Hooptedoodle #275 - Which Side Do You Dress?

BBC Radio 4's Today programme is the way my day begins - I wake up when my radio alarm decides it is time for me to start listening. It's good in a number of ways - I get to keep abreast of the news, and it is excellent therapy to be exposed to rational, articulate people who do not curse or communicate in txt-speak. Unfortunately the content is not necessarily going to improve my blood pressure. Never mind. Each new day comes with no guarantees - just be glad you lived to see it. To misquote Forrest Gump, life is like a box of chocolates - it is bad for your teeth and you don't like most of the centres.

This morning I am, of course, mostly impressed by the continuing adventures of Messrs Trump and Kim. I have been keeping a gentle eye on the betting odds against The Tronald completing his term of office - just for academic interest, you understand. Now I am wondering what sort of price I could get on none of us being alive by the end of his term of office. Problem, as someone will point out, is that I would have difficulty collecting my winnings.

To brighten things up a bit, I stayed with the programme this morning, and was confronted by a spokesperson (female) from a fine single-interest group called Let Clothes Be Clothes - they are committed to campaigning against what they term gender stereotyping, and their target area is eliminating the distinction between boys' and girls' clothes. She was celebrating the fact that John Lewis, the very famous and successful UK department store, have removed the signs from their children's clothes - all clothes they sell for children aged up to 14 are now just clothes. Now there's a mighty step forward. I have a 6-foot-tall, 14 year old son who would be prepared to headbutt you in the mouth if you suggested that he may no longer wear boys' clothing, and I do not believe this is entirely due to stereotyping or conditioning to which we have unreasoningly subjected him.

Initially I listened to the item to see if it were a wind-up, or if someone was about to pour a pail of water over the spokesperson's head, but - no - it was for real.

Now, of course I disapprove of stereotyping or prejudicial behaviour of any sort - at heart I even disapprove of my own stereotyping of women with irritating voices on the radio early in the morning, especially women who have the answer to where the human race has been going wrong for some thousands of years.

I don't really care what people wear - if they are comfortable with how they look and with the reaction it produces in others, and if it doesn't upset anyone else or break any laws then that's fine. If a medical examination indicates that an individual is male but he chooses to wear girls' clothes that is fine too, but I would be happier if he bought them in a girls' clothes department rather than having all the rest of us pretend that there is no such thing.

For my liking, this is all too soon after some other worthy on early morning radio was enthusing about the need to encourage young children to reject their default gender if they wanted - there will be a queue of volunteers to help them, counsel them - maybe sign them up? Perhaps individual councils or schools will score points according to how many defenceless children they can trap into making some blood-curdling mistake?

I fear I am not selling myself well here, but I am worried. Coping with individual preferences and exceptional life choices is positive and necessary; making such minority lifestyles into a new mainstream, and/or forcing the rest of us to change to fit in - that's maybe not so positive. If there is a serious market demand for unisex clothing then that's a different thing - let's have shops that cater for it. That's well and good.

Imagine: you have a 12-year-old son and you wish to buy him some new shirts for school. Seems straightforward enough. OK - where will you buy them? If he is forced to buy a gender-free, non-stereotyped "child's" shirt, which way will it button? How will it line up with his school uniform regs? What other issues have not been thought through? How much trouble are we saving up for the future in mental illnesses and young people being unable to adjust to society - not being able to understand what they now are, what they should relate to? Frankly, I do not care how much of a personal triumph the squeaky woman on the radio felt this is - I think it is a mess.

The Mad Padre recently summed this up with his customary breathtaking precision. I shall attempt to give a resume of what he said, though I am by nature more verbose and less precise. The problem with so-called political correctness, he said, is that it is nominally aimed at increasing tolerance, yet in itself it is completely intolerant; it is decreed absolutely that you will show and offer tolerance to such and such a group or personal status, and here are the strict, inarguable terms and conditions, and here is a list of the things we shall do to you if we decide you have been intolerant.

I'm keeping a bucket of water handy.

Hooptedoodle #272 - Not Much Here Either

With various disruptions caused by the continuing work of the house painter (and his frequent non-appearances) and other inconveniences, another fairly humdrum week has passed. My current batch of French ADCs is still not finished - any day now. Promise.

It occurred to me that I should trot out some routine listing of irrelevant stuff - just so you know I am still around - maybe it could be termed a miscellany. I shall limit this brief outpouring of trivia to two items - my editor will be pleased that I have restricted myself to the key house themes of Tragedy and The Social Whirl.

