Hooptedoodle #183 - The Revenge of The Typing Pool

This morning I have nothing to offer but a brief rant. I shall make some token attempt to pick my words carefully, because it is a subject area where I have little intuitive feel for the expected degree of political correctness, and I fear that I may be guilty of providing insufficient balance in my views. I seek no comfort, and I offer no solutions – I wish merely to let off steam for a moment and then move blithely on, and let us hear no more about it.

When I was a young man, setting out on my professional career, I was required to be courageous and wise – sometimes beyond my years and experience. That in itself was a little stressful, but by far the most terrifying thing I used to have to do was to venture into The Typing Pool. In there, the smoke pollution and noise levels were very high, and the chatter was approximately a musical fifth above the pitch I was used to elsewhere. None of this in itself was too dangerous, but if you had ever caught even a hint of the conversation in there you would have rushed out screaming. If your brain was not actually destroyed on the spot you were still likely to run away to sign up for some silent order or other – preferably on a remote island.

The chatter was completely – and I do mean completely – without any import or redeeming merit. It was talk of shoes, and shampoo, and the trashiest of TV programmes, and endless, outrageous, poisonous gossip about anyone and everyone. I still shudder to think of it.

Well, the years pass, and one writes these things off to experience, and after a while I didn’t have to go in there any more. Rank does have its privileges. Eventually, technology changes actually meant that The Typing Pool was a thing of the past, and I began, in idle moments, to wonder:

(a) could it really have been as bad I remembered?

(b) whatever happened to the people who used to work in there? – what else could they possibly do? – were they all right?

I still ponder this occasionally, but as time passes I have become convinced that the people from The Typing Pool (or their direct descendants) are doing very nicely, thank you, and they now run the newspapers and the TV companies. It is now beginning to dawn on me that they have taken over my Internet Service Provider too.

My new-look email service from BT Internet now opens up with the glories of Yahoo News – there is no escape. If someone put a tabloid newspaper through my letterbox bearing the same trash I would chase them down the path with a garden hoe, but I am expected to grit my teeth and live with this as part of my everyday email presentation. I realise that BT (or Yahoo, or probably both) make advertising money from this garbage, and I’m sure they have some clever marketing people who know exactly how to optimise customer satisfaction and ad revenue, but it is also worth remembering that I do pay rather a lot of money for the service, and their choice of news and adverts does not sit well with me, given that our rural broadband speed is struggling to cope with the things we actually want.

Could you possibly have Schwartzheim’s Disease? – Doctors make shock discovery – that is a damned lie.

See intimate shots of Kate and William at Garden Party – no – give me a break.

This cute kitten was rescued from the Thames – it will probably die anyway.

Guide to 10 things your body language says about you – take our test – no – my body hasn’t said anything for years.

Watch the worst open-goal miss in the history of Egyptian league football – no.

Would you wear this £10 dress to Ascot? – no – bugger off.

See the 20 biggest dress mistakes from the BAFTAs! – no – bugger off.

Watch this video of a motorcyclist falling into a vat of glue – no – bugger off.

See this 50-year-old-woman who has discovered astonishing anti-wrinkle trick – no – bugger off.

And much, much more. You can’t fool me – it was long ago, but I have had glimpses of this level of sophistication and good taste before, in the distant past.

Just out of interest – is there an ISP out there with any class at all? I am very much afraid that mine is one of the better ones. No wonder I get depressed.

Jamie the Postie Is Doing a Good Job

Our friendly postie has been doing stout service in wet conditions once again. Yesterday he turned up with an excellent parcel of S-Range Minifigs Spaniards very kindly sent to me by Matt - all the way from New Zealand (no wonder Jamie looks tired). I knew these were coming, but was delighted to see their condition, and they are painted, and there are enough of the fabled SN1s figures here to produce an 1812 Spanish light infantry battalion with very little work. There are also some 1809-period grenadiers who may well be the start of the first battalion of Granaderos Provinciales, if I can raise some matching friends for them. Thanks again, Matt!

I've been doing well on the donations front of late - I also was recently sent a very nice stash of unpainted SN1s chaps by my mysterious painting friend, Goya, so the 1812 Spaniards are kept bubbling along. I have only very rarely met a free parcel of soldiers which I didn't like.

