Trip to Stryker's, and Various Other Topics

 On Thursday I had an invitation to a wargame at Baron Stryker's country seat, rather north of here, so I packed up my lucky tree, tried to convince Siri the Navigator that Stryker does not, in fact, live at the pharmacy in my local High Street, and set off early to avoid the entitled children trying to kill each other on the Edinburgh Bypass.

It is maybe difficult to convey what an illustrious event this was for me. Since I have not been anywhere for 16 months which did not involve vaccinations or visiting my mother in her care home, it was a genuine treat. Ian had set up one of his excellent Old School games - proper wargaming! - an Allied force of about 1815 [I was the Duke of Wellington, though I am not a gentleman, and the Archduke, who had travelled further than I, was Blücher] was fighting against Ian's [Napoleon's] impressive looking French.

Ian, whose photos will inevitably do the event more justice than mine, will probably produce the official blog account in due course, so I shall merely set out here the best of my pictures, to give an idea of the action, with my usual propaganda-laden, biased captions. It was a most enjoyable day, with beautiful toys, an entertaining and absorbing game, great food and amusing company; I really had a marvellous time. My thanks to Stryker and the Baroness for their faultless hospitality, and to the Archduke for being an all-round good chap and a splendid ally.

Oh yes - the reason I still need navigation assistance to get to Stryker's, after a number of such trips, is because I can never, for the life of me, remember which exit from the M90 to take. It's always familiar when I get there, but you know how it is.

 

Turn 1 - Allies on the left (British this end, Prussians at the far end) and French opposite. I had all sorts of ideas about shifting some cavalry to my right flank, to cover the French lancers on that side, but the French immediately started bringing up their heavy cavalry reserve in the centre, so the Allies were prompted to react to this.

 

Thus the action began with a cavalry battle in the middle. I have no idea what odds Paddy Power had been offering against this possibility, but here we were again. The morning session was underway in frantic style, and Napoleon had brought along the Dice from Hell - here is an example of what the Allies were up against in this first session.

 

On the Allied left, some Prussian uhlans chased away a very attractive (though short-lived) regiment of Chasseurs à Cheval, but were obliged to follow-up, and suffered from musketry for their efforts. It took them a while to recover their composure.

 

The main cavalry action was not going well at all for the Allies - the Scots Greys have already routed (and took a long time to rally - they completely ignored all the fine words of Wellington, and only rallied when Stapleton Cotton joined them after lunch), some Prussian dragoons are falling back, while the Prussian cuirassiers and the battered Inniskillings are struggling against French cuirassiers and carabiniers respectively. Below you can see that the British right flank was now fixed, everyone in square, obsessed by the threat from a single unit of lancers.

At this point, we took a break for a splendid lunch, and the Allies were pretty much convinced that they would be beaten very quickly during the second session. However, something in the wind had changed. Given the choice, if there is a hill, the British infantry always prefer to march over the top. After lunch, the Cambridgeshires received a charge from the dreaded lancers in line, and drove them off with very heavy loss. That was the first encouraging sign for our side!

Allied cavalry still on the field, though the Prussian cuirassiers are about to disappear. The Blues have now taken on the fight against the French cuirassiers, and the Inniskillings are somehow gaining the upper hand against the carabiniers. This was the start of a very good spell for the Allies. [I have to observe that Blogger is a real pain in the neck this morning - uploading photos has been punctuated with a lot of failures and re-tries, and my usual treatment of caption text doesn't seem to be working now...]. Below you see the massed Prussian infantry working themselves up to fever pitch.

Napoleon sent forward his shiny new Grenadiers à Cheval, to support his stalling cavalry thrust, and they were promptly defeated by the Blues - the Curse of the Fresh Varnish strikes again. With the disappearance of the French lancers, Wellington's squares got themselves into column and started advancing on the Allied right.

On the Allied left, the Prussian uhlans keep an eye on a Swiss square (as one does), and the Prussian infantry are wearing down the Poles at the windmill. Below, you see the Cambridgeshires, with Rifles support, involved in a firefight with French infantry at the farmhouse. The last surviving gunner with the Guard Horse Artillery waves his linstock in defiance. I think it's a linstock.

On the central ridge, it's all happening - the Allied cavalry is now going very well indeed, putting the French line infantry to flight. Napoleon sends up the two battalions of his Guard to put things right...

...and ponders which of his axioms, appropriately delivered, might encourage the infantry, who can be seen heading back his way in disorder. Below are two general views of the table, coming into Turn 8 (the end of the day). The mighty Silesian Landwehr have chased away the Poles, while in the foreground the Hertfordshires (?) have decided that trying to form line to meet the oncoming French infantry is too risky, so they plough into them, still in column. I wanted to see what happened when two columns met head-on, so was delighted when the British boys managed to disorder the opposition on this occasion.

