvious that he was not one of the usual hellraisers and wild men of the sport. He was noted as quiet, a bit studious and retiring, and, as far as I know, does not appear in any photos drinking beer with Mike Hawthorn. He was a qualified dentist, a devout Catholic (I now learn), and avoided the wilder excesses. When he got married he retired at once from all forms of motor racing, opened a motor dealership which became very successful and raised a large family. Now 81, he is still going strong.

To put some dimensions on his career, he raced at the top level for only a few years – he was in F1 from 1955 until his retiral at the end of 1961, and he won Grands Prix for Vanwall and Ferrari. If he had had a slightly more pushy personality, and been prepared to take some extra risks, he would certainly have been a deserving World Champion for Ferrari in 1959. But he didn’t. That is why he is ultimately less famous than Sir Stirling Moss (that knighthood thing again), for example, though of course Moss never won a Championship either.

So - always a rather shadowy figure, and one who disappeared without trace after retiral, though I have met him a couple of times at Aintree and Goodwood in recent years. That is “have met” in the sense of “got him to sign my copy of some book or other” – he was always in notably better shape at these events than his contemporaries, Moss and Salvadori – remarkably sprightly, almost boyish for a man in his 70s.

Proper racing car - Brooks in a Ferrari, winning the 1959 French GP

Before I got the new book I was surprised by a couple of the customer reviews – there were complaints that it appeared to be mostly a collection of detailed accounts of very similar races – many of them minor club events – which quickly became boring. I dismissed these with a shake of the head – this is a racing driver’s autobiography, which kind of sets the context, you would think, and the man is from a different age – there are no tales of wild parties – this is not Eddie Irvine.

Well, I’ve been reading it. You know what? It is rather boring. The book is written, without any ghostwriters, by an 81 year old man, of deeply honest and slightly curmudgeonly nature, a man who apologises for including contemporary press quotes which show him in a favourable light. It is constructed mostly from his own very detailed records of his racing career, so the reader is going to get more detail on weather conditions, lap times and mechanical problems during testing than they may be comfortable with.

Me, I love it, but I can see how some chapters might be seen by the less nerdy as a collation of The 12 Most Boring Sports Car Races of 1953. Super photos throughout, and I can satisfy the Inner Nerd by identifying as many other cars and drivers of the day as possible. Pass the Doritos, Maureen, I’m going to be busy for a while.

I wish you all - whoever and wherever you are - a very happy and peaceful New Year.