Jamie also brought me a slightly off-the-wall addition to my non-collection of buses. This is a Commer (Rootes Group, Chrysler...) minibus in the colours of Crosville - the destination is Ynys Station, which was on a now-defunct railway line running south from Menai, in North Wales, through Caernarfon to Afon Wen. The bus companies used to run minibuses like this in country areas which were too sparsely populated for a full coach service; the minibuses also took a role in handling post and parcels. I must say the model (by Oxford Diecast) looks absolutely tiny, but it is 1/76 - the normal HO model railway scale - the same scale as the double deckers I have already in the non-collection, so I guess minibuses must have been a lot smaller than buses. That's probably where they got the name from. [Duh.]

The number plate ending in a B dates this vehicle from around 1964 - any North Welsh readers remember these little chaps? The railway closed in 1964 (thank you, once again, Dr Beeching!), and Crosville provided a bus service to replace it, so the full-size original of this van must have been provided new for the start of that service. I imagine these little buses would operate as feeders for the main bus service - so this would be a local shuttle running passengers into Ynys to connect with the (bigger) Caernarfon/Menai run. Note that the vehicle has a raised roof to allow passengers to stand up. The sheep would not be allowed on the seats, I guess.

Original rail route-map of Menai to Afon Wen service

Lasalle - I'm Doing It Again...

Ever since it was published, I’ve strongly fancied having a serious shot at Sam Mustafa’s Lasalle Napoleonic game. I was enthusiastic about his earlier Grande Armée (and the incomplete Fast Play version of the same), though my enthusiasm extended only to borrowing ideas from these rules – I was rather put off by some of the activation and command procedures, which added a lot of labour for marginal benefit. The fact that I didn’t just adopt Grande Armée as my main Napoleonic rules for ever afterwards is not necessarily a criticism of the game – it was merely another in a long series of rule sets for which my complete devotion did not survive a full reading.

Where Mustafa did impress me especially, though, was in the commonsense department – the Grande Armée booklet contains a wealth of footnotes which explain the logic of how he produced a playable game from the chaos which was the reality of horse and musket warfare, and much of what he said turned on a few lightbulbs for me in rationalising game mechanisms. There is a discussion of routing troops, for example, which makes sense to me – I have, like everyone else, spent many hours of my life moving defeated units towards the rear in accurate 2D6-inch steps, or whatever. Mustafa says that routing troops are not actually anywhere – shepherding them to the rear like this is not realistic – routers are nowhere – they do not hold a formation, they are not identifiably in a particular position on the battlefield. Good – I like that. That seems to me like commonsense.

Lasalle got a fair amount of advance publicity, and looked very promising. I was a little put off by the hefty cost of buying the official book from the USA, but managed to get a cheaper secondhand copy from eBay in the UK. It looked very good. At the time I got it I did not have the time to get properly involved in it – I was in the process of applying Commands and Colors to my Napoleonic games. It did seem to me that Lasalle would give a useful complementary set of rules, to cover smaller, more tactical actions. When I originally read it through, of course, I considered whether it would be a simple tweak to change it to fit a hex grid (no, of course not - idiot), and I had a few concerns about basing and unit sizes, but it still looked very promising, and I still do have the intention to give it a good try-out when the time is right. I also gave myself a slap and told myself firmly that when the time came I should set out with the objective of adopting the game as tested and published, not some mutant version which I cobbled together myself, based on prejudices and things I once used to do as a boy.

Recently I got the book down off the shelf, considering whether now was the time, and for the last few evenings it has been my bedtime reading. I also got myself a little notebook and a fresh pencil, to record “thoughts and issues” - areas of the rules which gave me concerns, or where I thought I might have problems getting my existing armies to work without re-basing them.

I wrote, very carefully, right at the top of the page, “DO NOT ALTER THE GAME UNLESS YOU HAVE TO”. I know myself only too well, I think.

The “issues” come in two broad groups. Group 1 consists of things related to base sizes, unit dimensions, the balance of the game – I am very keen that any fixes I have to put in here do not distort the way the game plays. Thus, for example, the game works comfortably with my infantry battalions of 4 bases, each of 6 men in two rows, and works pretty well with my cavalry basing – no problems there. Artillery is not such a good fit – I use 2-gun-model batteries, and Mustafa has one model equals two cannons, which would give 4-model batteries for the French. I worked out that I can tweak some of the numbers in Lasalle so that my 2-gun batteries behave the same as the 4-model Lasalle ones (and I have to admit to a certain dislike of the look-of-the-thing idea of 4 guns in a battery in a game where a battalion is only two dozen men, so – as long as it doesn’t spoil the game – a tweak to handle 2-gun batteries seems acceptable).