Topic 1 - RIP Steve.  I regret to say that Steve the Other Goldfish has passed away. Steve was never very lucky - he has had a long series of mysterious ailments, including problems with his eyes and some malfunction of his swim-bladder, and has been reputed to be on The Way Out for at least a couple of years. He got off to a bad start when he shared a fish tank with Jeff, who was much more robust and had a very bad attitude, and who spent some weeks roughing Steve up - sometimes biting him, sometimes merely knocking him about. Naturally we had to split them up, so since then we have had the dubious blessing of double maintenance, double overheads, and two separate tanks in different rooms.

Maybe, come to think of it, Steve was not so daft. He had a tank to himself, with all the fittings, and he was in a stress-free environment in which to perfect his one great talent, which was eating. However sickly he might have been, he grew far larger than we might have expected - thus, whatever problem Steve might be blighted with at any given moment, you could rely on the fact that there would be plenty of it.

He'd obviously been very unwell for the last few days, and we reached the point at which a strategic decision was required - the Contesse would place him in his little isolation tank, and we'd keep an eye on him. If he didn't buck up within a day or so, we would euthenise him - this being a politically-acceptable word, apparently, meaning snuff. [Quick aside, I am pleased, in an unfocused and probably irritating way, that "euthenise" and "euphemise" are such similar words - possibly we have the makings of an unusually pretentious and pointless joke here - I'll leave it with you.]

Right then - today's interesting field of research: how do you put your goldfish out of his misery, and still be able to live with yourself afterwards? After some online reading, our favoured suggestion was as follows (don't ever say this blog does not address the problems of real life):

(1) Add some drops of clove-oil to the water - this will put Goldie to sleep.

(2) After some minutes, add some vodka - this will kill him in his sleep. Painless. Humane.

The Contesse went off to buy the necessary supplies - we have neither of these exotic poisons in our storehouse. In passing, clove-oil is quite interesting - it has a long-held folklore role as a remedy for toothache, which as far as I'm concerned is very debatable - bollocks, in fact. Maybe killing goldfish is what it is really intended for, and the dental fallacy is just a cover story for the kids. Vodka? Hmmm. At least we can comfort ourselves that the little fellow will end his days free from toothache, and blitzed out of his tiny skull.

While she was out buying supplies, Steve, obligingly and astonishingly, did the one sensible thing he ever managed in a lifetime - he died peacefully, without assistance. Good for him. I buried him up in the woods behind the house this afternoon - without ceremony. Naturally we wish him luck on his way into the darkness, but we could hardly have laid on any celebration of his life - I'm not sure how much he noticed of it, and it was mostly dismal.

If I detect even the slightest whiff of clove-oil in my bath in the near future, I shall immediately be on my guard.

Topic 2 - Sylvia. On Saturday night I was at a birthday party - quite a big bash, really - mostly arty, cultured people - all very civilised - not my usual circles at all. While there, I bumped into Sylvia, whom I have known for over 30 years, now I come to work it out. A good egg, Sylvia, very loud and always cheerful, and eternally opinionated. Good value, in fact, though you have to cope with the fact that her conversation is mostly along the lines that her family are the wealthiest, happiest, prettiest and most successful people who ever lived. That's all OK - I think it is only right that the Sylvias of this world should be provided, to keep us humble, and to remind us of how we would like to have been, if only.

On Saturday, Sylvia was not well pleased. She is involved in a small circle of ladies who take it in turns to treat each other to cultural outings - one detects a slight edge of competition. Since it had been Sylvia's turn, she had been encouraged to get tickets for something uplifting in our local arts and music festival, which has been on recently. It was suggested that there was a very nice Italian operetta show which would be suitable, and, in a bit of a rush, she obtained very expensive tickets for it.

We may come up with any number of reasons or excuses, but it is obviously an easy mistake to make if you are short of time to check your facts; whatever, having duly turned up at the show in their concert-going finery, Sylvia and her friends now know for certain that The Rezillos are not an operetta at all, but an ageing punk band, and most definitely not to their taste. It would be mean-spirited to find this amusing, of course, but I feel that my efforts to keep a straight face and not choke on my vegetarian paella on Saturday earned me the right to enjoy a brief chortle now. In fact, I may run a bath, add some vodka, climb in and roar with [ignorant, common] laughter.

