Hooptedoodle #244 - Seasonal Exercise in Self-Indulgence

A week or so ago I was stopped in my tracks by a painting in one of the local high street galleries - I liked it so much that I bought it as a Christmas gift for my wife.

As I mention here frequently (ad nauseam?), the Contesse and I are both very keen on our local wildlife - she in particular is a very skilled photographer - and I knew she would love this picture. It is an original, acrylic on natural linen, by the Scottish artist, Helen Welsh. Helen is based in Perthshire, a little north of here; she worked for many years, very successfully, as an illustrator for the Dundee-based publisher, DC Thomson (no, she didn't draw the pictures in the Beano), and has now retired to concentrate on her original passion, painting Scottish wildlife.

Anyway, by any standards a piece of original art is a bit of an extravagance here at Chateau Foy, but we are very pleased with it, and I thought some of you skilled wielders of acrylics out there might appreciate it also.

Here, then, is A Hare in Winter, by Helen Welsh. Let it serve as a simple, locally-themed greeting card to all readers of the old Aspic blog - I wish everyone a happy, peaceful, comfortable Christmas, and may next year be a little less crazy than 2016 turned out. All the best!

Hooptedoodle #243 – Dear Mummy and Daddy

Clearing out my mother’s house has now reached a greater level of detail – I am now spending more time with my head in boxes of stuff, sorting out what should be kept. I take care to have my name and address written on the soles of my shoes, in case I need to be rescued.

Paper.

My mum seems to have every postcard that she was ever sent, and a great heap of birthday cards and letters, accumulated in large manila envelopes, with not the slightest trace of classification – a trip into one of these envelopes is just a mind-numbing exercise in randomness. She certainly has no idea what’s in there, and I’m not sure if she remembers many of the people who sent them, so it’s a little complicated – though interesting in its way.

Recently I found some letters from me, written when I was very young. Mostly letters about forgotten trips, written by a child I cannot really remember having been. About the earliest of these dates from a week I spent in hospital – I had some stomach problems – certain foods made me sick, and the doctors decided that my appendix had to come out. To this day, I’m not convinced there was anything at all wrong with my appendix, but at that time the medical profession was just itching to separate kids from their tonsils, adenoids and appendices (?) at the slightest excuse.

Myrtle Street hospital, a few years after I was there

So my stay in the Liverpool Children’s Hospital, Myrtle Street, was one of the very earliest times I was separated from my mother. I have remembered some things about this episode, and more came flooding back when I saw the letter.

(1) A stout lad named Gordon, who was in the next bed – he had some horrifying sort of drain in his knee, but his main claim to fame was that he used to lend me some pretty raunchy American comics he had inherited from his big brother

(2) Ribena – aargh – they forced gallons of blackcurrant flavour squash down us – served up in aluminium mugs. Woe betide anyone who didn’t finish it. I still can’t stand the stuff.

(3) The smell of hot tar. It was fine, warm weather, and throughout my stay the City Council was pulling up the old tramlines outside in Catherine Street and Myrtle Street, and laying tarmac – a very big project. A week with an asphalt cooker outside your window is not recommended.

(4) Most exciting - we had a visit from Roy Rogers. Now then – my lifelong devotion to celebrities got off to a flying start. This is the thing I wanted to recall here.

Roy Rogers (1911-98), in case you are not old enough to have heard of him, was a very big deal at the time – children all over the world just loved him – it said so on his publicity posters. Born Len Slye in Cincinnati, he was a Western cowboy movie star, recording artist (he was, to be fair, not a bad singer if you like that sort of thing) and a complete merchandising operation – very impressive – he even had a string of restaurants named after him. Me and my mates were not too convinced about Roy. When we went to the Saturday morning cinema matinee (at the Gaumont in Allerton Road, which was a bit less rough than our local flea-pits), the cowboy films we preferred starred Lash LaRue (which sounds a bit dodgy now), Monte Hale, Rocky Lane, Tim Holt – we were definitely less keen on the more showbiz style productions starring Roy Rogers or Hopalong Flaming Cassidy – though Rogers’ movies were normally in colour, which was unusually luxurious for that market.