One of the notes in this first group is, in fact, based on a personal niggle, but it doesn’t alter the game, so I kept it in Group 1. Lasalle uses measurements in “base-widths”, or BWs. This is good for making the rules read sensibly for a variety of scale implementations, but the advantage is entirely to the benefit of the authors – to the user who has fixed on a single scale, the permanent use of the generic BW terminology is something of a pain. In fact my BW is 50mm, or 2 inches, so it makes more sense to me to simply double all measurements, and refer to the distances in inches. I refuse, point blank, to go on talking about BWs simply because they suited the author and simplified the publishing task. It also means I can use a ruler I bought in a shop rather than some home-brewed device.

There are a few more things like this, and they are going down in the jotter in Group 1. Things which are not stoppers – things where I simply have to tweak the game a little to get it to work as intended with my own armies. Dr Mustafa would be all in favour of Group 1, I’m sure.

Group 2 gets a bit more edgy – this is getting into bits of the game which I don’t like very much, to be blunt about it. Yes – I know, I know – I should just accept the whole game as is because it works like that, and it is what the originators developed, with all their wisdom and experience. Despite myself, I find that I am questioning things – cheeky beggar. I am all in favour of the mechanisms for handling skirmishers – there is an element of abstraction in there which comes pretty much from Grande Armée – anyone who likes placing individual skirmishers behind bushes etc will not like this section of Lasalle at all, but I do – as Mustafa points out, the abstraction avoids the game getting bogged down in what was a minority activity, beneath the attention of the generals, and in any case what real skirmishers did is not at all like what you are doing with your riflemen in the bushes, so it’s a fair cop. Good. Then I find with amazement that moving units – changing formation and front, for example – is complicated and, well, fiddly, and not very abstracted at all. When I see a diagram showing how I am to measure the outside circumference of a wheeling manoeuvre, and how to calculate the movement allowance in rough terrain, for example, I find that I have written two notes under Group 2 in the jotter – “manoeuvre – fiddly” and “George Jeffrey lives!”, and at this point Dr Mustafa would not be so happy.

And so it goes on – my notes say:

Discipline Tests – fiddly

Army Morale – fiddly

Rules for whether or not in cover – fiddly

Rules for crossing obstacles - fiddly

Rules for flank/rear – fiddly

At that point I stopped and put the book down. This isn’t going well. This is what happens each time I read rules with a view to using them – Group 2 becomes a big obstacle. I really don’t want to teach myself a game of which 50% is the famous and well-received Lasalle, created by the highly respected Sam Mustafa, and 50% is a hotch-potch of gluings and transplants inserted by the madman Foy. The chances of such a game working well are negligible, and it would potentially be unfair to the original and a waste of my time.

It isn’t a problem – I can slap myself again and go about this in a more businesslike manner, or I can promise I will come back to it when I’m more positively disposed. What really grates is that I find myself in the same position I have been in so often before. I got to about this point with Lasalle a year ago and shelved it, and I wouldn’t like to guess how many such episodes I’ve had with Shako, Napoleon’s Battles, Empire and so many others over the years. No matter – I’ll come back to it.

I still intend to have a proper go at Blücher, too, and though my track record shouldn’t really give me a lot of optimism, you would think, I suspect that (as was the case for Commands & Colors: Napoleonics) the game scale and the concept are sufficiently different from what I’ve done before to give a better chance of my keeping an open mind. I hope so, anyway.

Hooptedoodle #182 - Coping with a Small Irregularity

In the course of every day, unexpected things happen, and the occasional emergency arises. It sounds irritatingly worthy to suggest that we should always expect the unexpected – I had years of management courses which took people’s money off them in exchange for advice like that; it differs in degree only from those other all-conquering life strategies, (1) always be right, and (2) win the Lottery every week.

Expecting the unexpected probably just comes down to application of commonsense, don’t do anything too risky, and be prepared to think on your feet. Know where the stop-cocks are for the water supply, have spare car-keys – stuff like that. Do not put the TV in the bath, do not use your food-processor on top of the Himalayas during a thunderstorm – user guides for just about anything you buy nowadays will be stuffed with sound-but-annoying advice of this sort, in 17 languages.