Hooptedoodle #270 - The Sock Cull

Time for another post about socks, I think. [No, no - terribly sorry, vicar - I said socks.]

Some time ago I published a lament about the state of modern socks. It was heartfelt (if that is an appropriate phrase) - I had increasing problems with shrinkage of the ribbing tops of socks, which tended to compress my lower calves (on occasions my lower legs would develop an ominous, waisted, hour-glass shape which I would prefer not to dwell upon, but you will appreciate this is far from ideal.

Bad Guys - and there's masses of them - they are GOING AWAY

The Contesse tried valiantly to obtain socks for me which were comfortable - with little success. Even when we avoided certain brands which we have grown to distrust, I regularly ended the day with sore swollen ankles and calf muscles. Ah, I hear you say - it is not the socks, it's your circulation - it is the ancient veins, the game pie, the chips, the beer, the Armagnac, the excessive salt, etc etc.

Not so. One cannot hold off the ravages of field rations and tempus fugit forever, of course, but the change is mostly in the socks themselves.  

Almost a year ago, we went on holiday to Mayrhofen, in the Zillertal, Austria. It was a good holiday anyway, but one unexpected bonus was that one day I picked up a pack of cheap socks in the Spar supermarket in the village - just off-the-shelf jobs to help out with the demands of hillwalking - and they were a revelation. If I'd fully appreciated them in time, I'd have bought a load more before we came home.

They are comfortable, they do not strangle my legs - they are terrific. They are, I believe, how I remember socks used to feel. Is it possible that Austrians just expect their socks to be comfortable? Is it possible that Mike Ash***'s crusade to to buy up reputable brands and make everything cheap and nasty has not yet reached the Tyrol? The questions, of course, are rhetorical, but one wonders.

Good Guys - the first of the "diabetic" socks [L] and one of the Austrian
cheapo pairs from SPAR [R]

Since then, a further discovery for me has been a whole new world of special comfortable socks - some of them made with bamboo fibre (which sounds faddy, but is OK), some of them marketed as "diabetic socks", which is new to me but I'm sure well known to people who need them. The Contesse has done admirable research in this field, and I am well pleased with the new arrivals.

Thus far I am still feeling my way - some of these are about £8 a pair, which is a bit steep by my usual standards, but we are discovering cheaper ones - the choice of colours is not all it might be, maybe. There are also hiking socks of the same type. Better and better.

This morning's delivery...

Just as an aside - how would you feel about marketing black socks badged "SS"?

A further shipment of the "gentle" socks arrived this morning, so I have had a quick look in the chest of drawers and have emptied out the old socks - and there are dozens of pairs. I shall reduce the stock to about 4 pairs of the conventional socks, and replace them with the new comfortable ones. Perhaps we'll recycle the rejects - they can go to any needy people who have very thin ankles, or maybe they can just go on the tip.  Either way, they are going.

That's worth a glass of wine with my supper, I think.

Hooptedoodle #269 - Captain Tolley's Creeping Crack Cure and various other topics

A lot of work going on in these parts - fortunately, most of it is being carried out by an excellent Australian chap named Luke, who is almost certainly the best house painter around here. Some of the more tactical, fiddling-about work, though, falls to me.

Luke the Painter

As often happens, we had a small accident which has made things a bit worse than they might have been. As part of this mighty painting project, I have agreed with St Luke that he will also take on a couple of inside jobs, so he has something else to get on with if it rains. Sorry - that should have said when it rains. One of these jobs is the downstairs toilet/shower room, which will probably need to be out of action for a few days while it gets sorted out. During the lead-up to this, of course, we managed to break the mounting for the shower-screen in the upstairs bathroom (i.e. the one which will not be out of action during the painting), so it has become necessary for me, moi, Comte Maximilien S Foy, former General de Division and military hero of the First Empire and subsequent leader of the liberal opposition in France, to apply my many years of experience to installing a new shower screen.

As long as you double-check that everything fits nicely, and check for snags before you hit them, this is not a formidable undertaking, and I am pleased to say that the job has gone well. Shower screens, however, involve the dreaded silicone sealing mastic, which is right up there with Nitromors on my personal list of pet hates.

While I was poking about in the garage, falling over gardening tools, and wondering whether my existing tube of bath sealant would have solidified (it had), and whether the white spirit would be filed away with the weedkillers or the things for washing the car (do you have a garage like this?), I came across this faint blast from the past. It might be just the thing, I reasoned, to prevent water seeping into the fine joint line between the screen and its supporting stand.

