Hooptedoodle #145 - Fever

Had an active musical week - on Tuesday night I was privileged to see the Eric Bibb band at the Fringe by the Sea festival - unbelievable - best concert I've seen in maybe 20 years. Lots of stuff going on all week.

A propos of nothing, really, apart from the fact that it is good music for a warm evening and makes a change from Peggy Lee, here's Maria Muldaur's pleasantly quirky version of Fever:

Cool or what?

Hooptedoodle #144 - Mike Trebilcock's Big Day

This follows on from a conversation I had recently with another ageing football (soccer) fan, about the strange tale of Mike Trebilcock. It is a story which, if written for a schoolboy comic, would be dismissed as stupidly fanciful - preposterous.

A bit of personal background first: I was born in Liverpool, a city whose passion for the game is not unconnected to having had long periods of its history when there was little else to be cheerful about. Just as I began to take an interest in my team of choice, Liverpool FC, they had a disastrous season and slid into the old English Second Division, but their local neighbours, Everton FC, were promoted out of the Second Division that same year, and moved up into the First (which was equivalent to the current Premiership) – thus the two local rival teams managed to miss each other, and the absence of league matches between them was to continue for a further 9 years, until Liverpool finally gained promotion again.

The rest is, in a football sense, history, but I well remember the dark years of the interim when my school pals and I used to go to Anfield for Liverpool’s home matches in the Second Divn, yet happily visit Everton when LFC were playing away (my mum wouldn’t let me go to away games at that age). There was less venom attached to local rivalries in those days – I was (and remain) a devoted Liverpool fan, but Everton, because of the local connection, were my second favourite team, and I still retain a soft spot for them. They were also, indisputably, playing in a more glamorous league, against more fashionable competition and – since the club was largely financed by the Moores Family, owners of Littlewood’s football pools – there were some expensive, high profile players on show. Despite being a Liverpool disciple, I was always a secret admirer of Alex Young, the legendary Golden Vision, and of a number of other stars Everton bought in.

Back to Mr Trebilcock: After the two big Merseyside teams were both back in the top flight (as it used to be called), Everton had a particularly good run in the 1965-66 FA Cup, and reached the final at Wembley, where their opponents were another great Northern team of the day, Sheffield Wednesday.

Mike Trebilcock was a Cornishman, a forward, who made a considerable name for himself at Plymouth Argyle (in the 2nd Division), before being purchased (for £23,000) by Everton for the start of the 1965-66 season, when he was 20. He was injured during his debut game in the big time, and played very little football for the rest of the season – if I recall correctly, he played a few games for the reserves to get himself back to fitness. For the Cup Final, for reasons no-one has ever understood, Everton’s regular chief goalscorer, Fred Pickering, who was an England international and had, in fact, scored in every round of the Cup leading to the final, was dropped, and Everton fans were dumfounded, not to mention fretful, to learn that Trebilcock was playing in his place.

The game was a classic thriller – Wednesday went 2-0 up, then Trebilcock scored twice in 5 minutes (good goals, too) and eventually Temple scored a breakaway goal to win the game for Everton, 3-2.

Trebilcock remained at Everton for a further 2 years, but never managed to establish himself as a first team player – he played less than a dozen games in total, and eventually he moved on to Portsmouth, then Torquay, and he had a good, solid career as a pro at these lower levels. He played for a while in Australia before retirement – his big day at Wembley in 1966 was very much a one-off. He is still alive, and he is mostly famed now as the first black player to score in an FA Cup Final, but I always felt that if he was asked, “what is your outstanding memory of your footballing career?”, he would probably not have to think very long about it.

The teams, for anyone interested, were:

Everton: Gordon West; Tommy Wright, Ray Wilson; Jimmy Gabriel, Brian Labone (capt), Brian Harris; Alex Scott, Mike Trebilcock, Alex Young, Colin Harvey, Derek Temple

Sheffield Wed: Ron Springett; Wilf Smith, Don Megson; Peter Eustace, Sam Ellis, Gerry Young; Graham Pugh, John Fantham, Jim McCalliog, David Ford, John Quinn

Further down Lilliput Lane – more eBay adventures

The inflow of collectable cottages is stopping – there are still a couple of items in the mail, but I am running out of enthusiasm and storage space at about the same rate. Interestingly, this week a couple of the “Sue” ladies (see previous post) were named Amanda and Carol, which I suppose is acceptable, but two of the sellers turned out to be blokes, which was more of a surprise, and (even more interestingly) I had my first eBay Lilliput Lane-related problems with these same male sellers.