At the end of the game, the French were once again scoring a few successes, but the Allies had won on Victory Points by a decent margin. Napoleon could not get his Guard infantry onto the ridge in time to stop the rot, and the Allies were surprised and delighted to have won, considering the disastrous morning session. Stryker admitted afterwards that at lunch he had considered giving us some extra troops, to keep the game going in the afternoon. I've seen games turn around like this before, but I don't recall one turning in my favour for a very long time!

Here you go - you saw it here - British and French columns meeting head-on. Lovely toys, too.

 

Separate Topic #1 - WSS Rules

I'm very pleased to say that my enforced break from painting has allowed me to finish the playtesting I had planned, and I now have a working "First Edition" of my Prinz Eugen rules. I'm confident they will change some more, but at least I'll be editing something which exists rather than a cloud of scribbled notes! My thanks to Chris G, Stryker, Goya and the others who have helped me get this project shaped up. Another tick in the box, and a great deal of waste paper off to be recycled!

Separate Topic #2 - Troll-Stalking for Beginners

I mention this lightly, with no particular agenda. It would be inappropriate for someone with a blog as ill-disciplined and rambling as this one to have too thin a skin. I don't set out to upset anyone, but it is bound to happen. I don't worry about it - if someone disapproves of what I write, I assume they will move on and not waste their time on it. If they express their distaste then fair enough - words are cheap - in fact, some people's words are without any value at all.

Recently, an old friend of mine drew my attention to the fact that I was taking a bit of a panning on the pages of a hobby chat-forum, not from the point of disagreeing with what I had written, but from a stylistic point of view - in particular, phrases such as "incomprehensible" and "a mess" were in evidence when I had a look.

Well, I'm not really going to get too upset about this. I quite enjoyed most of the invective aimed in my general direction. I am aware that such fora have traditions of being unpleasant for its own sake, but one hero in particular - his ID may or may not be Frobisher, as it happens - went a bit far. His contribution, which was what had triggered the tip-off in the first place, was much too personal and unkind for my taste.

Why do people do this? I don't know, but I guess that one day it will kill off our access to social media as we know it, Jim, so I don't see it as trivial. To quote the uncredited soldier from the Waterloo movie, how can we kill one another? We've never even seen each other (etc). Where is the appeal in being hateful to a complete stranger, with no real motive? Is it just to amuse our friends, or do we actually feel better afterwards?

I have no idea. I thought for a while about why I should be a little upset about something so unimportant, and I decided that it is the "we've never even seen each other" bit. The anonymity. There's a definite threat in receiving hostility from a stranger who could be - well, anyone, really. So I contacted my old friend who had tipped me off in the first place. He, you see, is a member of the forum in question, and thus he has access to a few more details about the Cruel Frobisher. Armed with some simple facts, easily available to any member of the forum, I spent about 20 minutes, online, and poking about mainstream social media, without doing anything illegal, and I now know all about Frobisher. I know his name, I know where he lives, I know what he works at; I have, if I am interested, access to pictures of his friends and family. He is not very threatening at all, in fact he is rather a sad little creep. I have removed him from my consciousness.

Given this amount of extra information, I have reduced forum-member Frobisher from the status of Mysterious Warrior to something rather more entry-level. I have no idea what I could actually use my new knowledge for - almost certainly nothing at all - but it is astonishing how the implied threat disappears when people appear on public platforms as themselves, with their own identities. Maybe a change has to come, in which case MSFoy will have to come clean and admit that he is, after all, the Prince of Wales. Topic closed - if anyone on a forum somewhere takes exception to my views then I'm sure they're right. I could not care less. 

Hooptedoodle #400 - Roller Towels as We Knew Them

 Recently I was looking at some old photos of domestic kitchens - circa WW1, I guess, and I saw a picture of one of these...

In case you don't recognise it, this is a traditional roller towel - linen on a wooden roller - such as my grannie had on her kitchen wall, and they were found in various other places (all my friends' grannies' kitchens, for a start) - they were everywhere, once, but I had forgotten about them completely.

Two yards of linen, stitched to make a loop. My grannie's would certainly have been clean (boiled) every day. We had them in the washrooms at my primary school - I was at primary school in the 1950s, though the school itself was pretty much Victorian. That was less satisfactory, the soiled towel would go round and round, getting wetter and filthier as the day went on. I guess they must have been in factories and pubs and everywhere.

By the time I was working, and in the habit of going into pubs, they had been replaced by linen rolls in metal dispensers which were usually serviced by a contract company - and they seldom seemed to work very satisfactorily - they would jam, or the towel would end up in a sodden heap on the floor. Eventually, of course, all this was replaced by paper towels, to ensure someone could make money from the conversion of forests into non-recyclable paper waste, and later still by hot air blasters. I guess this has all been progress - driven by the search for improved hygiene.