Chortle now - thank you

That must be worth a chortle, surely? The Contesse thought it was funny enough to feature on her personal Facebook account, which must be a very positive indicator. I have this stuff in store because once - many years ago - I spent a fair amount of money on getting my old Land Rover 90 repaired and smartened up, and when it came back I was disappointed to find that the windscreen still leaked. This is stupid - I realise this - it is like choosing to live in Scotland and then finding fault with the weather; however, I tried various products and gizmos to eliminate the leak, not realising that a Land Rover 90 without a leaky windscreen is a fake.

Horace the leaky Land Rover 90 - this is what Defenders were called before
they were Defenders - on account of the 90-inch wheelbase. Photo taken circa
Autumn 2004, when his days were numbered.

Captain Tolley's magic brew did not eliminate my problem, but after a quick succession of further mechanical problems I solved all my difficulties with the LR90 by selling it and buying a modern Mitsubishi. Sorry about that - it's painful but true. If you have an old Land Rover and you love it, then you have my respect and my undying sympathy. I never looked back. My banker was grateful too.

Lancelot? - 1000 and still rambling

The flow of finished staff officers is merely a dribble at present - Chateau Foy is being painted on a grand scale, so there are more rollers in evidence than No.1 brushes. This is all good - we now realise that our lovely white house had acquired a definite shade of pale green.

However, here's one new arrival. This is the first of the figures for the new-format "Marshal Marmont" command stand - the castings are from Hagen - the rider is from a useful pack of assorted ADCs and the horse, I believe, is a Turkish Crimean horse, but it is fine. It is a well known fact [bluff] that French ADCs were much given to Turkish military fashion - or was it Egyptian? Whatever - it's fine.

This is one of Marmont's aides - he might be 2nd Lt Lancelot-Meunier, of the 15e Chasseurs (sadly I do not know his first name), who was on Marmont's personal staff at Los Arapiles - he adds a bit more colour and variety to the army. It is not inappropriate to have a Lancelot in my Peninsular War collection - the brigade commander for King Joseph's Guard is a General Merlin, after all, and the British Big Boss is a bloke named Arthur, so it all fits together nicely.

Lancelot's companions will be along shortly - they are undercoated and ready for their treatment.

I am surprised to learn that this is my 1000th post on this blog. For anyone who reads this stuff on any kind of regular basis, I can only offer my sincere thanks and my sympathy - I really didn't expect to have this much to say. As a monument to self-indulgence and rambling verbosity it is not without significance, I guess. As my late cousin used to say, "I hadn't realised you could pile it so high". Back in the beginning, the blog was described as "discursive" - a term which was maybe not without a faint pejorative resonance.

Spot on!

This and That, and Some of the Other

Odds and ends, really.

Topic 1: The Figure Stripping Trials

Getting a breather from the Clean Spirit

Following previous laments about this, and plentiful advice, I have now had the set of Qualiticast French Napoleonic staff figures steeping in a sealed jar of Bartoline Clean Spirit for two weeks, so I decided it was time to see how they are getting on. I fished one of them out, scrubbed down with water and a (rather soft) toothbrush, and did a little exploratory picking with a penknife point. Not bad at all. What I have done now is I put him back in the Clean Spirit with his pals, and we'll see how they are doing in another two weeks. As mentioned by Doug, the big advantages of this stuff are:

(1) - it is unbelievably cheap - a bottle about the size of a wine bottle is about £2-something out of Homebase.

(2) - it is non-toxic - hardly smells of anything - you can soak figures in it forever without damaging the metal - it would do plastic too, it's safe to handle, and you can flush it down the kitchen drain without wrecking your pipes or the environment.

(3) - it seems to work - pretty well, if you like slow and steady rather than quick and life-threatening. I'm interested to see how the residual fragments of paint get on over another two weeks, and - of course - see how easily the paint comes off figures which have been in the bath for a month. Good so far.

I also ordered a bottle of Simple Green, which was much more expensive, and has just arrived - it took a fortnight to get here (posted from Germany, I see, though I ordered it from a UK firm).

If I can find a suitable figure or two, I'll start another trial jar of Simple Green.

Good this - almost scientific, in a pathetic sort of way. I'll report back. They won't be sneering when I get my Nobel Prize...


