Fighting Next Weekend

On Saturday 30th, I'll be hosting another get-together with those Perthshire Paladins, those Transpontine Terrors, Baron Stryker and Count Goya.

Our action on this occasion will be based on the "EPIC"-sized Commands & Colors scenario for Talavera de la Reina (1809). On my largest available table, this will be staged at about one-half scale, compared to the real battle. Given some more boards and a bigger hall, Talavera is one of the Peninsular War actions I'd like to try on a full, double-width C&CN - I believe we have enough soldiers. [I'd also like to stage a hefty version of Salamanca sometime, but we might have to recruit some more division commanders, and I have some figure painting to do.]

As things stand, Talavera at one-half scale will certainly do to be going on with. I'm very much aware that the worthy JJ recently did a fabulous 18mm version of Talavera - we won't be attempting to compete with the visual riches of that fine effort, but our game promises to be pretty good anyway.

It's a well known tradition, that all the battles of the British Army took place on a hillside, in the rain, at the junction of two maps. On the 30th we shall have another logistical impediment - this is to be one of a series of Saturdays when engineering work will cause the cancellation of all train services to stations in East Lothian, so my visiting generals will have to drive here. If you suspect this might give me a slight, unfair advantage, consider (if you will) how much it must have cost me to arrange this deal with the Scotrail management. My intelligence people have been surpassing themselves.

I'll publish some set-up pictures as we get towards the end of next week.

Steve St Clair and a quarter of a million friends

Someone sent me the link to this video; I hadn't seen it before, though I would guess it is very famous. If you have concerns about the size of your current project, or if you are running out of space for your collection, check this out.

Stripping & Grinding Dept - new kit

Well, it's here. With all due gratitude to everyone who provided advice and guidance, I ordered up a Proxxon rotary tool, and it has arrived, as have a couple of rather nifty little work-stand/clamp/things. I have the safety goggles, the bright lights and the Metallica teeshirt (all right, this last bit is a lie) - I am ready to set about those Bavarian plumes, as a kick-off project.

I'm a little nervous about the bulk and the weight of the tool itself - it's certainly more massive than a needle file or a scalpel. If I have difficulties I'll treat myself to the add-on flexible drive, which means you can leave the main tool on the desktop (or on your lap, as shown in a YouTube demo I was watching - that makes me a little nervous too, but OK). The flexible drive means that the thing you hold in your hand to work with is rather like a dentist's drill. I could carry out root-canal work on the Bavarian army.

Might make a start tomorrow, but it all certainly looks good, and the variable speed turns down v-e-r-y  s-l-o-w if you want - very quiet, no vibration. Now I need to work out the full details of my figure orders to 3 different suppliers, to make up my Stage 1 Bavarian OOB for 1809.

Busy-busy. Idle hands are the devil's playthings; an electric grinder in the hands of an idiot is kind of a dodgy proposition too, so I shall read the leaflets this evening. Onward and upward.

Hooptedoodle #277 - Lunch with Sir Henry

This is really about the tricky little matter of accents - or ahxents, or excents, or....

A long, long time ago, when the world still had a little hope left, I was busily engaged at work on a hefty project which was installing new system development methods and tools. As it happens, the firm which employed me was successful and highly respected, and the project - which was a joint effort between Our Lot and an American specialist software house - became a bit of a flagship in the industry for a while. As a consequence, around about 1991 I found myself presenting a series of lectures at conferences - something of a road show, explaining what we were doing, and why everyone else should spend all their money on doing the same things. I was the tame customer expert, a rare and highly prized life form, and the software company shipped me off, with my lecture slides, to London, Paris, Stockholm, Atlanta, Lisbon and - erm - Glasgow.

