Reducing the lead pile and out to lunch!

Well, my attempt to decrease the lead pile is going quite well, as I have now disposed of around 120 figures on eBay.  It's been goodbye to Copplestone Polar figures and Foundry Bronze Age (more going up tonight) some spare Ancient Greeks and a few duplicates.  Metal Caesarian Roman will be next.  It's actually de-stressing me, even if I haven't made any serious inroads into the lead pile yet.

I've sorted out some more Carolingians to get started on for Lion Rampart and found the rest of my IHMN Scotland Yard company to get to work on, combined with watching the final few episodes of series 2 of Ripper Street.  However, I may be getting distracted by a female dancing figure which I found in a box on the floor, having completely forgotten about her.  

I had an excellent lunch out on Friday after picking up some paint in Games Workshop on Oxford Street which is on my Food and Wine blog, of course.

Now then, now then, what's going on 'ere?

I have at last finished my policemen for my In Her Majesty's Name Scotland Yard Company.  I had been putting them off due to the necessity of having to paint the striped armbands that policemen had to wear on their left arms while on duty.  But by holding my breath and trusting in the Force they came out looking alright (from a distance!).  I need to locate the rest of the company now, as I have already painted Holmes and Watson.

New Warhammer shop in London

On  the way out to a drunken lunch with my ex-personal assistant today I nipped into the Games Workshop store in Oxford Street to pick up some paints.  French chap in there told me that, having moved down from the first floor in the Plaza Shopping centre to the ground floor, they would be moving, in April, to a new shop in Tottenham Court Road.  This will be their number one shop in the UK and will be "impressive".  It will be branded as a Warhammer shop.

I moaned about the rubbish support for The Hobbit and he said that the filmmakers caused problems for GW by changing the look of the troops at the last minute.  So their Thranduil was mounted on a horse, as the original artwork suggested, but then they had him on a stag for the film which was a last minute change which took them by surprise.  I asked if there would be any plastic forces for the Battle of Five Armies and he replied "possibly" but he was French and, therefore, unreliable by definition.

More Carolingians...

I found some more Carolingian figures in the lead pile.  See my Dark Ages blog.  Something to work on this weekend!  Oh, and I have finished four new IHMN figures!  Shock! Pictures soon.   Off to a long lunch with an ex-personal assistant today.  Heh, heh!

Plans for my first Lion Rampant force - Carolingians

Roland blows the olifant

I enjoyed my first game of Lion Rampant at Eric the Shed's the other week so am going to build my first force for the rules: Carolingians.  You can read about it on my Dark Ages blog here.

Wargamers Bloggers Quarterly, Penny Dreadful, reducing the lead pile, my birthplace and even some painting!

The Third issue of Wargamers Bloggers Quarterly is out.  Unlike the bumper second edition it has gone back to the slim proportions of the first issue.  Personally, this one's contents are less interesting to me but this is always going to be a problem with any wargames magazine.  I thought two how to paint/model (essentially) articles was a bit much and anything to do with naval wargaming makes me fall asleep (aviation wargaming too, I am afraid, despite the fact that I love both ships and aircraft).  Sidney Roundwood's WW1 piece had some fantastic photographs though, even though late war isn't my period. Unfortunately one post, at the end really annoyed me.  It was another piece on the variability of scale seen in 28mm figures but was ruined by totally unnecessary use of (uncensored) four letter words. Now I do find the use of four letter words in written pieces (especially) not offensive, really, just a bit...tragic.  It makes anything you write sound like something a thirteen year old schoolboy would do and, I think, takes away from any argument you might be making.  Not that this man's arguments were very compelling.  Why do they measure figures foot to eye, he ranted, saying that was not how they measure people.  No, of course not but model soldiers invariably wear hats so measuring to the eye is sensible when you can't tell where the top of their heads are.  Anyway, do download WBQ, if you haven't already as it is an initiative well worth supporting.

Good CGI London in Penny Dreadful but there is something fundamentally wrong with this picture!  What is it?

I have actually managed some painting this week on some In Her Majesty's Name figures and my four new Servants of Ra figures arrived from North Star too along with a figure to complete my new Pulp company I am working on.   I think my return to IHMN has been provoked by watching Penny Dreadful, which was a birthday present from my friend A.  We are both enjoying it and are watching it accompanied by appropriate Victorian drinks, like Porter and, er, Port (which I'm not really allowed).    It's a nice (perhaps "nice" is not really the right word) Gothic counterpart to Ripper Street and, as ever, I spend rather too much time looking at the sets to see how well they have recreated Victorian London.  It suffers from a surfeit of red bricks again, as it was, like Ripper Street, shot in Ireland not London and, in fact, I am sure some of the buildings used are the same.  Dublin really doesn't look much like London did.  Still, I would happily watch Eva Green doing the ironing, let alone acting all dark and fascinating, despite an English accent that is sometimes a bit more Romford than Mayfair.  Although, it's better than Billie Piper's Belfast accent which makes her totally incomprehensible much of the time. 