 Anyway - back to the point. I can see some arguments in favour of the old linen roller:

* It would always be in the same place - no-one could walk off with it

* If it was used sensibly, each user drying their face/hands and moving it down a little, it might have dried off by the time it went right round

* No-one could use it to clean his football boots (or whatever)

* It kept it off the floor

* It was Official Issue - it would be maintained and refreshed by the Keeper of the House (Grannie)

My grannie's used to be on the wall next to the big sink in her back kitchen (scullery?) - when he came in from work, my grandad used to wash his face and hands with Stergene (bottled laundry detergent), I believe, which is scary, and on one famous occasion he accidentally washed his face with liquid ammonia, from which he seems to have recovered all right, and recovered long before his wife forgave him for his language. 

Here's an old vote in support of roller towels, with useful life-style tips for the enthusiast:

Kitchen Work Made Easier.

 

It seems strange to speak of the roller towel as a convenience, when it should be considered a positive necessity in every well-ordered household, yet there are many more kitchens without them than with them in some parts of the country— the cook substituting her work apron, or, worse, a dish towel, to wipe her hands upon. A roller and fixtures can be bought ready to screw into the wall. Six towels is a bountiful supply for one roller. Buy a good quality of linen crash, making each towel two-and-a-half yards in length; sew in a seam and fell neatly. Roller towels that have been in use a few months make the best tea towels, as they are soft and pliable, a quality by no means to be despised. Cut in two, hem the edges and again supply the towel drawer with new roller towels. In this way the drawer can be always supplied with strong towels for kitchen toilet purposes, as well as soft ones for the dishes. — The Weekly Wisconsin (May 13, 1889).

Conversely, it was also identified as a menace to health, as here: 

 

From a public information advertisement in the US in 1915

 While shaving this morning, I wondered if a variant could have been produced - a Moebius Towel? - with a single twist in the towel before stitching - this could gradually have presented us with both sides of the linen before we got back to the soiled bit. Nah - it wouldn't work, but I do find shaving very boring.

 

Hooptedoodle #399 - Time Out for a Jigsaw Puzzle

 A lot of work is going on here at present, trying to restore some order to Chateau Foy after the sale of my mother-in-law's house, which has involved an astonishing amount of stuff passing through here on its way to the saleroom, or the charity shop, or the tip. One useful side effect of this is that we keep finding things that we had lost or forgotten about. Last week we found this item behind the sofa in the Garden Room (aka The Ironing Room or The Music Practice Room):

It is a Jumeo PortaPuzzle - a very handy item, which will keep your unfinished jigsaw puzzle flat and safe - you can even zip it shut and take your puzzle around to someone else's house - whatever. You may well own such a thing. This is quite a big one - it's about 32.3 inches wide - big enough for a 1000-piecer, which is why behind the sofa is about the only place we could have stored it.

OK - this is not an advert for PortaPuzzles, nor even for the benefits of tidying up, but the discovery of this lost treasure did encourage me to dig out one of our jigsaws and have a go. My puzzle of choice was a 400-piece job we have had for a couple of years; it's a custom puzzle depicting a map of our home county. It's not the entire county, of course - the big towns and the old coalmining areas are mysteriously excluded, so it's a sort of cute, tourists' view map of our county. This makes an interesting little challenge; the puzzle comes without an illustration. It would be possible, of course, to get hold of an actual map, and use that as a master, but that would definitely be cheating; the objective here is to complete the puzzle from one's own knowledge of the area. I spent a fascinating couple of days trying to locate all the farms and tiny hamlets, and there was an insane afternoon when I placed all the sea pieces by measuring the gridlines and checking for a match.

Anyway - not much more to say about it really, but I'm reminded that jigsaws are good fun, I am pleased with my knowledge of the area, and I am encouraged to try another puzzle next week. I have an unopened 500-piece picture of Port Isaac, which will do nicely. The map puzzles are made by Butler & Hill, if you are interested. 

It did occur to me that carrying one of these map puzzles around in your car in case you get lost would not be a great plan, unless you had plenty of time. 

I was discussing with the Contesse the most terrifying jigsaw we had heard of - the winner was a large puzzle showing only a coloured picture of baked beans - a bath full of beans, in fact, cropped so that only the beans were visible. That's pretty bad, but we understand that some maniac also produced such a puzzle, but printed on both sides with different, though similar, photos of baked beans. That's certainly a bit extreme.

Hooptedoodle #398 - Brunanburh - This May Be a New Interest for Me...

 Anyone who has had the courage to dip into this blog over the years may be aware of a pattern which I have commented on in the past. I'm not sure quite how it comes about, though I have a theory or two, but I have observed that it definitely does come about.

Typically, I suddenly realise that I have bumped into the same potentially interesting topic several times, from different directions, in quick succession - and I am intrigued, not only by the subject matter, but also by the way the bumps have occurred. If this makes no sense at all to you, then I understand completely, by the way.

The theory? [Let's get this out of the way...]