Topic 2: A Delayed Make-Over

Pontes Bellonae

After I saw some recent photos of my old Bellona bridges, I suddenly realised that they are very crudely presented - I slapped some paint on them about 45 years ago, and that's how they've stayed. They get a fair amount of use, but every time I see them I think, "Oh, there's the old Bellona bridges", and completely fail to register that they are a bit scruffy. This is very odd - if I'd paid a lot of money for some piece of imported resin exotica I would be carefully drybrushing the life out of it before I let anyone see it.

I decided it would be a simple matter to smarten up the Bellona chaps a bit - so I did it last night. Dark brown undercoat, drybrush with two shades of stone. Not a brilliant job, but surely an improvement. Why did it take so long? No idea - low prestige project? - other things to do? - kept forgetting? - some other reason?

Doesn't matter. Done.


Topic 3: This One under Wraps for a While

Drop me a line

What's this then, Foy?

Well, it's fishing line - pretty strong fishing line. It is my latest outside-the-envelope idea for solving what has become something of a bugbear problem in the figure preparing and painting department. There will be some experiments, and if I have any success I'll come out of the cupboard and bore everyone silly. If it doesn't work, I'll just never mention it again.

How can we lose?

Hooptedoodle #267 - Throw It Away

Must be about time for another whinge, I think. It is a constant source of sorrow to me that our lives seem to be dominated by the need to dump items - especially electronic items - since they are no longer supported, and/or cannot be repaired economically - and buy nice new ones. This process is enforced by the dictates of fashion; the message comes across when the young man on the other end of the support line actually snorts when he learns that my telephone (or camera, or sat-nav, or radio, or washing machine, or whatever) is almost six years old. The implication is that only a dreadful dinosaur would have a product of such age - how can such a person show his face in decent, tech-savvy consumer society? Sometimes the trained engineer [HA!] on the other end of the phone has never even heard of that model number - that's how old and uncool it is.

Well, I've thought some more about this - my thoughts are heavily influenced by two recent examples which I shall share with you in a moment, if you are not quick enough to spot what's coming and move off elsewhere. I have been doing some thinking, and my thoughts are summed up by one word.

Bollocks.

Recent Example 1: Tom-Tom. My wife has a new car - well, it was new some six months ago, and it has a built-in sat-nav system. Very nice. This renders her old Tom-Tom unit, which I bought for her about 6 years ago, redundant. I spotted an opportunity for shameless personal gain here, so I offered to take the old Tom-Tom off her hands - I could happily use it in my van, which would avoid my having to switch my own Garmin sat-nav between my car and my van (which may not seem like much of a hardship, but hey).

I quite like the Tom-Tom - it's friendlier than my Garmin - only problem with it is that the maps have never been updated since the unit was bought. This is not entirely due to hopeless inertia on our part - until recently, our domestic broadband service was so poor that a download big enough to include a complete motoring map of Northern Europe would have taken days and days. In a state of some excitement, I now did some poking about online, and found that a map upgrade would cost me about £35 - fair enough - ordered it and paid by PayPal, but the download wouldn't work - nothing happened. A lot of further searching revealed an appropriate support number (Tom-Tom's website, by the way, is a nightmare - lots of closed loops where links point to the page you are already on, or the one you just came from etc). Nice young man (NYM) explained to my wife that the sat-nav unit in question is now so old that they have withdrawn support for it - in any case, the latest maps are too large to fit the on-board storage. He very kindly arranged a refund of the PayPal payment (which took a week to come through), and offered us a discount on one of their new models. Some thoughts at this point:

(1) Everything must come to an end - it is not unreasonable that Tom-Tom should withdraw support for an old model, though 6 years might be considered rather indecently quick - well, in my world anyway, but...

(2) At any point between 6 years ago (when it was bought) and some time later (when support was withdrawn) there must have been updated maps on sale which would fit the storage - it is quite likely that if I had attempted this transaction last year (say) then it would have worked nicely. This point extends into...

(3) Withdrawn or not, supported or not, there must be a number of past updates still on file which would be an improvement on the map which we have at present. Any one of these would have been useful - we could negotiate a fair price? Well - no....

(4) I realise it doesn't work like that. If they sold me a replacement map which was more modern than the one I have, but not fully up-to-date, then I might trustingly drive into a newly-constructed reservoir and be extinguished. The important point is that if this was simply a consequence of my being too mean or idle to buy an up-to-date map then that would be entirely my problem, but if they had sold me an outdated map which did not show the reservoir then things could get sticky. Hmmm.