Picture at the top is of a pleasant group made up of four David Winter Tudor cottages and a Lilliput Lane church, complete with passing cavalry unit to give the scale comparison. Nothing earth-shaking, but the most expensive building on display here is the church, which was, I think, £3-something. I am contemplating a forthcoming ECW campaign in a hitherto-undiscovered part of Lancashire, which involves a couple of decent-sized towns and a possible siege or two, so buildings of this type are most welcome.

My eBay adventures were instructive, and not particularly tedious, so I shall relate something of my dealings with the male sellers.

Case Study No.1 – Adam

Adam listed a single lot of two David Winter cottages, starting bid £0.99p, with a pretty hefty shipping charge of £9.50. Blinking at the P&P, I put a maximum bid of £1.25, and got them for 99p, with no other watchers, as far as I could see. Did the PayPal thing straight away (before I forget!) and looked forward to seeing what sort of velvet-cushion-accompanied-by-dancing-girls delivery service I got for my £9.50.

It was perfectly standard customer drop-off by Hermes, which for a parcel of this weight costs £3.98. Adam is obviously one of those eBayers who likes to load the shipping charges and put in a cheap starting price. I’m not sure that eBay actually disapprove, but I do – I’m not keen on this practice at all.

Just for the hell of it, I sent Adam a polite note (and at this point I had fulsome feedback from him, but I had not yet done the feedback for him, so I had a tactical edge), emphasizing that I had no grounds for complaint, since I had agreed to the purchase, but could he please explain the shipping cost.

I got a rant by return. Adam went on at considerable length about the unfairness of the fees charged by eBay and PayPal, the cost to him of doing the packing and travelling to the courier, and how I could hardly complain getting two such fine cottages for this amount of money. He also explained that if I wanted a postage discount I should have asked for the shipping on the two cottages to be combined, and he would have considered whether he could afford it, which is, basically, straight bollocks, since the two items were a single listing, and were combined already.

Tiring of Adam, who was less fun than I had hoped, I withdrew from the debate and left sort of sketchy feedback for him. If the cottages had been £5 for the two plus £5 shipping I would have been perfectly happy – as I am, in fact – so he’s correct, in a daft sort of way. It is a shame that he seems to get so little fun from his eBay involvement – the Sues do much better in this respect. One of them, bless her, sent me a lollipop with her business card – now that is classy.

Case Study No.2 – Colin

Colin is not a lucky man. I purchased another David Winter house for very little from Colin, paid for it, and got a notification that the item was mailed 1^st Class on 21^st July. By the 28^th there was no sign of it, so I sent Colin a friendly note to say that I wasn’t unduly worried, but thought I should let him know.

I got a lengthy reply from him, to the effect that he had, unfortunately, been involved in an accident the previous week, and had been hospitalized, had had an adverse reaction to the painkillers he was prescribed, and was in very poor shape indeed. He had arranged with his father (who is elderly, an army veteran, and suffers occasional lapses of memory) for the week’s parcels, which were all packed and ready to go, to be posted, but it had all gone wrong for various further reasons.

I sympathized with his misfortune, told him I’d be delighted to get the package whenever he could manage it, and not to worry about it. There was a faint whiff of Foy’s Seventh Law about the explanations, but no matter.

True to his word, Colin emailed me the following day to say that he had battled his way to the post office, and the parcel should reach me the next day. And so it did, and I was very pleased with it, though I was surprised when I found a note offering his repeated apologies for the delay and the “mix-up” – the note was inside the packing, next to the miniature house. No problem at all – pleased with the item, very cheap purchase, but – would you undo and then re-wrap an already-complete package to put in an apology? No? – neither would I.

You don’t suppose he had just forgotten, surely? No – of course not. To be on the safe side, in future I deal only with eBay sellers named Sue...

I am still looking forward to receiving a very attractive, period town hall of suitable proportions, which I obtained for very little, though it is No.68 of a limited edition of - I can't remember how many, in fact. You get an idea of what kind of an outsider I am in this field of collecting when I tell you that I am thinking of how best to prise said town hall off its handsome wooden plinth. Proper collectors the world over would wring their hands and weep at such an act of desecration.

Heavy on the Cute – the World of Sue

More Confessions of a Closet Lilliput Lane Fancier

English windmill, Sir?