In the middle of this period, I was invited to have lunch with my company's chairman, Sir Henry. This was not in recognition of my fine work, you understand, nor did it indicate that Sir Henry might just possibly give a rat's about what we were doing. He had recently been criticised in the business press for being almost invisible - in fact, I think the word "almost" was absent from the criticism. Accordingly, a very expensive PR consultancy was now doing a job on him, and one of the Great Steps Forward was that he should host occasional lunches, attended by randomly selected groups of plebs from his firm, so that he could keep up to date on their skills and their efforts to make him even wealthier, and they could come to see what a warm, caring, avuncular old bugger he really was.

It was, of course, a complete charade, not to say an irritating waste of time and money, but he had to be seen to be trying, at least (and he was, I promise you, very trying), and this was really just a small drop in a vast ocean of waste, anyway.

I had hoped that I would be somewhere down at the shallow end of the table for lunch, where I could nod earnestly and make vague, sycophantic "rhubarb" noises as the brighter little sparklers jostled to catch the Knight's eye. Alas (lucky white heather), I was seated at Sir Henry's right hand, and as the soup arrived he was already asking me what I did, and what I was involved in at present.

Taking care to swallow my (deliberately very small) mouthful of crusty roll before I replied, I spoke slowly and clearly, with what I hoped was a well-judged balance between calm enthusiasm and boring technicality, and with absolutely no inappropriate nervous jokes or hints of self-deprecation. It all seemed to be going quite well until I caught sight of Sir Henry's facial expression, which really put me rather badly off my stride.

Sir Henry was peering at me, blinking, as a man might try to peer into a severe gale from the deckhouse of a fishing boat. His back was hunched, his mouth hung open in a grimace of very obvious pain. This remarkable pantomime was evidently something he had perfected in the past, and the very clear message was:

"I can hear that you are speaking, and I recognise some of the words you use, but I fear you have an accent which is unfamiliar to me, and this is something of a problem; it is necessary for me to make a show of putting up with this for a minute or two, but you appear to come from a background which is outside my comfort zone, so keep it brief, will you?"

You see, I am a little challenged in the accent department. I was born and schooled in Liverpool, though my father's own accent belonged more to rural Lancashire, his ancestors being farming people from the Warrington area. At the age of 18 I went to University in Edinburgh (which is in Scotland, by the way) and I have lived in Central and Southern Scotland ever since. Thus my normal speaking voice has evolved over the years - it was probably a bit of a hotch-potch to start with, and then the need to make myself understood (to get fed, for example) required me to modify my vowel sounds and the figures of speech I used over an extended period, so that I am now instantly recognisable, wherever I go, as Someone from Somewhere Else. The Universal Foreigner.

My former schoolmates and my (very few) remaining family members in Liverpool will, without hesitation, identify that I now have a Scottish accent, a suggestion which would astonish my friends and relatives in Scotland, who think I probably sound as if I come from the North of England, though they might not be quite sure where. If I hear recordings of myself speaking, I would say I maybe sound a little like Michael Palin, or maybe Melvyn Bragg - that sort of thing, anyway - fairly vanilla, educated North of England, right enough. Nothing particularly memorable, nor likely to conjure up images of (say) George Formby, or Yosser Hughes. Nothing (I hope) that suggests I might be incapable of joined-up thinking, or might have a tendency to steal the wheels off your car.

Maybe

Maybe

No

No

However, it seems Sir Henry remembered our brief chat, and subsequently his secretary sent a message to the head of my Division of the company, asking him was he quite happy that someone with my accent should be acting as a spokesman for our fine organisation. My Director, bless him, said that yes, he was quite happy, though he also made sure that I got the message about Sir Henry's discomfort, so we'll give him only a qualified blessing.

So what on earth was all that? Sir Henry had no idea what I was talking about, partly because it was below his horizon but also because he was too frigging dumb. However, he unerringly managed to pick up on the fact that I might not be one of the Chaps. I filed the incident away - I was a little indignant, I guess, but I was quite a tough fellow in those days. I did not propose to be mortally wounded by a posh old tosser like Sir Henry, and I forgot about it all very quickly.