I reckon that we are constantly impacted by all sorts of things, and there are plentiful coincidences and apparently unlikely areas of overlap, but we don't necessarily notice unless we have some underlying interest or reason to recognise them when the arise. [As a stupid, though useful, simplification, a friend of mine pointed out, correctly, that if you walk through a crowded city centre on a Saturday, it is very probable that you will pass some total strangers multiple times each, but you don't notice because you don't know them and have no reason to recognise them (unless one of them is wearing a pink jacket, or is a Martian, of course). However, if you pass your best drinking buddy, Dave, twice in quick succession you will notice, and probably exchange grins, and make a mental note of what a small world it is (or something equally profound)].

I'm not sure why I bothered to set that theory out - never mind - bear with me.

I've been aware of Brunanburh for some years - it was a dirty great battle, back in 937AD, whose exact location has been a matter of debate for a long time. Recently I've found I keep bumping into Brunanburh - gosh, there it is again - so I recognise that it may have become significant to me - my new drinking buddy. 

Let us discuss the bumps, not necessarily in strict chronological order. These will overlap a bit, which is the whole point of this story, I think - if you are due to have coffee, this might be the time to get one - have a couple of biscuits, too.

Bump 1

My wife has recently been clearing her late mother's house for sale, and we are left with some miscellaneous items. One of these is a sealed box set of DVDs of the BBC's "History of Scotland" from 2008, which I have now borrowed and started to watch. My wife and I are fans of these non-fiction BBC series - I still re-watch the multiple editions of "Coast", which are a constant source of delight to people trapped by lockdown. 

We didn't have the DVDs of A History of Scotland - we watched some of them when the series was transmitted (12 years ago), and we missed a few. They were notable for the director's fixation with certain motifs, which got in the way of our viewing a little; every time Neil Oliver was required to deliver a narrative, looking over his shoulder at camera while walking briskly across a moor somewhere, and every time we got a close-up of some historical character's eyeball, or of blood spattering on a stone floor, or of speeded-up clouds to denote the passage of time, my wife and I would break out into spontaneous ironic cheering, and this was something of a distraction.

I must say that, as a non-native resident of Scotland, an incomer, I have always struggled with Scottish history. It is messy, it is very confusing, it is frequently contentious and it is dominated by legends and tales of heroes which are often wildly inaccurate and add to the difficulty. If I can live with the director's trademark tricks, I could usefully learn something here, so I have come back to the DVDs with some enthusiasm, and greater resolve.

Anyway, second instalment of the series, guess what? That's right - King Constantine II of Scotland and his ally, Olaf Guthfrithson, king of the Vikings - have a massive battle against Athelstane at Brunanburh. OK - excellent. They lose, of course.

Bump 2

My old school chum, Bain, who now lives in North London, has recently become heavily involved with the University of the Third Age (U3A), and has a number of history projects on the boil. Well, simmering. He is preparing some lectures and papers on the Battle of Brunanburh - do I know anything about it? Well, not very much, as it happens, but Bain and I have now exchanged a series of emails on the topic, and this has fired me up a little.

Bump 3

In 2005, an excavation was carried out on the farm where I live, an archeological dig, in fact, and they unearthed a religious settlement and its graveyard (which was founded in the 8th Century by St Baldred, and buried its monks there for a couple of centuries). They also found the grave (and personal remains) of a non-Christian outsider, who is almost certainly the aforementioned Olaf Guthfrithson, who is known to have been killed during a raid on the East Lothian coast in 941AD. Well well - Brunanburh is obviously inescapable - we are almost related by this stage.

Bump 4

When I was a very young chap, I applied to university and was awarded a place at Edinburgh without having to sit my final exams again, so I promptly left school, and got a job until I started at college in the Autumn (this is a particularly bad idea, by the way, but discussion would be inappropriate here). I got a job in the accounts department at the North West division of Cubitt's, the civil engineering and construction firm, whose head office was next door to the Kelvinator factory, on the New Chester Road at Bromborough, on the Wirral, across the river from Liverpool. I knew Bromborough a little, since my Uncle Harold lived there.

At the Cubitt site, we had an old watchman who looked after the joinery shop, and he was a great character. He used to tell us tales of when he worked as a green keeper at Bromborough Golf Club, before the war, and also at a tennis club at (I think) Brimstage, another local village. He told us there had been a great battle there "in prehistoric times" [sic] - they regularly dug up bits of swords, helmets, ancient sandals and bits of horse harness. Naturally, we dismissed all this as an old man's ramblings, but he did tell a good story.

Bump 5

I read recently that Bernard Cornwell, no less, has been adding his enthusiasm and resources to the opportunities for exploration of the old Brunanburh site, which he is convinced is at Bromborough, in the Wirral. Previously, alternative candidate sites were at Sutton Hoo (don't even know where that is) and in a lay-by near Doncaster (which sounds a bit compact for the biggest ever British battle), but Mr Cornwell tells us that the true site overlaps Bromborough Golf Course and the grounds of the old Clatterbridge Hospital, right next to the M53, which is the motorway which runs up the spine of the Wirral to Birkenhead.