(5) OK - accept that. What really pisses me off about this is that the decision to withdraw support for an old product is pretty much arbitrary - the owner has no reasonable idea when this might happen - and it is heavily weighted commercially in favour of forcing existing customers to buy a new replacement. All good economic sense, of course, but - even with a discount - this line of reasoning would discourage me from doing further business with such people.

(6) The way ahead - Ze Plan:  I shall happily continue to use my pre-owned Tom-Tom with its outdated maps, I shall keep my eyes peeled for unexpected reservoirs, and I shall chuckle to myself at the prospect of having diddled Tom-Tom out of - ooh - several pounds. One day you may read about the tragic accident which claimed my life.   

Recent Example 2: Pure. I am a big fan of DAB digital radio. Only concerns I have are that the hardware - certainly from the market-leading brands - is too expensive, and (I am learning) the sets are not wonderfully reliable. I had a small Pure unit which died miserably, about 2 months past the end of the guarantee period, and I rather disappointed myself by buying another Pure radio to replace it. Before she moved out of her own house into a care home, my mother had a surprising number of Pure radios - she liked to have one in each of several rooms (kitchen, sitting room, bedroom - in fact she had two in her bedroom - one on the bedside cabinet, one on the dressing table). This may seem excessive, but her sight is poor, and she cannot see to plug a radio into the mains, nor to retune it when it has moved. We bought 3 of the things for my mum as a batch after my sister died in 2013, so we have a pretty good fix on how old they are.

Mum now has just one of these radios in the care home with her, and she listens to it for many hours a day. Right - that's all very good.

I sort of acquired the rest of them, and they haven't been a huge success. One of them developed a fault with the display, so I gave it away to someone who needed an extra radio. One of the remaining two has also recently had a failure of the display - I checked the support pages on the Pure site, followed the instructions for a full power-down and reset, and the display still didn't work. I emailed them. Within a day, I got a reply from a NYM named Sam. Guess what? - the unit is so old that it is not worth getting it repaired, and they have no suitable spare parts - the best they can offer is a discount off a reconditioned product.

Does any of this sound familiar? Just a minute - they have reconditioned products? Does this mean somebody has fixed one? This seems unlikely - I doubt if they have any actual engineers - the philosophy seems to be one of unloading shiploads of new units from China - it is cheaper and easier to send out a new one than it is to attempt to test or repair an existing one - even assuming they have the skills in this country (which we may debate).

So, in addition to not buying a new Tom-Tom unit, I shall not be buying another Pure radio either - with or without discount. They can focus their marketing on customers who are more in tune [ho - see what I did there?] with their business model. I shall take my custom elsewhere.

Don't misunderstand this - young Sam is obviously a good chap - he sympathised with my situation, and said that if I change my mind (and somehow he seems to believe I will) he can supply a list of current reconditioned deals for out-of-warranty customers [dinosaurs] like me.

All a bit depressing - I'll see you down at the landfill.

I'll finish with my most treasured tale of techno-waste. Some years ago I had a friend who had retired in ill-health from his job, and had set himself up as a self-employed photographer. In his new role he did a vast amount of printing of digital photos - he had a trade card which allowed him to purchase new Canon printers so cheaply that he could now buy a brand new printer (with cartridges) for far less than the cost of a set of replacement cartridges, so it made obviously good sense for him to simply throw away his printer when the ink ran out, and buy a new one. Is it just me, or is there something wrong with this picture?

To cheer me up, here's a smashing song, written and sung by Abbey Lincoln - Abbey is dead now - she recorded this when she was in her late 70s - her voice had gone to hell, as you will hear, but this is a piece of magic. See if it cheers you up too.

More Transpontine Travels

I can only assume that Count Goya was granted bail - whatever, after a few weeks delay, the Battle of Raab is back on, for tomorrow, so I've been loading the invasion barge for another trip over the water to Tayside. Early start tomorrow - another grand day out. You'll hear more of this.

Foy's Roadshow ready to roll - you will observe the IKEA playmat on the floor,
which is a prized accessory, and much envied by the lads in the local garage

The French army is in the big boxes, with vast quantities of bubblewrap. Bungee
cords are necessary, of course - you can see that my 5 foot wide table sections
just fit, which is something to think about if I harbour ideas of upgrading to a
six-foot-two wide replacement. The van is a French Renault, appropriately

Topic 2 - the Doves of War, a possible suicide pact, and other oddities

Apart from our first-time-ever subjection to the delights of having nesting swallows on the premises, we have observed some odd things going on in the garden. First - and in passing - might I mention that our Collared Doves, those icons of peace and gentleness, have suddenly become violently aggressive. In particular, they seem to have taken a strong dislike to the neighbourhood Wood Pigeons, who are bigger, but slower and (apparently) less intelligent. The pigeons here live in constant fear now - they have to keep an eye open for squadrons of warlike doves, who can swoop in at any time and give them a mighty beating up.