Roy was doing a European theatre tour at the time, and he visited Liverpool. It seems remarkable now, but this caused about as much excitement as if the Pope had come. Crowds lined the streets to greet him, and he and his trusty horse, Trigger, were accommodated at the Adelphi, which was probably Liverpool’s only worthwhile hotel at the time. It has become a matter of Merseyside folklore that Trigger had his own room, which I’ve always dismissed as celeb goss (darlings) – I assumed that Trigger had stayed in the Adelphi’s stables. However, it seems that he was installed in a room – at least the official records claim that he was. Trigger duly appeared on a balcony, to acknowledge the cheering fans below. You get the idea – these were rather dismal days, I guess, and Liverpool was pretty close to the Third World.

Roy and Trigger enter the Adelphi

Trigger signs into the hotel (surely not?), and visits his master, who was laid
low with influenza, apparently - maybe this disrupted his schedule. 

You may imagine the breathless excitement when Roy and Trigger were to visit the Children’s Hospital during my stay. The place was cleaned and then cleaned again – no comics or spare plates or anything were to be in sight – the nursing staff had their best No.1 kit on, starched and flawless, and everyone was very tense. Including me, of course – I was prepared to swallow my normal disbelief in Roy’s marketed persona, just to bask for a moment in the glamorous world of Hollywood. The word was that the Liverpool Echo would send a cameraman, and photos would be taken with the kids. How cool is that?

Well, it really turned out to be an early lesson in How Things Rarely Turn Out As You Hoped. The official party was 3 hours late. Trigger was not allowed in the hospital (probably just as well), and Rogers made a very fast pass through the wards. I had a brief, distant glimpse of a rather uninteresting-looking, hatless, middle-aged man in a pale grey business suit, who waved from the door of the ward (a ward which was about the size of a football field). So much for celebs. My contempt for the Roy Rogers brand was confirmed and reinforced – he was never forgiven.

This clip is maybe a little more like the sort of extravaganza I expected to see during the visit. Not a bad singer, but as a tough-guy cowboy hero he was a bit of a girl's blouse, wasn't he?

French Siege Train: More Gunners

Thanks for positive reaction to the painted SHQ siege artillerymen from last week. I quite enjoyed the "factory" process of painting up the first lot of gunners for the Siege Train, so was happy to bash on ahead this week and get the rest of them done. It went well enough (though my current favourite brush seems to be moulting), and I got them finished quite quickly.

Two batteries of howitzers and two of Gribeauval mortars, to add to the siege cannons

I have to confess to a faint unease about this little project - I'm happy to have made such good progress (eventually), but there is something about it which maybe says something about me which I don't really care for. Online, one sees all sorts of projects which are beautiful, or which make use of rare and glorious figures, or which represent the height of the figure-painter's art for us to relish. This is none of these things - it is just BIG. Having decided to do it, I have gone about it (relentlessly?) and got it finished - it's kind of industrial. Never mind - I guess it's a personal style or something.

All right then - let's have a look at what's in this box now...

...all right, that's the whole lot

That's the guns ready for the French siege train, then - I may paint a couple of water buckets or ammo chests to make the bases more interesting, and I have some officers and some digging soldiers to paint - all looking quite promising. Another major gap in the Napoleonic siege effort is I still have to obtain some of the special MDF buttresses to enable guns to stand on my Vauban walls - it's in hand - the drawings exist, I just have to meet Michael from Supreme Littleness for a coffee next week and we are back on track.

Good. I'll tidy the brushes away until after Christmas.

Separate Topic - more pottery buildings.

I have obtained a couple more buildings for my ECW town...

On the right, The Priory, Lavenham, on the left a rather odd church...

...it's flat-backed! What in model railway circles I believe we used to call
low relief - this is a church to stick in the distance, against the edge of the table. 

French Siege Train: A Little Progress

The guns were painted up months ago, but recent diversions in the Real Life Dept have meant that the siege train has been stuck in a siding for a while.

You wish to lose a wall? a bastion, perhaps? These are the boys for you

The first batch of gunners are now painted and ready - I'm pleased with them. As ever, they are finished in my simple old toy soldier style, and the unpretentious little SHQ/Kennington crewmen are absolutely fine for purpose. These are the 3 batteries of 24pdr siege guns (old La Vallière pattern models, as is historically accurate for the French in Spain, though the purist might object to the rather later style of jacket...). The crews for the mortars and howitzers are undercoated and on the bottletops, so they should follow shortly.