Crikey - now you're talking.

Bump, bump, bump. Bain's U3A course, the old groundsman's finds on the golf course, Uncle Harold's house in Bromborough village, Olaf Guthfrithson, the BBC videos and now Mr Cornwell. I think I was predestined to be interested in this lot - I am involved, after all.

Watch this space.

Hooptedoodle #397 - The Royal Ascot Disaster - The Legend That Will Run and Run

 It seems like yesterday, but it is now more than 30 years since that dreadful Saturday afternoon when a grandstand at Royal Ascot partially collapsed, crushing nearly a hundred spectators to death and injuring many more.

There is no real consolation to be had after such a disaster, it still makes my heart ache to think of it, but at least we know that the behaviour of the emergency and medical services on the day was heroic and could not be faulted, and that so much energy was put subsequently into pursuing a full enquiry, which very quickly identified what had happened, drew up failings and recommendations for improvements in safety regulations and - not least in importance - identified all the areas of accountability and proceeded to bring those responsible to justice.

It can have been of little comfort to the friends and families of the deceased, but it is pleasing that fair compensation was made in almost all of the cases, that all individuals or organisations who contributed to the accident by their own actions or errors were brought to very public account, and legislation was enacted to ensure that such a thing could never happen again. Of that much we can be proud.

Also, it is reassuring to recall that there was never any attempt to distort the story of what happened, nor to shift responsibility to the victims themselves, and - as I recall - no national newspapers or politicians were involved in a widespread campaign to cover up the facts, and no-one accused the families involved of being whining bin-dippers. At least I didn't hear of it.

Of course, it didn't really happen - not like that anyway. Around the same time, there was a crowd disaster involving Northern football fans, and it didn't go like that at all.

Even I am tired of this now. Having exonerated the crowd and the victims, the legal processes following the disaster which did take place - and they have moved with the speed and energy of a moth in treacle -  have never been intended to deliver anything meaningful, ever. It has always been clear that eventually, if they held their breath for long enough, the people who caused the Hillsborough shambles and subsequently tried to change the narrative would never be answerable. It is surprising, but it still appears that no-one was at fault.

Not quite true - a former secretary of the football club at whose ground the accident occurred was fined a couple of years ago for not having his safety paperwork up to date. He was the token fall-guy, and he did not have to fall very far.

The latest - possibly the last - in a series of farcical legal non-events was a trial in Salford, involving three individuals - two former senior police officers and a lawyer who had acted on their behalf - who were accused of falsifying or amending police statements taken at the time. It ended a few days ago - a mistrial. It was a mistrial because the statements which were changed were for submission to the Taylor inquiry, which was not a court of law, so - on a technicality - VAR ruled it all offside. Case dismissed.

I expected nothing else, but I am more than a little cross to note that the lawyer who represented the lawyer (if you follow me) - a pip-squeak of a QC who has built a reputation on successfully defending crooks against all the odds (this is my interpretation, rather than the gentleman's actual wording in his promotional blurb) - also felt obliged to add the following comment to the BBC afterwards:

He said: “My client was accused of covering up criticism of the police. What he in fact did was cut out criticism of the Liverpool fans, whose behaviour was perfectly appalling on the day, causing a riot that led to the gate having to be opened, that unfortunately let the people in and crushed to death the innocents as they were – complete innocents – who were at the front of the pens, who had arrived early and were not drunk and were behaving perfectly well.”

So, it seems, the crowd behaved badly and were (by implication) drunk, and this was a major contributor to the event. He has also said a few other things elsewhere, but my blood pressure is not up to reading them again. His job for the day was to defend individuals accused of falsifying statements; the world does not wish to hear his personal views on the original disaster. The world, I believe, does not give a shit.

Whoever drummed up the crowd-funding necessary to get a 2nd Division QC to defend the case, it looks rather as though they didn't raise enough to get him to read through its archives. The alternative history version involving a rioting crowd was blown away in 2016. Old news. No good.

I don't know what happens next - probably nothing - but it would be nice to think that the QC in question might live to regret his words. Back in the day, Northern soccer fans were near enough to striking miners for Mrs Thatcher to be unable to tell the difference. I don't think that is going to wash now.

I refuse to get worked up about it, but I shall keep an eye open. God is listening. So is Mr Rees Mogg, apparently. That's a midfield to make anyone tremble.

***** Very Late Edit *****

It's been brought to my attention that, after the latest attempt at a trial was aborted (on, let us remind ourselves, a legal technicality), the defence lawyers expressed the views that the continuing persecution of the police offers involved was a "witch hunt" and a huge waste of public money, but that the dismissal of the case should put an end to suggestions of a cover-up.

No. Sorry. Everyone knows there was a cover-up. We haven't seen the full extent of it, but the solicitors should try to maintain some sense of reality. Give us a break.