A real emergency, of course, puts everything else into perspective – my wife broke her shoulder recently (she has now completely recovered, I am delighted to say), and we had a couple of months when a great deal of what we regard as normal procedures and normal priorities just went out of the window, yet it all seemed quite logical and straightforward. Most of the time, you just find you know what to do if something goes wrong, but we do take a lot for granted, I think.

A couple of days ago we got a bit of a fright. My son has his “den” on the ground floor of our house – before the property was altered and extended, 10 years ago, this was one of the bedrooms of the original bungalow cottage which forms the oldest part of the house. My son is coming up 13, and he is, to be honest, a bit heavy-handed these days – he flies about the place at great speed, crashing into walls and skating across tiled areas – he opens doors with a karate chop technique which we have discussed at length in the past. Well, it would be unfair to point any fingers, but the lock on the den door finally collapsed two nights ago. Two I-told-you-so’s come to mind:

(1) I told him, many times, that he would eventually bust the lock

(2) More seriously, I told myself, also many times, that the lock didn’t feel too healthy, and I should do something about it before it broke

As with all I-told-you-so’s, repetition did not help – eventually we become deaf to them.

My son had been out all day with his mother, a day which included his swimming coaching session and a visit to a shopping centre, and his tea was being prepared when suddenly he was trapped in his room. The door handle turned, after a fashion, but the lock was unmoved, so to speak. The door-handle turns a square-section bar which fits into a square socket in a cam, which turns the thingme that pushes that wassname that pulls the how’s-your-father that unfastens the door. After we had assured him that we would have him out of there in no time, I removed the brass handle from the outside, took out the square bar and found the extent of the disaster – the alloy rotating cam into which the bar fits had disintegrated – shattered into fragments. There was nothing left to rotate or poke or fiddle with to get the door open.

So you stop, and you think for a moment – there is always a way, if you just think. I was, of course, thinking of solutions which stopped short of breaking windows, removing door frames, cutting through wood panels etc. No good. If we had planned to trap him forever in his room, we could not have done such a perfect job. Since the door was obviously not going to open, the first priority was to get my son out of there so that we could produce a permanent fix with less immediate panic. “Remove any threat to life” – very sound.

The window – he can climb out of the window! Well, the windows have security bolts, and there is no key for the bolts in that room. OK – if he unlatches the main window catch, the window will move about three-quarters of an inch, which would be enough to get a key through if I climb up a ladder and poke it through.

No good. The windows have expanded with the humidity, and are stuck fast, we would have to do a lot of damage to lever them open, even a bit.

We can slide the security bolt key under the door! – no – the floor is tiled, the door is a heavy, wooden panel door and the gap underneath it is tighter and neater than you would expect to see outside of an engineering facility. You could just about slide through a piece of paper bearing a message of hope.

OK – we can break the window if we have to – if we have to get him out, that is a possibility. Not really – this is double-glazed, toughened glass – anything short of a sledgehammer is not going to do much damage, and we really don’t want broken glass flying around the den.

Now I have a long-standing friendship with Ed, who is a joiner and (wait for it) locksmith! Ed has helped me out of a few holes in the past, and I have his phone number on the wall behind my desk. Excellent! The final, cruel, show-closing snag is that Ed had a serious fall from a fire-escape last year, broke his spine in a couple of places, and – last I heard – is recovering slowly (with titanium bolts inserted) and is unlikely to work again in the foreseeable future.

The perfect trap. We reassured my son that we would have him out as soon as possible, and he happily settled down to enjoy the remainder of his DVD.

It was worth a shot – I rang Ed’s home. His wife told me that Ed had started doing some light jobs again, but that he was out in his van – I might get him on his mobile. It was now 6pm. I rang him on his mobile and – a rarity – actually got to speak to him. Normally in the past I have merely got to develop my relationship with his answering service.    

Suddenly things started going right – very like the old children’s story about the old woman who couldn’t get her pig to jump over a style until a whole string of other prerequisites fell into place. Ed agreed to come around straight away, and duly turned up within 25 minutes. I had spent the 25 minutes steeling myself for the mess and expense of what was obviously going to be a bit of a demolition job.

"Dog! Dog! Bite pig!"

Ed arrived, took out a single sheet of flexible silicone, wiggled it round the angle between the door and the frame, and bingo – the door opened. No fuss, no damage, no drama. I would not have believed it was possible. My son had to interrupt his DVD and get his meal after all, and I paid Ed for his time and the call-out, and subjected him to an embarrassing amount of thanks.