Another strange recent development appears to be a large upturn in the incidence of flying accidents among the birdlife. After some thousands of years of successfully flying around obstacles, our local feathered friends seem to have forgotten something or other. We had a sad moment some weeks ago when, on a rather blustery afternoon, one of our resident baby sparrows collided with the sitting room window, and died very quickly, despite the attempts of my wife to look after it. This was particularly ironic, since the poor little chap had managed to survive its parents choice of a nesting site (inside the junction box for the high-voltage overhead cables), which is impressive enough. I guess Nature claims a few - one might point to lack of flying experience as a contributory cause - presumably this is why fledglings pay through the nose for insurance?

We have had a few more collisions with buildings since, none of them fatal, but yesterday we had a real disaster - a fully-grown hen pheasant managed to fly full-tilt into our French window; the window was undamaged, but the pheasant, alas, is no more.

Sorry about this - the victim was neither young nor inexperienced - just careless -
it must have been about 20 feet off course if it intended to miss the house. The
paving stones are 55cm across, so you can see this is a large, heavy object to have
impact your window. If you found this picture upsetting, please ring
800-DEAD-PHEAS for counselling support

It was a hell of a bang - I was busy packing French soldiers into magnetised box files (as one does), when I heard the most alarming noise - I really thought that a gutter had fallen from the roof or something - the whole house shook. It became obvious what had happened - very sad. What's going on here? - has our house become less visible? - are the birds not paying attention? - is it just a blip? - is it global warming? - you don't suppose it's our new radio-transmitted broadband service, surely?

I'm keeping an eye on things. I don't suppose there's a connection, but a magic fairy ring has also appeared on the back lawn - you can clearly see where the little people crept in from the wood, behind the wall, and danced around. You do believe in fairies, I hope?

This and That

I guess this post is mostly about OCD, and maybe ineptitude - both topics on which I might claim a small amount of expertise.

Topic 1: The Catalogue

Recently, in relaxed conversation, Stryker, having had the mixed pleasure of inspecting my Soldier Cupboard (in semi-darkness, on his knees - it's an architecture thing), asked, as one might, how many units there were in my armies. An innocent enough question, quite appropriate in the context.

The Cupboard - current state; these days it contains only the French and
Anglo-Portuguese cavalry and infantry...

I answered, correctly, that I really didn't know, which surprised him a little, and then the conversation moved on. Afterwards, I found I was actually slightly concerned that I didn't know. Firstly, there is a faint whiff of schoolboy bravado in the implication that I have so many units that I don't know how many there are - I wouldn't like to give that impression - that's a bit like claiming not to know how many yachts one owns. More worryingly, I felt it was more than a little odd that I didn't know - I should know, really, shouldn't I? If I were in control of this silly obsessive hobby thing then I would know.

Now I do maintain a very detailed catalogue of my armies - which unit is which, what all the figure castings are (including known conversions), where they came from, who painted them - all that. I get a lot of value out of that, but one surprising omission is the date when they arrived - I wish I had thought of recording that, but I could probably reconstruct most of that information if I were pressed - at least approximately. Have you ever been approximately pressed, by the way? - no matter.

...everything else is in boxes - the pink boxes are ECW, the remainder are
the rest of the Peninsular War stuff.

The Catalogue is in a dirty great Word table, with hyperlinks to photographs of all the units. Being a table, though, it doesn't lend itself well to proper statistical analysis. So after I had thought about it for a little while I set about linking a spreadsheet to my Catalogue tables, and - of course - the spreadsheet very readily coughed up the numbers. As is always the case with worthy, obsessive jobs like this, after I had studied the numbers and thought about them, I was at a loss what to do with the information.

One obvious thing to do was to send it to Stryker - that'll teach him - but it also occurred to me that I could post it on the blog too; not so much because I think you'll be interested, or even remotely impressed, but because the blog in some ways is a sort of confessional - forgive me, Father, for I have far too many soldiers - in fact I have now quantified how many I have. If you can give me some pointers towards an official algorithm, Father, I could add a column to my spreadsheet giving the appropriate number of Hail Marys.