**************************

Hooptedoodle #396b - Mystery Object Revealed

 My thanks to everyone who got in touch. I have to say that I was delighted with that little exercise - so much creativity - I am impressed, and greatly cheered up. Apart from a temporary problem I am having this morning, thinking about steamed cod-pieces and giant fat-balls, I was profoundly touched by the friendly, supportive spirit in which my possible foibles such as shrunken head collecting were glossed over - accepted on the nod - without any hint of disapproval. That is kind and diplomatic; if I had a heart, it would be warmed.

Many of the suggestions are more exciting than its true purpose, but I shall now reveal the correct answer...

As a couple of people suggested, it is a device to assist in cleaning a baseball-type cap. As far as I know, it can also cope with a baseball cap which is worn backwards, which is pretty good too - high marks for versatility.

The weird bit is that, as revealed in the photos, the device is intended to be used in the dish-washing machine. Yes - quite so.

My "lucky" walking hat has now been with me for 10 years - I have worn it in the Alps, on the Danube, along Hadrian's Wall, around the fortifications of Chester, Berwick, Carlisle, Denbigh, Salzburg, on my visit to the Eagles' Nest, in Vienna, at numerous recent wargames (to avoid the overhead lighting setting off my ocular migraine) and all sorts of other exciting activities. I reckon this cap has also accompanied me during a couple of hundred mowings of my lawns - we have been inseparable. I've lost it a few times along the way, and some of the occasions on which I found it again were unlikely - occasionally they might even have been far-fetched. Critics have queried why, since I bought it in Austria, it says "Austria" on it - in English. I have no answer to this - I assume it may be something to do with British and American tourists probably not being expected to know what Österreich means. Whatever, it is my friend. Like me, it got soaked through, walking the last few miles into Wallsend in the footsteps of Hadrian. It also walked across the great bridge at Regensburg when slightly too much beer had been taken. You get the idea.

Recently it has been quarantined - it has become, with use, smelly and unappetising, so a wash was prescribed. We obtained the gizmo under discussion, and yesterday I fired up the dishwasher, specially. Cool, quick wash cycle - no lemon in the cleaning capsule [discuss?].

Seems to have been successful - it's still drying, but looks (and smells) far better. Now I'll have to come up with some special trips on which to wear it again. Sounds good.

My friend De Vries suggested that the device might be a Scold's Bridle (also known by various other names) - a medieval, cage-like device which was fitted around the head of a gossip or similar, with a tongue clamp. Horrible thing - I saw a few once, in a museum in Rothenburg ob der Tauber. No it's not one of those.

***** Late Edit *****

As a bit of evidence, here's a shot of my cap on tour, at the big castle in Salzburg, when I was younger, and still allowed to go on foreign holidays.

*********************

Hooptedoodle #396a - Another Mystery Object...

 We have something of a tradition here at Chateau Foy of being very partial (I almost said "susceptible") to the occasional gizmo - an unlikely knick-knack which someone out there wishes to convince us all is the solution to some problem we never realised we had.

The Contesse Foy has recently obtained this. I had never even heard of such a thing before, but it comes with some positive reviews. So, as usual, I am left to wonder am I the only guy on the planet who has never come across one of these...?

Right, gentlemen - you may well have one, and use it daily, and you may be astounded that I am so ignorant as never to have seen one. So - I ask you, in a spirit of gentle quizzery, as a bit of innocent fun  - what do you think this is? 

 

I'll put up the answer in a day or so - please send in suggestions - the wackier the better. If you know what it is, that's fine too, though less interesting...

Oh - yes - it's made of flexible plastic - the glimpse of my hand in the upper photo gives an idea of scale, and the fact that I can lift it confirms that it is not heavy.

Battle of Santiago Martir - deleted scenes...

On Friday I'll be hosting a Zoom wargame. This is a re-run of a scenario I used 3 years ago or thereabout, which I thought had some promise and was worth another shot sometime. The action featured never actually occurred, though if it had it might have been in April 1809.

I finished setting up the battlefield this morning, and was taking a few preliminary photos when it occurred to me to try a little video. I've recently enjoyed some very nice home-made wargaming movie clips on Youtube and elsewhere, and felt I should try one. I hasten to emphasise that I had no intention whatsoever of publishing my attempts, but in fact it's maybe worth a look. If you click HERE, the movie should appear from somewhere - at the moment, my chief priority is to avoid putting vast movie files on storage media I can't afford!

 

Standing-still picture of the battlefield, all set up - French and their Allies on the left, Spaniards on the right

 

The clip was filmed on my digital camera, which is not exactly the very latest tech, and I have now taken due note that I should pan more slowly, think about what I'm going to say before I start, and try to do something about the loss of picture quality resulting from file compression. However - it's no too bad, as they say around here, and it serves to give a quick walk-through who's involved on Friday. I propose to have another go, using my phone, which is more modern and should give better results. However I have now had a first attempt, and would not be frightened to try again!