The siege train also merits some senior officers to go with it, so I'll see what I can come up with.

Jean-Marie ponders - dolphins? why dolphins?

Sieges: A Small Matter of Supplies (and Mining, Just a Bit)

I’m pleased to say that my elderly mother is now safely moved to a care home, which is the best outcome all round – it has been a very difficult and distressing time. Also, we have now sold her house, which was quicker and far easier than it might have been, so, with a bit of luck, my life should be returning to something a bit nearer a state of normality in the next few weeks.

Without  wishing to jump the gun, I thought it would be good to plan a celebratory wargame – a proper, social wargame – for the first time in ages. And it also seemed like an opportunity to try out the siege game again, after my brief but unsustained spell of progress in April. When I come to think about it, though, there is a bit of a problem. It’s all very well running a solo siege, correcting (frequently inventing) rules as I go along, and glossing over the incomplete bits (such as supply – and then there’s mining…), but playing this as an actual game with real people requires a rather more polished show. Thus I am proposing to get the rules typed up in a sensible form (sort of), and fill in the more obvious holes in the game. If some motivational soul ever points out to me that a problem is really an opportunity, my instinct is normally to give them the opportunity of removing my cup of coffee from their shirt front, but it does seem a good idea to embrace this excuse for getting the rules written up. Yes – all right – before I forget them again – quite so. Thank you.

Let’s deal with mining very quickly, and I’ll return to it in some future post. In about 2010, Clive S came up here to help out with some siege testing, and it was pretty good fun, but one thing that was clearly wrong was the effectiveness of mining. Mining was so devastatingly successful in the test game that it made us wonder why anybody ever bothered with all that tedious bombardment stuff. As I frequently do, I shelved the problem, pending some great leap of inspiration or some further research. My shelves are overloaded with things like that. 

Trouble was that my mining rules were so brilliantly clever that I had completely missed the point, and failed to check the dimensions of the problem. Clive and I had our mining parties tunnelling at speeds which would have left the machines which dug the Channel Tunnel miles behind. I will not give details of just how fast our miners could dig – it’s too embarrassing – but if such speeds had been possible then it is clear that mining would definitely have been the standard approach – in fact the whole history of fortification  (and everything else) would have been vastly different. Just put it down as a misunderstanding.

I did a fair amount of reading of late – the most useful source was a nice little booklet published by the Shire people, Siege Mines and Underground Warfare, by Kenneth Wiggins. He actually discusses digging and tunnelling techniques, but the main thing I took from all this scholarship is that miners who had no bad luck and knew what they were doing would do well to average 3 paces a day for the progress of a tunnel.

Ah – right. 3 paces a day is about 20 paces a week, which is one tenth of the way across one of my terrain hexes. This is a very small nibble indeed in one of our battlefields, and requires a whole new look at the matter. Hmmm. This also explains why mining was something of a secondary activity – though useful on its day, of course. I’ll think about this.

Just before I leave the subject of mining – does anyone know where they keep those Channel Tunnel digging machines when they are not using them? Just wondered. It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing you would throw on the back of a low-loader and off to the next job – interesting…

So – supplies.

SUPPLIES!

I am looking for some dead-easy approach to supplies which does not lead to either insanity or a crippling bookkeeping industry, yet prevents the matter being forgotten completely. My rule of thumb (it may be one of Foy’s Laws, but I can’t remember which one) is that the cleverer and more realistic you make your add-on rules (command, morale, supply, whatever), the more fiddly they become and the more likely they are to be dropped during an otherwise exciting game. In other words, if you really wish to exclude all consideration of command and activation from your wargame (for example), spend a few weeks developing the cleverest rule system the world has ever seen to cover this, and the players will just abandon it on the day. [This may have some parallels in the world of Brexit legislation, but let us not go there.]

I started off with provender – I’ll leave ammunition for the moment. Starting place, obviously, is Bruce Quarrie. Interesting, but far too much information, man. Can’t see the wood for the flipping trees. From the classic Siege of Dendermonde I picked up the useful idea of 2 lbs of bread plus 1 lb of meat per man per day. Ron Miles had a lot of detail in there about how many portions of meat you get from slaughtering a cow (1000) or a sheep (80) or even a cat (1.5), so I decided the simplest way to do this is add the whole lot together as food rations – not to worry what the recipe of the day was. The important bit is that a soldier needs 3 lbs of food a day. A magazine will contain a weight of food, and I’ll formulate some rules on how much this needs to be. As a quick aside, this is an aspect of warfare I have always studiously avoided – so I was interested to see what amounts are involved here.

