Max Foy's Mad April Prize Competition - Results!

Thank you very much for the excellent response to the photo competition – I got a total of 37 entries, which is (by far) the best ever.

The standard was really very good indeed – I am most impressed. Just about everyone placed the camera within a few kilometres of the actual spot. The most common causes of lost marks were (1) being a bit short on gratuitous artistic content, and (2) making no attempt at the question about dying at this location. The more accurate the identification of the actual place the better, obviously. Thanks again for all the effort that went into this.

The photograph was taken in Italy, near the top of the footpath from Sorrento up to Sant’Agata sui due Golfi – the bit of roadway in the foreground is part of the Via Talagnano, just below Sant’Agata itself. We are looking very slightly east of due north, over the town of Sorrento, straight across the Bay of Naples towards Vesuvius. The pale line below the volcano is the sprawl of the suburbs of Naples – Torre del Greco and Torre Annunziata – along to the left is Naples itself. Since you can just about see Naples from this point, it seems logical that it would be just about OK to die up here – see Naples and die – vedi Napoli e poi muori.

There were some interesting references to people dying during the Pompei disaster, to the local Sirens, and – especially – the ancient Greek necropolis on the hills near St Agata, which was subsequently buried under the convent of Il Deserto. However, I was simply looking for the Naples quote.

I offer my humble compliments to all who entered - it took a good while to sort out a finishing order. After much head scratching and chewing of my pencil I decided - and it wasn't easy! - that eight of the entries were sufficiently outstanding to form the final list of prize winners. I have email addresses for some of you anyway, but could the following fine fellows please send me a blog comment (if you didn’t already enter by email!) stating your current/preferred email address – I shan’t publish these, obviously, and will delete them after perusal – you may encrypt the address as you wish – assuming I can still work it out!

1^st – Chris Grice

2^nd – Michael Peterson

3^rd – Steve-the-Wargamer

4^th – nundanket

5^th – Steve Curry

6^th – Gary Amos

7^th – Wellington Man

8^th – Francisco Goya

I’ll contact each of you in turn, listing the prize lots which are still available and asking you to make a choice from what’s left. This may take a week or two, but that gives me a chance to get my collection of boxes and bubblewrap sorted out.

Thanks again – over to you.

Max Foy's Mad April Prize Competition - Update

This is just to thank everyone who has submitted an entry for the photo-quiz (I've had a great response this time), and to remind anyone who wishes to have a go and hasn't done so yet that the closing date is 23:00 UK Summer time tomorrow (17th April) - also please remember that you must be an official follower or regular email correspondent of this blog to enter, and if you wish to enter for glory only, and are not interested in the prize lots, please say so, and you can be entered in Category B.

No supplementary clues were required this year, though I can confirm that the place in the photo is neither Scarborough nor Gallipoli. You see me above, considering the excellent submissions to date - great fun.

New Trotman Book - and a nerdy question

Delighted to say that Jamie the Postie brought a parcel today which turns out to be the keenly-awaited new Spanish Army title by Gerard Cronin and Dr Stephen Summerfield, published by Ken Trotman - this one covers the cavalry, foot guards and artillery of the early Peninsular War.

Haven't had a proper read yet, but it looks just as good as the infantry title. Excellent - very pleased.

Subject 2 - I recently acquired a few of these chaps - this is a British Artillery driver, as you will see, from the Minifigs S-Range series (long, long ago...), and the particular reason I was quite excited to get these, along with their limber horses, is that they give me a chance to further the constant struggle for Creeping Elegance, and replace the draught teams from my British ammunition caissons, which are all Lamming castings at present - nice, but just a touch overscale. Such a change would mean that I could feel much more comfortable parking the caissons near the limber teams. Slight fly in the ointment is that you will notice that this driver has a pistol holster on his right hip. I hadn't really thought about this, but it has been suggested to me that only the drivers in the Rocket Troop had pistols like this, and that the driver castings might be from the S-Range Rocket Troop set.

Now you may feel that I could just brass this out, and claim that it is a well-known fact that caisson drivers wore pistols too, but I thought I would check if anyone knows about this. Any thoughts? It would be a dreadful thing if an army which is already stuffed with errors and anachronisms were to drift any further from the true path. That would not be proper Creeping Elegance at all.