My recent coming-out as a browser of Lilliput Lane listings on eBay has landed me a number of excellent items of ECW scenery, and has been quite an education. I am, I sincerely hope, a fringe player here, but I have seen enough to be intrigued and sometimes horrified by the real deal.

Here’s the technique – enter “Lilliput Lane” and some other promising key word like “manor house” or “smithy” or “church” in the eBay search field, and have a look at what’s on offer. Don’t look at the prices at this point or you will run for cover, screaming. Find something you like the look of, and skip through ads for this item until you find one that gives physical size, so you can check it’s OK for scale (usually the serious retailers will give a full spec and lots of photos, but their prices will be off-putting).

Or a very serviceable manor house for ECW, for £2.25? 

I use 20mm wargames figures (Les Higgins, Hinton Hunt, SHQ, Tumbling Dice), and I deliberately use underscale buildings – the most suitable of the Lilliput Lane items work out at a slightly smallish 15mm scale, which is good for me. Having identified a suitable candidate item (and I like “retired” items best – current catalogue stuff and recent releases are dominated by heavyweight pro dealers, and therefore are too dear), I do a specific search on that, and then list the items by price, cheapest first, and the unknown, perfumed, faintly purple world of ladies’ eBay opens before me.

There are some astonishing bargains, and some of them still have boxes and certificates (which are wasted on me) and many of them are pretty much perfect. There is a whole alternative reality out there of ladies who deal in secondhand party frocks (size 14) and shoes (silver, stiletto heels, worn once only) and assorted gifty tat and shelf clutter, especially LL cottages and chromium plated photo frames. These ladies live in Basildon, or Bournemouth, or Slough, and they are – almost all of them – named Sue, and they are all lovely.

The Sue thing is quite amazing – almost an essential qualification; I did buy a nice little half-timbered cottage, perfect, for 99 pence from a lady whose eBay ID was molly*moppet or similar, but I was relieved to find that her real name was actually Sue, so that was all right. She was brilliant – postage fees were exactly correct, the care of packing and the amount of bubblewrap were well in excess of what I would have done for 99 miserable pence, she posted it the same day and left me nice, gushy feedback which was so extreme that for a brief moment I glowed with my supreme status as an eBay customer, until I checked and found that all her buyers get the same message of love and appreciation.

Preston Mill - the real building is at East Linton, in East Lothian, about 6 miles
from where I'm sitting; Montrose could well pass this way...

Why Sue? The Contesse and I discussed this briefly, and we reckon that Sue was a very popular name in Britain for baby girls maybe 50-something years ago, and that this is the typical age at which ladies achieve their lifelong wish to sell used party frocks and ornaments and gush at total strangers. And God bless them all – I have no complaints.

The price spread is astonishing – I bought a flawless (though unboxed) Claypotts Castle for £2 or something the same week that a dealer was selling it, used and "rare", as Buy-It-Now for £32.99.

Convincing Lonsdale-area farm; watch out - some of them have hidden Land Rovers 

I’ve had a couple of disappointments – paid £1.25 for a David Winter mansion house which turned out to be just over an inch tall, but that can go into the local charity shop – some nice lady will be delighted to buy it, I’m sure, and stick it on eBay. Mostly everything has been very pleasing. You have to be selective – this is a huge, bewildering topic area when you start looking around – and you have to watch the sizes and the close-up pics, but the number of items and the choice is staggering.

Storage is an issue – the buildings are quite heavy and will chip easily, and are maybe not just what you wish to have lying about your bookshelves, but careful use of bubblewrap and old shoe boxes should take care of that (I can send the shoes to Sue for auction). I’m going to stop browsing the listings now – I’ve got some very decent items so far, and there are a couple more in the post.

Cornish tin mine - could just as easily be a Scottish lead mine

One word of warning – stay away from the collector forums, for that is a twilight world and you may become frightened. That is where you get into the debates about why the original version of Lupin Cottage (retired in 1987) is worth so much more than the later version (though I cannot tell the two photos apart) and why we all have to put our names down for this year’s special Members-only Limited Edition Piece, Windsor Castle in the Snow, which will (of course) be a magnificent investment to leave to your grandchildren (who, as I am beginning to understand, will get Sue to sell it on eBay for 99 pence).   

Background Artillery Project - More Siege Guns

Just the thing to rattle the roof-tiles - the brown bases are my house standard for
siege equipment and engineers. I can't remember why, but it's a standard, isn't it?