Next morning I went off to a wholesale hardware store in Edinburgh and bought nine (that’s NINE) lock inserts, same size and spec as the broken one – the locks are almost all the same type in our house, and they were all installed ten years ago. I am now going to work my way around the place systematically and replace any unit that is showing signs of wear or not turning properly. I have done two so far – I’ll work away at them. It’s fiddly and sometimes surprisingly mucky, but I’ll keep at it. I’ve also ordered some silicone sheet (in passing, I find it slightly alarming that you can purchase burglar’s kit on Amazon, but I have no complaints) and two types of lock lubricant.

Panic over – on a world scale, this was an insignificant event, and it was solved quickly and simply in the end, but just for a little while I couldn’t see what we were going to do. We watch disaster movies about earthquakes, we hear on the news about tidal waves and the chances of an asteroid hitting Philadelphia, but it comes to something when you suddenly can’t open one of your doors, and a member of your family is trapped. I, for one, have to learn to cope with the small stuff rather better.

My grandma would have told us, "Don't wait until it's raining before you fix the roof". She was a smart woman, my grandma - infuriating, but smart.

Summer Competition - extra clue

I've already received a few entries - some of them really excellent - but I fear that in my attempt not to make the thing too easy I have made it impossibly difficult, so it's only fair to provide a further clue, with apologies to everyone for my lack of brain.

The stretch of water in the background - this is not the actual site, but Operation Avalanche passed near here in Sept 1943. My apologies to anyone who was misled into assuming the Whitby reference must be Dracula.

So - where is the photograph taken, and what is the association of this particular place with Whitby?

Max Foy's Summer Prize Competition 2015

My new fortress (see previous post) will require some painting, and that got me thinking about the other buildings I have waiting to be painted, and that, in turn, got me thinking about having a bit of a chuck-out, which (and the marketing people despair of me) led me to thinking that someone might like the buildings I'm chucking out. Yes, that's right - I am offering to give away some junk I don't want any more - it's as exciting as that.

Nothing wrong with any of them, all but one are still in the original packets, and they are all good quality, resin, 15mm scale buildings. They were all bought in when I was collecting scenery for my ECW project, though a number will fit in well in European 18th and 19th Century theatres, and they have been carefully stored away. I'm getting rid of them because I have enough buildings now, and because these are really sort of 15mm/10mm scale, which are a tad small for my 20mm figures, even though I deliberately use underscale houses in my wargames.

First off, the prizes - these are all unpainted, and since a photograph of an unpainted resin building in a plastic bag is not very informative, I have substituted the manufacturers' pictures of painted examples where possible, which give a better idea - but please remember, the buildings I am giving away are unpainted. If you want to have a shot at the quiz but don't want the buildings, please say so, and you can be a Category B entry.

Some Hovels 15mm buildings:

1T5 - half-timbered house - there are two of these

2T5 - another half-timbered house - two of these as well

6E5 - European double-fronted Guildhall

9A5 - humped-back stone bridge

9M5 - A-frame peasant's hut - medieval

11M5 - a pair of A-frame hovels

Some JR Miniatures 15mm buildings:

#4106 - Prussian-style Eckhaus

#4012 - Austrian/Bavarian village gatehouse

And one from an unknown maker:

British/Northern European farmhouse/manor house

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All right, the Quiz. Here's a photograph which I took myself; it was taken in the early afternoon, on a rather hazy Summer's day in Europe, and I reckon we are facing approximately South-West.

I'd like to know, please, where the photograph was taken - what are we looking at? - and what connection has the picture got with the town of Whitby, in North Yorkshire? I'll judge entries entirely subjectively and unfairly, as always, and will give points for accuracy (based on distance from true location). Bonus points will be given for the Whitby connection, and for humour and additional whizzo facts - an amusing entry which is wide of the mark might well score better than a dead-accurate entry which is, well, dead-boring. There is only one prize - my previous attempt to give a choice of prizes was far too complicated for my poor brain, so the Category A winner will get all of these buildings as a single parcel.

I'll keep the entries open until midnight at the end of 20th July - please send them as comments (which I shall not publish if they are entries) or as emails to the address in my Blogger profile. Only restriction is that I require you to be a regular follower of this blog. Best of luck if you are going to have a go!