My unit of strength for my ECW forces is the base – 6 figs per base for foot (200 men), 3 per base for horse (100). It occurred to me that it might be a nice additional convenience to add fodder into the food stores as well, and assume that 100 horsemen consume the same amount as 200 foot – let us stop short of whether the men can eat hay or the horses like their beef well cooked – I’m looking for the simplest-ever supply system.

This is a detailed depiction of 4 lbs of food - that's all you need to know

Thus a base of foot will require 200 x 7 x 3 lbs per week, which is, near enough, 2 tonnes, if you add in the drink. That is a lot – thus a regiment of 3 bases of foot will eat their way through 6 tonnes a week, and (by dint of my bovine assumption of equivalence) a unit of 4 bases of horse will require 8 tonnes. On the basis of no science at all, I’ll assume that an artillery unit needs 4 tonnes a week – they have few personnel but a great many draught animals.

The poor old citizenry do not get to eat as heartily as the soldiers. I’ll assume that 1 tonne will feed 500 civilians for a week. OK – that gives me a basis to get started. I’ll add a rule about rations – military and civilian personnel may get full, ¾, ½, ¼ or no rations – which will affect the health and vigour and general happiness of all parties. Oh yes – about the civilians…

In the absence of factual historical data, the population of a township or conurbation can be generated by the formula nD6 x k, where n has the following values:

Major City – 15

Provincial City – 10

Market Town – 6

Village or fortress – 3

My first assumption is that k should be 250 (I may change my mind later) – thus a market town turning up 6 4 4 3 3 1 with its 6 dice has a population of 21 x 250 = 5250.

Standard split is 50% females; for both sexes, one quarter are children and infants, one quarter old or infirm, thus one half able-bodied. Overall split then is

Females – children 12.5%, able bodied 25%, old/infirm 12.5% and the same for Males, so our market town of 5250 might yield 25% able-bodied men = 1315 approx.

Now I need to check how much you can get in a wagon, how much on a mule. I bet Bruce Quarrie has something on this…

Next I need to develop this a bit, and work out some dice algorithms for the relationship between diet and vigour, vigour and susceptibility to outbreaks of fever; I also need to work out some rules for how the effective strength of a garrison is affected by the need to police the population, and how the attitude and loyalty of the population is affected by things like food supply, sustained bombardment. Lots to think about – that’s OK, I have some more free time and a bit more spare brainpower than I had a week or two ago, so I’ll enjoy the challenge!

Hooptedoodle #242 – They Say the Neon Lights are Bright on Broadband

In which a new gizmo arrives, and British Telecom make one last, bravura attempt to be a pain in the backside.

As I mention fairly regularly, I live in a rural area, and one of the consequences of this is that we have had very poor broadband since forever. This in itself is just a fact of life if you choose to live in the middle of nowhere, but things have actually got steadily worse over recent years – for a start, there are more people online out here, so traffic levels are getting further and further beyond the capacity of the available service, and, for another thing, the global assumption that everyone now has fibre-optic connections which blow your hat off has meant that all the resulting add-on claptrap noise of advertising screws up what bandwidth is left by sending you gratuitous video clips of things you didn’t want to see in the first place. In the last couple of years, it has been a feature of my email that I cannot read it until I have seen some advert of the day – frequently this is a completely irrelevant American advert (this because our ISP, BT, provide an email service which is really just a very poor relation of Yahoo’s), and often it could take up to a minute to reach me from a server in Ohio or similar. Your blood pressure can do some surprising things in a minute.

The fundamental problem has been the distance between here and our nearest telephone exchange. We pay BT for a service which is officially 1 Mb/sec, but it is normally about one fifth of that. Not fast. We were, of course, promised by that nice Mr Cameron that everyone in Britain would soon have superfast broadband, and BT have even published some grandiose plans for implementing this, but no-one was holding their breath around here. BT have finally admitted that there will be 5% of the UK population for whom fast broadband is just not going to be available – we are in the 5%. You may imagine us, sitting around a campfire in our animal skins, playing with bones and baying at the moon.