A little more progress - the British 10-inch howitzers mentioned here back in February have now been painted and have met up with some gunners. The howitzers themselves are from the old Hinchliffe 20mm range, the gunners are mostly by NapoleoN, with a couple of Falcata castings thrown in (including the officer in the bicorn, who might be Captain William "Beefy" Tonkiss of the Royal Artillery).

This little lot represents 2 x 6-gun batteries, which is rather more 10-inch howitzers than the British had available in the Peninsula, but they look nice. The real things were given up as a bad job after the gunners ignored a "maximum elevation" instruction and wrecked the gun carriages at the First Siege of Badajoz - as far as we know, they went into storage until the Crimean War…

A small, sadly routine tale of dommage from the preparation of these: the howitzers are on hybrid carriages, which have little garrison wheels at the rear. One of these little wheels escaped while I was gluing things together, fell on the carpet and disappeared without trace. Remarkable. After the necessary amount of swearing, I cut my losses and assembled the batteries with a gunner standing right in front of the missing wheel, so you can't see that it is not present. I know it's not there, and the gunners probably know, but we won't tell anyone else, will we?

Another step towards getting the fortress out for another siege game; still need a better set of trench sections and a revamp of the rules. I've been sort of hoping that the Picquet-related "Vauban's War" would have appeared by now, but no sign of it yet. I shall hash on with my own ex-Chris Duffy efforts.

San Marcial - C&CN in a Wider Fitting

View from behind the Spanish left flank - these are the voluntarios that Freire
was very concerned about - they held the position, despite a couple of scares

Last Saturday Iain visited here, and we played a C&CN game - the published scenario for San Marcial (Aug 1813) stretched for an expanded board, with rather larger forces. Because of the bigger table, we also used the Battlelore amendment to the command rules which I described in a previous post.

Iain has very kindly sent me copies of his excellent photos, so here they are, just to prove the event actually took place, with my thanks for his camera work.

The scenario consists of Clauzel's corps of Soult's French army, crossing the Bidassoa to attack a Spanish force under Freire on a line of three ridges at San Marcial. True to the original battle, the French fought vigorously and determinedly, but the Spaniards held out, the Victory Points margin eventually being 10-3, which includes 3 extra points for Freire for hanging on to the three hills and - in any case - rather flatters the defenders.

The action is primarily one for infantry - I included a cavalry presence in both armies simply because - well, you have to really, don't you? The French had a 3:2 superiority in artillery, but had little opportunity to bring it forward into action; the Spaniards, on the other hand, had their guns on the flanks, which caused a lot of damage to the attackers. The Spaniards fight well enough if they stand their ground, but the retreat rules for the Spanish army in C&CN are harsh - especially the voluntarios units, which are classed as militia - so getting them to stand their ground is the heart of the matter.

General view from the French left

Those voluntarios, on the Spanish left ridge

Some of Reille's Italians attempting to flush the Legion Extremena out of a wood

Lots of Higginses - Lamartiniere's French division, on the right

More Higginses - the Dragoni Napoleone

French advance under way, all along the line - keeping the momentum
without much artillery support was a problem  throughout the day

Villatte's Confederation Germans, on the French left, ford the Bidassoa, but
are already suffering from the Spanish cannon

Lamartiniere, at the San Marcial village, sets about those stubborn voluntarios

Spanish line infantry wait calmly for their moment

Spanish hussars (Extremadura) mostly stood watching - converted Hinton Hunts

The Italians now have the wood, but are starting to wonder if this is such a great idea

At this point Villatte's Germans on the French left are struggling to progress, the
Italians in the centre are running out of steam and Lamartiniere's Frenchmen at
the far end are fighting hard but getting bogged down

The voluntarios have yellow markers to denote their militia status, but the
beggars wouldn't run...

French cavalry supporting the Italians, but there were no broken troops to harry - it was
not a good day for cavalry

The Germans still struggling to get a hold on the other side of the river - a lot
of those bloody red markers in evidence

Final view - Freire's men still on their ridge, with plenty of fresh units if needed

Hooptedoodle #143 - Foy’s Thirteenth Law: The Optimal Number of Spares

This was nominated as an addition to Foy’s Law’s by Iain, which probably suggests that he was as bemused by my thoughts on the subject as by the rest of the Laws in the series. Not discouraged, I have decided to publish it, as another small effort to share my painfully-gained wisdom with the world. It is the least I can do, I feel.

Foy’s Thirteenth Law states: It is a good idea to have spares available for useful items, but only a few; over a certain number, the overhead of management and organization of the spares outweighs the benefit of having them, and the spares themselves will tend to disappear until the optimal number is achieved.