Now, having remembered him, I checked to see what Sir Henry is up to. Perhaps, I pondered, he is no more? - certainly he has, once again, become invisible. A friend and former work colleague confirmed that he is still alive, but, alas, is not keeping very well. The old fellow is now in his mid-eighties, suffered a major stroke some years ago, is confined to a wheelchair, and has great difficulty with speech.

I find that very sad. I was hardly a close friend, obviously, but it is always tragic to witness the downfall of the mighty. One can only hope that he is still wealthy enough to ensure that all the people who care for him and look after his needs do not have regional or Eastern European accents - at his stage of life he most surely does not need the strain of having to pull that face again.

Bavarians - Figure Samples

This is a little selection of figures for which I have already obtained samples. Here are some miscellaneous infantry poses from Falcon, including a rather charming mounted infantry officer, a couple of artillerymen from SHQ/Kennington and a charging grenadier and a OPC chevauxleger from Hinton Hunt.

The castings are resting on a cutting board, and the little squares are 5mm. All these ranges stand 22mm soles to eye, the hats and weapons match, they have sensible human proportions. It all looks rather promising, doesn't it?

Hooptedoodle #276 - Supellism: from a Dark Place

A previous blog post of mine was intended to be about the labelling of children's clothing, but it accidentally strayed into rather more touchy areas such as stereotyping in society, and prejudice.

I found the experience particularly uncomfortable because, privately, I have recently been troubled by growing doubts about myself. I have never really spoken openly of this before, and I find it hard to write about. Obviously, one has to maintain appearances; one's career and standing in society depend very much on being accepted, and there are clear implications for the interests of our families, but one also has to be at peace with oneself. It is very hard to live a lie.

Let's cut to the chase: I am becoming more convinced that I am not as I may seem to others - in my heart I am - well, to be blunt about it, a wardrobe. I realise this may give rise to some incredulity, but it is true; I am now almost sure that the real me, the me that the everyday world does not get to see, is a fine, handsome wardrobe.

There, I've said it. It wasn't as hard as I expected. I'm not sure that a blog is a good place to discuss this, but I have previously raised the topic with a couple of close friends and their reaction was disappointing, though maybe predictable - exactly the sort of unreasoning, stereotyping behaviour that we have to expect, that so-called social norms instill in people. It was pointed out to me that I do not make it as a wardrobe on a number of counts - organically, materially and functionally. Not even the most devout follower of Thomas Stahlberg could dispute that I fail on one of the key facets of being a wardrobe - i.e. no-one can keep clothes in me, at least not to any useful extent. I am not discouraged; I feel I have to stick to my guns, to follow this through. 

This self-doubt thing is not entirely new. For years, to all outward appearances, I was an actuary working for an insurance company, but there were many occasions when I seriously thought that I would rather be almost anything else. Once, on a flight to Frankfurt, having drunk too much Lucozade, I woke up convinced I was an Eccles cake, but that is a story in itself.

Another story

Naturally, I have looked around on the internet to see if there are others who feel like this, and I have been reassured to find that supellism, as it is called, apparently, is surprisingly common, especially in the USA, though most of the people affected there seem to regard themselves as sofas. I have avoided the self-help fora thus far - too easy to get sucked in (or plumped up), and too many tales of tragedy for my taste. This has to be a positive change, or I'm not going to proceed with it.

I was genuinely flabbergasted to learn that my local County Council - here in rural, unsophisticated Scotland - has a trained, specialist counsellor in exactly this field. That does seem a remarkably long shot, doesn't it? As it happens, she has been on holiday in the Farne Islands for four years, but the message on her voicemail service assures me that she will be in touch as soon as she gets back.

You can have an operation. I don't know too much about this yet, but it seems that it is carried out in stages. The first step is to get yourself veneered - I thought a nice, traditional, satin-finish, light oak would complement my personality best, though I am still thinking about it. I have written off for a leaflet.