Subject 3 - this was borrowed shamelessly from someone's Facebook page, and I apologise for the low-res picture, but I liked it - seen on a Glasgow baker's van...

Hooptedoodle #217 – Julie & Steve – where do dreams come from?

Thoughts over coffee on a foggy morning.

I awoke this morning with a tune running in my head – not an uncommon occurrence, in fact, but sometimes puzzling. This morning’s tune was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it, so I tried to concentrate. It was obviously the bridge from some well-known standard song or other, and I knew the song, if I could just identify it. Bad news with bridges from standard songs, of course, is that many of them are interchangeable – you can substitute the middle section of a different song, and a lot of people will not notice. This is common practice for an ageing pianist friend of mine, whose memory is not what it was; these days, bless him, he is still working – he does a solo spot on Monday nights in a vegetarian restaurant – and his unorthodox musical arrangements are all right in such a context, but the combination of his fading memory, his increasing deafness and his growing reluctance to listen to what anyone else is doing makes him a dangerous man to do a gig with. That was a digression.

Back to this morning.

The words “a cottage for two” seemed to belong with this fragment of tune, and after some more runs-through [correct plural form?] I convinced myself that I could sort of imagine Julie London singing it, in a slightly breathless way, but I still couldn’t work out what it was. Eventually, after breakfast, before I lost the thing altogether, I dug out my Julie London CDs (and there are a few) and I found it. It seems I had woken up humming (in my head) the bridge from “Give Me the Simple Life”, which is a so-so sort of song – the only recorded version I have is on a middling (and little-known) album called “Julie at Home”, and it’s probably one of the less memorable tracks on that album.

So it is a song I have not heard in 12 years, I would guess, and have not thought about during that time. If someone wanted to play it, and gave me the key, I could probably busk my way through it, and I would probably remember the bridge when we got there, but otherwise it doesn’t mean anything to me. So why was it on my mind this morning?

Hmmm.

I am reminded of an occasion a little while ago when I woke from a dream in which I was having a conversation with a chap named Steve Platt. Nothing worrying or threatening about that, but Steve Platt in my dream was about 15 years old, and wearing the same blazer and spectacles as he was the last time I saw him, at grammar school in the 1960s. Strange? – Steve was not a particular friend of mine, I had very little to do with him – after age 15 or so he went off in a different class, to study Arts subjects, when I did Science. We never had any fallings out, played no sports together – hardly any interaction at all – I didn’t particularly admire or dislike the kid. If someone had now shown me a photo of my school class at that time he might be one of the half dozen I couldn’t remember a name for. So what was he doing, in such clear focus, in my dream half a century later?

It doesn’t matter, of course, but it’s kind of interesting. Somebody told me once that the human brain does a lot of re-organising of itself while you’re asleep – this is a healthy and necessary activity, and dreaming is part of this. People who do not dream are liable to develop mental and nervous disorders – prolonged reliance on sleeping pills can result in such a condition. The reason we cannot remember our dreams is, apparently, because they do not use memory in the same way as our conscious thoughts do – it also occurs to me that it would drive us all crazy if we could.

I suppose I dream most nights – most of us do. I don’t know how long I dream for, but I must have spent many thousands of hours of my life humming tunes and meeting ex-school chums during adventures which I could not remember the following day. OK – if that’s how it works I have no problem with it, but the nightly defragmentation job (or whatever it is) must get to some pretty dark corners if it comes up with Steve Platt or the bridge from “Simple Life”. Idly (of course), I wonder about it.

I have the impression that sometimes I have recurrent dreams, or bits of dreams – especially in terms of finding myself in a town or a place which I recognise, and do not like, though when I have woken from the occasional recurring nightmare I have been fairly sure that they were not real places I remembered from real experience – they were some synthesis which I recalled from previous dreams – or maybe I just dreamed that I recognised them.

Anyway – that was this morning’s pointless ramble, over my coffee. These things intrigue me, in a casual sort of way, but surely you must have something better to do than read this? Have a good day, whatever it is.

Max Foy's Mad April Prize Competition

It’s been a while since I had a clear-out, so here’s Max Foy’s Mad April Prize Competition. If you can bear it, I’ve gone once again for the photo-detectives format, which has produced a lot of entertainment (for me, anyway) on previous occasions.