Situation as at 11:00, 14th June 2017...

Anyway, I'm pleased I have the thing under better control - well, not under control, maybe, but at least more accurately measured. I feel better for it. Cleaner.

Now I'd better have a look at doing one for the ECW, and all the Napoleonic transport items...

Topic 2: The Plastic Forest

This is really just a fleeting mention - I seem to have accumulated what must be one of the world's largest collections of Merit fir trees - the little plastic jobs for HO railways, out of production since about 1970. I didn't set out to achieve this, but people kept selling them on eBay (I guess railway modellers must be dying off too?). In its way it is a fine thing, and I am increasingly concerned about storing and looking after these little trees, because they are very old and fragile, and the plastic is rotting - they are very like me, in fact. I have a new solution to the storage, which I shall share with you when it is ready. You will be impressed - you may not wish to copy it, but you will be relieved to learn that someone else is as weird as this.

Anyway - more soon. Oh - and, yes, I do know how many fir trees I have, but I'm not saying.

Topic 3: Plonk

I do enjoy a glass of wine now and then. My wife drinks almost no alcohol these days, so opening a bottle of wine means either:

(a) I drink the whole bottle, which is not a great idea, or

(b) I try to recork it and make the bottle last a few days, which - let's be honest here - doesn't work very well - the stuff really doesn't keep, despite all the patent air-pumps and sealing stoppers we have accumulated - or

(c) I can drink some of the bottle, and then pour the remainder down the sink, which is maybe the worst idea of the lot.

Recently, someone jokingly suggested that I should buy wine that I didn't like, so that I wouldn't feel bad about wasting it. As is often the case, there is a germ of commonsense in that daft thought.

What I have been doing for a year or two now is buying a box of wine. You can have a single glass, and it will still be drinkable for a week or two. OK - that's a working solution (the issue of sticking to a single glass is important, but a separate problem). However, on the general subject of wine...

There are some excellent wines available now - I don't know how Brexit might affect that, but at the moment our local supermarket has some splendid wine. I find that I am having to be a bit choosey - this comes down to personal taste, of course, and my taste is no better than anyone else's, but it's me I'm making the choices for. A large proportion of the good wine on sale comes from the sunny countries of the world - Australia, Chile, California, South Africa and so on; it's good stuff, much of it, and its ancestry is from the classic vintners of Old Europe, but it is often too strong for me now. Too much sunshine? I can buy an excellent 3 litre pack of Australian Shiraz for about £15 - super stuff - but too serious, too fiery, too intense - I can't casually sip a glass of this (13.5% alcohol by volume) while reading or watching a film - too much Marmite in the taste, too many headaches.

I find I'm moving down-market a bit. Nothing new - I always used to like French Table Red - Chateau Plonko - vin ordinaire - you can't buy it now, as far as I can tell. No demand, I guess. I prefer simple red wines - Tesco do a good Sicilian red which is not too beefy, I like Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, Corbières - things which are soft and friendly.

Quick digression. I was listening to the radio a week or two ago, and there was a chap on from the British wine-growers' association. I might have overlooked that there was such a thing as a British wine industry, but it seems they have been having a tricky year. The mild, wet winter produced brisk budding activity early on, and then the frosts of April did a lot of damage. I made a mental note that there was a British wine industry capable of being damaged, and promptly forgot about it.

Last week, in Tesco, I spotted a box of British wine! Never seen one of those before. It was very cheap, 8% strength and described as "refreshingly fruity". It is a poor life that does not extend to a little research, so I bought a box - I expected little and - as you expected - that's what I got.

The box suggests they have the neck to sell this stuff in bottles, too.

The stuff is awful. It tastes like a cross between Ribena and boot polish, to be honest. I could, I suppose, grin and bear it in a spirit of Good Old Patriotism, but the final straw is it isn't actually British. The box says that it is made from imported grape juice. Good grief. My dad used to produce home-made wine like that years ago, and it was all crap and it all tasted mostly of sulphites. A long and honourable tradition, then, of putting a brave face on things. Personally, I feel I humoured my dad for quite long enough, I want no more of this. I mention this only as a gentle warning - if Brexit requires you to change your drinking habits, don't be tempted to change in this direction, lest you, too, get to rinse out your kitchen drains with it. 

The small print.