A nice, burred oak - tasteful, restrained, dignified

I have also been warned that a number of people and institutions, Her Majesty's Department of Work and Pensions being one, may react unfavourably to my coming out as a wardrobe. No-one suggested this was going to be easy.

I am not going to bombard anyone with this topic, or give daily updates, or become evangelical about it. I shall pursue it quietly, in my own way. I felt that airing the matter like this would give me a further opportunity to examine my own feelings about it, and maybe bring comfort to others who might share my situation.

If you find that you gain great solace from extended visits to the furniture departments of large retail stores during your lunch-breaks from work (in my case, coincidentally, it was usually John Lewis), that might be a clue. If, like me, you are mystified that the bar staff cannot actually see you waiting to be served, that might be a clue. If, again like me, you find that standing motionless in a corner of the bedroom for hours is surprisingly liberating, that might definitely be a clue. And - finally - if you have already looked for Thomas Stahlberg on Google then you should try to get help as soon as you can.

One more thing. If you find any element of this post tasteless or offensive, go and have a big drink of water, look at yourself in the mirror and breathe deeply a few times before you send me a flamer.

I feel better now - still troubled, but better.

Can't Get No Grindin'

Such a device might be the answer to several questions I haven't even thought of...

Things are a bit overshadowed at present by another outbreak of Real Life. It is, inescapably, a time-of-life thing; further problems with the care of elderly relatives - this time my wife's family rather than my own, but it feels very much like more of the same. I hope and trust that things will be resolved soon in a satisfactory and comfortable manner, but the most obvious immediate difficulty (for us) is that the relative in question lives some distance away, so the Contesse is going to be driving long hours, and negotiating with overstressed social workers in yet another county. Having recently been through a similar episode with my own mother, we could have done with a bit of a break, I guess, but of course it is important that we help as much as we can. Blood, as you know, is famous for having a higher viscosity than other well-known liquids.

My Bavarian project has not yet made made much visible progress, but I am getting a feel for the available 20mm figures, and have a growing collection of samples, including a couple of very generous donations of vintage figures. In a few days I'll publish some size comparison pictures of what I have to work with. Really looks very promising, though - as you would expect with vintage castings - I am going to have to carry out some conversion work to provide sufficient command figures and - not a trivial point - sufficient variety of command figures. As discussed before, I'm happy to have entire battalions of crisply identical fusiliers, but having the self-same officer in every regiment is less satisfying.

Another issue requiring conversion work is the nippy question of plumes on Bavarian infantry. Only the grenadiers had plumes on the helmets (all right, the Jägers had them too, but not until some time later than my chosen 1809 context), so, for a couple of the brands of figures, a period of competent plume removal is approaching. Which (at last) brings me to the point of this post.

I was once the owner of a rather dinky little cordless Dremel, complete with accessory tools, some of which I never identified. I used it sparingly, to say the least. After about the fourth time I used it in anger the battery would no longer recharge, and that model does not allow a replacement part, and of course the guarantee had expired a small number of weeks earlier. Maybe the poor thing died of loneliness. More quality stuff in the landfill.

The Bavarians will require some conversion work, and I am freshly healed from a spell of very sore fingers after needle-filing epaulettes off a bunch of Spanish officers. I think I need to replace my Dremel. I checked out some cheaper brands - Silverline and Tacklife, for example - but the customer reviews were uniformly hostile, and there was a general theme to the messages: pay the extra, get something better.

Not recommended, apparently

So I need to get something small and hobby-ish, but it must be mains-powered, and I don't want to sell the house to fund it, but the cheapest brands seem to give problems - notably with the chuck attachment.

Anyone have experience of such a device, or a recommendation? I don't think that I shall require to re-machine motorcycle parts or anything - this will strictly be a device to assist a flaky dilettante like me with his toy soldiers. All views welcome. Anything which requires hearing protectors or similar is probably not what I'm looking for!

Care must be taken with all DIY projects

To revisit the title of this post, here is the Mighty Mr Morganfield - Muddy Waters to you - live in Germany in 1976.