If you are appalled by the experience, there's no need to rush to let me know!

More on Friday, though I don't think the movie crew will be in attendance!

Hooptedoodle #395 - Just the Thing for the Grand Duke's Study

 My wife has been clearing her late mother's house recently, preparing to sell the place. This has not been especially easy in a time of lockdown, and the closure of the charity shops has been a major problem in the disposal of household trivia. Some of the larger and more valuable items have been sold through local social media pages, and a lot has been given away. One item I was interested in for myself was a wall clock.

I've always had a thing about clocks - I associate chiming clocks with sunlit afternoons at my Posh Auntie May's house in West Kirby when I was a kid. There is something soothing about them. They go with the smells of furniture polish and coffee. The clock in question is built in a traditional style, but it is probably only about 45 years old. For a featured clock in a hallway or similar I think I'd prefer something genuinely old - with ghosts and all that. Still, this is a proper, wind-up clock with a pendulum. Not a battery in sight. It keeps good time, and really is perfect for the Grand Duke's study.

I paid the advertised price and hung it on the wall.

Very good thus far. The tick is pleasing, and is actually no louder than the noise the battery clock which preceded it made.

And, of course, it chimes - how long that stays switched on is a matter of wait and see, but at the moment I'm enjoying it.

Hooptedoodle #391 - LaptrinhX - an unfortunate oddity or a symptom of something?

 I'm not at all sensitive about privatising my blog, or making it somehow kind of exclusive. It's not that big a deal - if someone reads it and likes it then, good; if they don't like it then they can move on and do something else. If they protest in a comment, then I can please myself whether I publish the comment, and it's all just part of the blog world.

Like many others, I get a bit fed up with the constant lifting of bits of my labours into TMP, but since the combined attention span of TMP is minimal it doesn't matter much, and occasionally someone who comes across my blog through that channel does what I would think of as the normal thing to do, and makes human, friendly contact. [In fact, of late, the borrowed bits of this blog on TMP which appear under the "authorship" of Tango01 have also carried a house official legend identifying the original source - could it be that TMP's views on decency and intellectual property are somehow evolving? Who knows? Who cares, actually?]

Occasionally I find that chunks of my blog are on Pinterest - I am unmoved. On one occasion I was surprised to find that I could purchase a mug or a poster from some on-line pirate, bearing a photo which was actually mine, and was pinched from here. Again - so what?

And then there is LaptrinhX. 

If you visit their site, laptrinhx.com, you may find, if you search for your Blogger ID, that you are one of their featured contributors. I was very impressed to find that some 800-odd posts from Prometheus in Aspic - credited to MSFoy - have simply been stolen, intact. They are reformatted, though not changed otherwise; the comments are dropped, but there they are. This is, supposedly, a news and job-advertising online journal for software developers, and they feature paid adverts which, presumably, generate revenue per hit.

I'm not awfully upset about this, to be honest, my material is in the public domain, and I realise that the pinching is done by a robot somewhere, so I am neither flattered nor personally very offended, but - for better or worse - this blog is all me own werk, Miss, and if someone generates advertising revenue for themselves and their poxy website by using my original thought and images, without any pretence of a by-your-leave, then I find that less than amusing. Thus I felt it was only appropriate to name them in this blog post, and see if it, too, is lifted intact.

Naturally, I wish to offend no-one, but thought it would be appropriate if I were to mention here that, in my opinion, LaptrinhX, their owners, advertisers, bots and readership are all a bunch of sad little wankers; please publish this. I hope they enjoy reading about themselves here today. Consider it an experimental work-out for their editing software.

Hooptedoodle #389 - How Old Ben Suffered for His Art

 

Strange, ruminating post this, so if you have something better to do please feel free to move on - cheers...

A week or two ago a relative of mine phoned up for a long chat - this is obviously a feature of pandemics - and, in mid chat, out of the blue, suddenly announced that it had been my dad's 99th birthday a couple of days previously. Actually, she said "would have been", since he has been dead for some years now. Well, that's something; a 100th birthday is really more of a ritual - telegram, special flowers, all that - but 99 is just a routine birthday. No fuss, nothing in the local paper, just a number to attach to the idea of being bloody old.

 

Unless you are dead, of course.

 

Later on, she recollected that my dad had been an interesting man - "very artistic", she said. Funny one, that. A number of people have made similar comments in the past, so that must be a fairly common perception. Personally, I think he was not the slightest bit artistic, in any sense I understand; he may have been one of the least creative people I ever came across.

 

 

Let's have a little look at my dad, then. His name was Ben. My relationship with my dad was always a bit problematic [this is not going to be a rant or a wallow, by the way, so unclench]. Maybe that's the norm for dads? - anyway, he worried me. When I was little he worried me because he was a bringer of discipline and retribution, and when I was a little older I used to worry about whether he would be pleased with what I had done, and when I grew out of that I used to worry because he was becoming old and frail and a bit of a liability, and now that he is at peace I worry a little because his DNA must still be kicking around in my brain somewhere. I watch for signs...