First of all, then, here’s the quiz photo. The photo is one of mine, so you won’t find it on Google Image. It was taken in midsummer, in Europe, at about 11:15am, after a fairly strenuous walk up through woods from the town below.

Please, what can you see, and from where was this photo taken (as exactly as you can make it)? Also (and importantly), in a sense, why is it just about all right to die up here?

As ever, I shall judge entries on a totally unfair, subjective basis, and many marks will be available for humour, unnecessary detail and implausible stories – a hilarious incorrect answer is quite likely to score as highly as a glib one-liner giving the correct GPS reference.

The Goodies (I hope this lot is interesting…)

Books

Lot 1 – Signed Copy of Bernard Cornwell’s “Waterloo” – mint

Lot 2 – “Out of Nowhere – A History of the Military Sniper” – Martin Pegler – minor shelf wear, otherwise perfect, clean copy

Lot 3 – “The Sleepwalkers” - Prof Chris Clark’s highly-praised account of the political slide into WW1 – pretty much mint

Lot 4 – Michael Glover’s “The Napoleonic Wars” (exc cond) plus John Keegan’s “Mask of Command” (a little brown around the edges, but decent nick).

Lot 5 – “The Smoke and the Fire” by John Terraine plus John Foley’s “The Boilerplate War” – both in vgc.

Lot 6 – Biographies – Vincent Cronin’s “Napoleon” (goodish cond) plus a paperback edition (vgc) of “The Green Dragoon” by Robert D Bass, an (American!) bio of Bloody Ban Tarleton, the notorious Scouse cavalryman

Lot 7 – Alternative Napoleonic History – David Hamilton-Williams’ two much-criticised works – “Waterloo – New Perspectives” (hbk vgc) and “The Fall of Napoleon – the Final Betrayal” (pbk – vgc). Too much has been said about the mystery surrounding the true identity of DHW, his credentials and his tendency to quote himself as a source. These books are very entertainingly written, provide some challenging interpretations of the history, and – let’s face it – say some things which needed to be said. Keep the salt handy, but these are great fun – don’t make them your standard references, though.

Toys & Games

Lot 8 – A good little Spanish boardgame - "2 de Mayo" (about the 1808 revolt in Madrid) – complete and in exc cond – plus a toy bus(!) – all right, this is the wrong scale for my collection, but a lovely 1/50 1950s-style Corgi Leyland Tiger in Ribble colours (NW England) – complete with COA – the model is mint, the box a little distressed.

Lot 9 – “The Hunters” – excellent Consim Press game about WW2 U-Boat warfare – punched, but complete and in perfect cond.

Lot 10 – “Empire” Napoleonic wargame system (1^st edition? – 1990 anyway) plus the companion “Empire Campaign System” – both complete and unpunched, boxes a little scuffed at the edges.

Lot 11 – 6 boxes of Italeri set no. 6030“Battlefield Accessory Set” – a lifetime supply of 1/72 scale gabions, gun positions, temporary bridges, fascines, chevaux de frises and so on. Left over from yet another Grand Plan of mine which was overtaken by events – perfect.

Regulations and Stuff (please do read this bit)

Send entries to me, please, before the closing date (23:00 UK Summer Time, Sunday 17^th April) – you can send as email to the address in my profile, or as comments to this post (which I shall not publish). You must be an official follower of this blog, unless you are a regular, non-Google correspondent known to me. If you want to have a go at the competition but you don’t want any of the prizes, please say so and you’ll be entered in Category B…

When the days are accomplished, and I’ve decided which entries entertained me most, I’ll post some names of winners, and we can start a background dialogue of who gets what – I’ll rank the winners, and the top of the list gets first choice (I hope this is going to work). One slightly niggardly rule, if you don’t mind – I’d appreciate it if winners could help me out with the postage – I promise I’ll do the mailing at the cheapest effective rate, but sending parcels of books to Foreign Parts can be a bit of an overhead.

Hooptedoodle #216 - Donkey Award - The Bank of Scotland

This is not going to be a rant, just a straight description of my recent adventures with the Bank of Scotland. If any of this seems odd or unsatisfactory from a customer’s point of view, I leave a judgement on that to the reader.

Some years ago I disposed of a (very) small business which I owned, and I closed the Bank of Scotland business account which I had opened for it. In fact I had made very little use of this account – the charges for deposits and cheque payments were unattractively high, and the account was really only used on the relatively rare occasions when a customer paid me by cheque – my main clients mostly paid by bank transfer (which was much cheaper) and my smaller customers almost always paid in cash (which, of course, was free).