Exotica

This originally came to my notice in the rather specialized field of guitar picks (or plectra, as we called them in the Roman army). I have managed to maintain a shadowy alternative life as a musician and arranger, and always carry at least one pick in my pocket (to be precise, I carry it/them in my left hand trouser pocket, with my penknife, as opposed to my right pocket, where I carry my loose change – these things are important, I think). Picks are not very impressive items, and are easily mislaid, but arriving at a gig without one is not recommended, so a little care is worth the trouble. Also these things are increasingly expensive – I have acquired a taste for Claude Dugain’s little sculpted masterpieces, which come in at around £8 or more a hit; since the softer ones (ebony, coconut shell) wear out fairly quickly, this is a bit of a consideration, particularly if you are unfortunate enough to have to use the UK distributor.

This Optimal Number is not known at the outset, but you become aware of it as the number shrinks, mysteriously, from what you think it might be to what it really is. I have sometimes tried to analyse this – I haven’t got very far, but it goes like this:

1. I need to have at least one good pick with me at all times – I might be forced to call at a music store, I might get a sudden phone call from the Howard Alden band, telling me that Howard has been taken ill – anything is possible. 
2. If I have one good pick with me, I will be careful with it. I am unlikely to leave it in the music shop, or in the wrong trousers, or on the bookshelf, or on the music stand, or just drop it somewhere without noticing. This is because I will regularly (nervously) check my left pocket to make sure everything is in order. Penknife? – yep. Pick? – yep – I can hear it clink against the penknife.
3. But one pick is a bit risky – a spare one will cover me for accidental loss or breakage. So two is a better number than one, but being forced to call on the spare would put me back to one, which is not ideal, so maybe three would be even better.
4. Hmmm.
5. If I were going on a week’s tour (unlikely these days, but one lives in Hope…), I might feel justified in putting, say, six or seven picks in my pocket. Now you’re talking. Idiot proofing.
6. Not really. When I am pick-rich in this way, maybe I get careless, maybe my routine pocket-check is unable to detect a difference between (say) six and (say) five without a special, extra count. Maybe something more sinister happens.
7. Whatever it is, I will find that my seven picks very quickly become three, at which point I get worried enough to pay attention and check more carefully, and stop the rot. 

What is this? One day a future generation of archeologists will find a random layer of Dugain picks, and will assume that they are the claws of some unknown creature, or the jewels of a religious leader. Where do the things go? How do they know to do this?

Three is the optimal number for my pick load. No picks at all is obviously useless, one is a bit risky, two is a bit better, three is good, anything more than three will tend to reduce itself back to three again quite quickly. Three.

I quietly filed that away as a fact which is invaluable only to me, but in the last year or two the Contesse has started using reading glasses. She tended to mislay these fairly frequently so – since she is lucky enough to require a prescription you can buy off the shelf easily and cheaply, she began to buy spare pairs of specs. One in the car, one in the handbag, one on the bookshelf, one on the coffee table, one on the bookshelf, one in the kitchen, one on the bedside cabinet, one on the bookshelf…

Just a minute – where are they all? Foy’s Thirteenth strikes again. As I move around the house, I see an apparently endless stream of reading glasses, and yet the Contesse will be looking for a pair at that same moment. The Contesse, I hasten to add, is not unusually careless or disorganized – I feel that she has merely, unknowingly, exceeded Foy’s Optimal Number of Spares.

A statistician or a moron – either of these – might expect that an increasing number of spares would mean that they would be spread more widely through the house/car/handbag, that a random walk around the place would turn up more frequent examples, which implies some sort of even distribution, or simply that the more likely places would tend to have more spares in them.

Further study is needed, but I don’t think it works like this. We don’t usually lose something because we can’t remember which of a finite number of sensible places we have left it in (which is already sounding a bit dodgy), it is because we have put it down somewhere daft while we were distracted by something else. Thus a greater number of spares simply means that they will occupy more daft places – places a sensible search would not look for them on a first pass.

Some kind soul will suggest that the reading glasses should be attached to neck-cords. This seems a reasonable idea, but has not proved to be a well-received suggestion – in fact I have to say that my own reading glasses have such a cord, and in my case it simply means that I am often searching for a lost pair of reading glasses with cord attached, so it is not necessarily the answer. We are still unsure of the Optimal Number of spare reading glasses, but it seems pretty certain that the number of spare pairs we have (if we could find them all to count them) is greater than this.

Work continues.