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Late, late edit: there is an additional clue in the next post...

eBay Capture - Very Old Toys Dept

I used to have one of these, or at least I had one very similar. This is a fortress made from moulded plastic sheet, manufactured by Eberlein & Co, of Neumarkt, Germany. Eberlein were not a specialist toy maker, they were a plastics company, but they produced toy castles under the trade name Eco, and they produced them in the German style already established by Hausser and Elastolin. [In passing, I am interested to note that Neumarkt is in Bavaria, very close to Regensburg, where I visited two years ago - yes, I realise this is of no interest to anyone else...]

I bought one in the basement toy department of Jenners, in Princes Street, Edinburgh, sometime in the late 1970s. I had grandiose ideas about adding sieges to my stuttering repertoire of wargaming activities, but I think really I just fancied one. Jenners had a choice of different models - this was a smaller one, I think. I have to make two hefty admissions right here and now:

(1) The thing sat in a cupboard for years and years, and never came near to any wargames

(2) Eventually it disappeared, and I cannot for the life of me remember what happened to it. I imagine it went to a charity shop or similar, and I guess the reason I cannot remember the details is because I wasn't interested by that time. Oh well.

This one came from eBay, yesterday. The background to the purchase is the usual haphazard series of coincidences which result in such things. Two years ago, on holiday, I went in a shop in the Salzburg area which had a mighty stock of old Elastolin things, and I was entranced. Crazy prices, and not my thing at all, but pre-war SS marching bands, and all sorts of exotic vehicles and buildings which I found very attractive (in an academic, holiday-time sort of way). Since then I have occasionally had a squint on eBay to see what Elastolin things are on offer - the rule of thumb seems to be that if it is in any kind of decent condition then the price is horrifying. That's OK, I maintain the same sort of vague interest in secondhand Ferraris. Recently a post-war Elastolin castle appeared - it wasn't in especially good nick, it was expensive, and it would need to be collected from a long way away. I thought about it, and watched it as it was relisted twice for lower and lower price. Still wasn't worth it (to me), and I didn't really want anything so big, or so difficult to store.

While I was losing interest in it, there was suddenly this much cheaper Eco castle available, complete with box, and I bought it very quickly, for very little outlay, and it was even shipped here by courier for an extra £7. Well now. I'm really rather pleased with it. It will make a splendid medieval castle section for a Peninsular War fortified city, and it may have applications in the ECW, though I haven't really explored that yet. It's in very good condition, though a bit dusty. It came from a shop that deals in old toys rather than a specialist wargame or military model supplier, so the low price probably reflects the fact that people who want old toy castles really want nice hand-made wooden jobs, not semi-realistic plastic ones.

The scale is around smallish-HO, which is perfect for me (I think the Elastolin castles are really designed for 40mm figures), and the factory paintwork is good and crisp and bright - the tops of the towers are a bit worn, presumably by being slid in and out of the box, but it is so good that I now have a very mild dilemma. Should I "improve" the paintwork? The red roofs are a bit too much of a Royal Mail shade for my taste, and the copper-painted tower on the church is as irritating as I found it in the 1970s. My general feeling is to give the model a good (careful) clean up, smarten up the roofs a bit and then dry-brush some of my house baseboard green colour around the edges so that it blends into the table nicely. my only doubt about this is caused by the fact that it is, in fact, in such good condition. If it had been shabby then it would be a no-brainer, same as for figures - repaint it. However, it is nearly perfect - if it were really old and really valuable, then the no-brainer choice would be to leave it exactly as it is. But it isn't - it's pretty old, and it's interesting to the oddball toy soldier collector like me, but it isn't Elastolin and it isn't valuable - if I were to choose to leave it alone, it would be entirely out of a sense of respect which might be inappropriate.

No. I think I'll do some painting on it.

I'm pretty sure that the plastic sheet is a lot heavier than I remember, so maybe it's not the same vintage as my previous one, and I see that the box is ticked against model #1493 rather than #1495, so there must have been two models of the same overall size, and I seem to recall that Jenners had bigger ones.

Anyway, it's here, and I'm still staring at it and grinning. I don't know how old it is - Eco still exist, though I don't think they do toys any more. If anyone knows any more about these, I'd be interested. I'll be in the courtyard, winding the working drawbridge up and down.


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Late edit: I was doing a bit of browsing about, and I came across this picture, which I use without any permission, which appears to show 3 further Eco castles, placed end to end, none of which is the one I have. I also checked out Eberlein's current website, which says they made toys for a period commencing 1966. I must say they look good, they don't have the cachet or the value (or the scale) of the Elastolins, but they seem a useful buy if you can find one.