So I went into the Dunbar High Street branch of Bank of Scotland, sometime around October 2011, handed over my cards and cheque book and paying-in books and returned the (unused) security token which I had been issued, and requested that the account be closed. All the bits and pieces were accepted over the counter, but I was told I would have to write to a particular address in Basingstoke to get the account closed.

OK – I did that. After this I received occasional letters advising me of subsequent changes to interest rates and account terms, but you would expect that – this is a bank, after all, and banks are idiots. In 2013 I was sent a replacement security token, which I promptly returned to the Dunbar branch.

Around February this year I received a letter telling me that the terms of this supposedly dead account were to change; from some date in the near future I would start paying some £8.60 per month just for the privilege of having it – if I were to use it in any way, of course, the charges would be much more punitive. So this time I gave up on the losers in Dunbar, and I went to see my friends in the North Berwick branch of BoS, told them that I thought I had already got rid of this problem, and asked them to sort things out, since I really didn’t want to pay anything for an account which I didn’t want or use, and which I had thought no longer existed.

The lady on the business desk was very helpful – she found my account on the computer files, and told me that they had never closed the account, since it had a positive balance of £2.42. This was a bit of a surprise, since I thought it had been empty when I closed it (or failed to close it, as it appears).

Anyway, now I received £2.42 in my hand, and signed a couple of bits of paper which authorised the bank lady to close the account. Very good – job done.

Not so fast. A letter arrived today to tell me that I now owe them 71 pence, which will be billed to this same account on 17^th April. A statement was enclosed, dated 10^th March, which shows that I was billed £0.70 for the debit of £2.42 from the account because – well, because that’s the charge for a withdrawal – plus an additional charge of 0.65% of the amount withdrawn – i.e. 1 penny.

Presumably they have been unable to close the account this time because there is a negative balance. Furthermore, apart from the potential monthly account fee of £8.60, I fear that I may be about to be hit with a further charge of £15 for having an unauthorised overdraft of 71 pence.

Whatever else I might have imagined I would be doing tomorrow, I now realise that I will be going back to the Bank of Scotland’s North Berwick branch at exactly 9:30am, and I am sincerely hoping that I will find some grown-ups in. I trust and believe that those lovely people will do what is necessary to prevent any further cost and inconvenience, but if they do not manage it I think I can promise that a rant will follow sometime later.

Just off the top of your heads, can anyone think of a single reason why we should continue to deal with retail banks? I have to confess that I am struggling to come up with anything. 

Wargaming Dangerous? - It May Be Official

I received an alarming email from Allan B, a veteran wargamer who lives in Nevada. Allan is also employed by the Nevada State Division of Environmental Protection, and he has become aware of some possible future regulations which may be of interest to wargamers everywhere.

There is a current civil lawsuit, which has not yet come to court, which involves a claim by a museum employee that he has had his health seriously damaged by working in an environment containing vintage diecast and other toys, without adequate protective measures being put in place. Little is known of the detail of this case as yet, but there is general concern that old toys containing lead and other heavy metals in alloy are seen as potentially unsafe.

One immediate effect is that the forthcoming wargames show in Carson City this summer is likely to be able to proceed only under special licence, and the insurers for the event have already pulled out, pending further investigations. It is possible that attendees will have to be issued with some kind of protective clothing – probably only gloves, though the possibility of some kind of breathing apparatus for staff working on the stands is not being ruled out.

The problem is State Regulation NRS 459.3816, apparently, which lays down requirements for organisations employing staff in potentially hazardous situations. Lead is present in most old paints, and lead and antimony were very common ingredients in cast metal toys manufactured until the 1970s. The difficulty, apparently, is not helped by the lack of precise knowledge of the dates when standard practice changed, nor of the exact age or manufacturing details of specific toys. Lead, in particular, can become unstable as it ages, and toxic free ions may be released with no apparent visible change to the object. The effects of lead poisoning are well known.

As yet there is no mention of the possibility of regulation concerning the domestic use of such old toys, but this may also become an issue, especially if the court case sets any worrying precedents. If the court finds in the claimant's favour, the knock-on effects could be world-wide.

Start looking for your grandad’s old gas mask?