Well, there is a new game in town. As a result of a local government initiative, a private company, Lothian Broadband, has created a new infrastructure which provides broadband by wireless connection. Our hamlet is now connected. Our broadband is transmitted from the hill of Traprain Law, some 10 miles away, a shared receiver/relayer then sends signals to the individual households, via little aerials – ours is shown in the photo. As broadband goes, it is not especially cheap, but for a total outlay similar to what I was paying BT we now get an effortless 12Mb/sec. This may not seem impressive to you, but for us this is a whole new world.

Good.

Very pleased.

I have, of course, taken the opportunity to remove broadband from the services I receive from BT. It was harder to get it sorted out than I expected. As of last month, I was paying BT some £69 per month in total, including a charge for this lamentable broadband service, and – as it happens – my account was some £83 in credit. I spent a fair amount of time on the phone to BT on Thursday, explaining that I wished to keep my telephone services exactly as they were, but to drop the broadband. OK. It was explained to me that my new monthly bill (ignoring any extra call charges that arise) will be £28.74 per month. That seems reasonable – that’s about £40 down on what it was, which compares favourably with the £35 I shall be paying to the new broadband provider.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I received a confirmatory email stating that my new monthly payment to BT from December would be £72. That’s right – though my account is in credit at the moment, and though the broadband will be removed from the service I receive, my monthly payment was to increase by £3. The email stated that if I did not agree with this, or if there was something incorrect about the proposed changes to the service, I should phone 0800 800 150. So I did.

This number puts you in touch with a technical support team (in New Delhi), who do not know anything about the product ranges or the pricing. All they could do was arrange for the Sales people (in Leeds, I think) to phone me back. This was done, and eventually I got confirmation that the revised service will be what I actually asked for, and that the monthly payment will, in fact, be about £30. That’s more like it.

There was a time when I would have been interested to know just why they had been prepared to charge me a completely fraudulent amount, but I no longer care. I don’t get my broadband from them any more. They can, in fact, go to Hell.

Grateful Thanks from the Wilds

Strange couple of days here - our local electricity supplier has seen fit to do some line upgrades, which is always a good idea, but the result has been that we were without power during daylight hours for a couple of days. We are, of course, in a very rural area - probably only about 14 or 15 households affected by this work - but why November? The first day coincided with the gales and freezing rain associated with the northern fringes of Storm Angus (which was a lot less severe here than further south). It also coincided with the day that Dod the Gardener was coming to trim down the top of the second of our juniper trees, so that our exciting new wireless broadband service may have an uninterrupted line of sight connection from the main transmitter on Traprain Law. The second day, probably fortuitously, prevented the broadband installation anyway, so Dod and the Broadband Men (I have all their albums) will get a second chance at all that tomorrow.

Why November? Is it just that we don't matter much here, or is there some ancient tribal vendetta at work?

Anyway, we've got through the two days. No, the downtime was not restricted to the promised hours - there was a period of overrun yesterday, after dark, when there was not much to do but sit and stare at the log stove (see photo), which is very therapeutic, in fact. Brandy helps, too.

I thought I'd take this chance to thank everyone who pitched in after my plea for help with some Hinton Hunt hussars (see here). Many thanks to Clive, Matt, Simon, Ian, Martin S, Chris and a few others for advice and suggestions, and especially to Roy, Andy T and Old John for providing castings. If I've forgotten to mention anyone, then thanks anyway - this has all been very heartwarming. The project to produce an actual unit of the Husares Españoles (to replace the unit which I currently have-but-hate...) will proceed with dignity and care, rather than speed, but I shall certainly see it through. The tricky bit will be the production of convincing command conversions. You will hear more of this, be sure of that.

Thanks again, anyway - very much indeed.

You may have observed that my previous post on the subject of Trumpo has now been suppressed. I was asked if I had been threatened or imprisoned or anything, and the answer is, of course, no. I thank everyone who contributed comments and balanced appraisal - I simply decided that if I am to be off-blog for a while, I would rather not have a post about Trumpo hanging around as a lasting legacy and reminder. I really don't find Trumpo very amusing at the moment.