 

Credit where credit is due. He was a very clever man - he was a chartered engineer, electronics being his field. A former colleague of his once told me that my dad was an absolute natural - he could look at something, however complex, and he would see straight away how it worked, and what its weaknesses might be. If it were broken, he could see what was wrong with it, and how it should be fixed. He was a lot less capable with people, it has to be said, and that may be something to do with the fact that his world was dominated by whether things were perfect or not. Things were well made or they were not; they were working or they were not. Binary. You could argue, if you wished, but if you disagreed with him then you were wrong. That's quite a simple philosophy, really. Sometimes tricky for everyone else, but simple enough to understand.

 

 

His job was not without its stresses - he became a very senior Managing Engineer with the UK Atomic Energy Authority, then got more and more frustrated as further promotion eluded him. Problem was, no-one could work with him. He wouldn't delegate anything, partly because he couldn't trust anyone to do a job as well as he could, and also (I think) partly because anyone who shared the credit for anything he did was a threat. Eventually, they solved everyone's difficulties by paying him to go away and leave them alone.

 

So, in his lengthy retirement, he returned to an old interest, and started doing watercolours, and later oil painting - his doctor reckoned it would calm him down (which is another convincing argument in favour of always getting a second opinion). His painting mostly caused him angst. He had considerable skills, in a draughtsman-like sense - give him a pencil and a sheet of paper, and he could draw you a straight line, freehand. He could do it because he knew he could do it. Give him the challenge of painting a perfect watercolour replica of a photograph, and he went through agonies trying to get it right.

 

Years ago, when I was in another marriage and lived in another town, he presented us with a large oil painting of some waterfall near Callander, which had taken him ages to finish. It was ghastly - boring - it was a failed copy of a photograph, devoid of any personality or interesting insight. My wife of the day refused to display it, so we came to a truce arrangement whereby it was stored in a box-room, and was hung in the hallway when my parents visited (which was not often). My wife was certain that it was gifted to us because my mother didn't want it.

 

Tricky. When I cleared my mother's house, 4 years ago, when she was moving into residential care, there were lots of his watercolours around the place. Framed - dozens of them. Crap quasi-photographic representations of a spray of roses (with droplets of dew), a Cornish fishing village, a horse in a stable-yard in Wensleydale, a mountain in the Cairngorms. And so on and so on. Heaven forgive me, I ditched the lot - they made my teeth ache just looking at them.

 

 

Proper Painting

 

By this time, of course, my dad had been dead for years. He had a bookcase full of coffee-table sized books about famous artists, and he did know a lot about them, though not one photon of understanding seemed to penetrate along with the dates and the titles. His favourites were Canaletto, and Escher - probably predictably - guys who could paint and draw properly. None of your interpretive or abstract stuff, thank you. As a side issue, I am intrigued that his favourite music was Telemann and Vivaldi - only short pieces, naturally - is there a symmetry here?

 

 

Proper Drawing

 

He did calm down a little as the years passed. After he had moved up to Scotland (to live near me, so that I could sort things out when he forgot how to use the VCR, or fell over in the flower bed, or - once - got stuck in the bath), one night he and I had drunk enough wine to somehow get into a befuddled debate about art. We got around to a recurrent theme, which was along the lines that a painting of a blue cow by Picasso might be very valuable, but since cows were not blue it was not worth considering as a piece of art - Ben would not have given it house room if he had received it as a present. It wasn't right. It failed the rightness test.

 

Never knowing when to shut up, I told him that I considered art as an accumulation of imperfections - a human being, with his/her own values and upbringing, looked at a subject, saw some particular interesting qualities in it, and presented it for public view in this way - all reproduced through the (imperfect) medium of their own style and technique. It was a work of humanity, built on human frailty, rather than a photocopy (though, of course, it might be a photocopy if that was how the artist saw it). If I went to an exhibition of pictures of the Empire State Building, for example, I would not expect to see the place filled with full frontal views of the building - I'd expect to see interesting aspects of the place, pictures from unusual angles, maybe of little-known details. Much use made of lighting, the neighbouring architecture - and so on - in short, there would be some point to the exhibition.   

 

Ben couldn't understand this at all. My view was incorrect. If a cow is a brown animal with four legs, that is what the artist should depict, and - not least, from an engineering viewpoint - the legs had better be one in each corner. Maybe, now I think about it again, his view has some validity, like some form of super-realism, but I don't think he thought about it like that.

 

 

Anyway, artistic or not, his works - perhaps "labours" is better - have made no lasting impression on the world. Just not ready for him, maybe, or possibly his impact was ruined by the invention of photography before he got started.

 

An interesting man, then, as a case study, but artistic? I'd give him a respectful thumbs-down for that one.