I haven't watched the third season of Ripper Street even though it is available on Amazon Prime, which I am a subscriber too.  This is because I don't know how it works but also, unlike young people, I do not want to watch TV programmes on a computer or a "mobile device".  I want to sit in a comfortable chair with a nice glass of wine looking at a big screen, not squinting at some low quality download  (all streaming is rubbish quality) on a tiny screen.  

I am making a real effort to reduce the lead pile at present and so far this year I have got rid of 38 more figures than I have acquired (only about 7,000 to go).  I just put my Foundry Ancient Egyptians on to eBay so that will take another fifty off the total.  That said I did just pick up the Warlord Black powder supplement on the Sudan, Blood on the Nile (which looks tremendous), from Perry miniatures so I could acquire their Col Fred Burnaby figure.  I am tempted to get him painted right away as it will get my Sudan efforts going again.  

Bearsted Hospital (right) the building on the left was scientist Michael Faraday's home

The estimable Mr Bob Cordery  celebrates his birthday today and posted a picture of the hospital where he was born which, coincidentally, I walked past on Friday.  Now, I celebrated (not really the right word) my birthday last month, albeit I am ten years younger than Mr C, so I thought I would show the building where I was born too.  Bearstead Maternity Hospital is just across the green from Hampton Court Palace and in previous incarnations was a yacht club (it backs onto the Thames) and a military hospital during the Great War.  It closed as a hospital in 1969 and is now posh flats.  We used to drive past it when picking up our daughter from school. 

Speaking of whom, I didn't get a whole lot of hobby stuff for my birthday this year but my daughter excelled herself by getting me a copy of The Hobbit Battle of Five Armies Art & Design book direct from Weta Workshop and signed by Alan Lee among others.  What a good girl!  Perhaps I will pay for her pole dancing instructor's course now!

Our road on Tuesday morning

I've got a horrible bug at the moment which has left me almost unable to speak and I didn't enjoy having to trudge through the snow earlier in the week to get to the station because one inch of snow, of course, brought the main road to an almost total standstill.  It took my wife exactly an hour to drive one mile towards getting Guy to school (they turned back in the end because the traffic wasn't moving).  Fortunately, I put my Canadian overshoes on and got to the station in fifteen minutes.  Oh how my Canadian friends laugh at our snow problems.  My friend Sophie is in Toronto at present and tells me they are expecting six to eight inches in the next day.

I got some tidying up done on the workbench this week but free time is going to be in short supply for the next few months.  I hope to have a few painted figures (here's a clue) to show in the next few days.

50 years ago today: A memory of Sir Winston Churchill's funeral train

 The 21C151 Battle of Britain class engine Sir Winston Churchill pulls his funeral train through Feltham just a couple of miles from Staines

Fifty years ago today a five year old Legatus was standing by the railway track on a cold grey day in Staines (or Staines-upon-Thames as it has recently been named in a doomed effort to make the place sound more upmarket) waiting for Sir Winston Churchill's funeral train to pass.  

The Legatus' house, until the age of eight, today (right).  The railway line is just at the end of the lane.

We lived on what was then an unmade up lane (as it still is at the far end, at least) overlooking Shortwood Common.  The Common itself was not a place of fond memories.  In January 1963, the coldest month in the Twentieth Century in Britain , I fell into a snowdrift on the common and disappeared completely (I can still remember this incident).  A year later, the girl next door, who was pushing me in my pushchair, left the brake off and I ran down a slope into the pond on the common and hit my head on a concealed rock.  I was in hospital for two weeks with a fractured skull. Worse yet, as I can still remember it very clearly, I was chased by a bull on the common, on the way to school, when I was seven.  I have hated cows ever since.  

The crossing today.  Not changed at all

But fifty years ago the whole family walked down the lane, with everyone else who lived there, to the pedestrian crossing next to the railway line where we waited for the train on its way down from Waterloo.  I remember the tremendous noise and the smoke as it barelled past and  the flash of the chocolate and cream livery of the Pullman cars on their way to Oxfordshire.  I also remember being slightly disappointed at how fast it went by!  Even at the age of five I had some idea who Churchill was and how he had saved Britain from the Nazis (or 'Germans' as we referred to them in those pre-politically correct days).

This photograph shows the train passing through Staines station (where the signals are) just a few hundred yards from where we stood to watch.  The oast house on the left became a community centre and I bought my copy of Ugo Pericoli's Uniforms of Waterloo there in a second hand book sale about ten years later.

The Legatus boards Perseus at Victoria Station in 1992

Coincidentally, some twenty seven years later, I rode in one of the carriages, Perseus, which formed part of Sir Winston Churchill's funeral train, on my honeymoon, when we took the Orient Express to Venice.  At the time I had no idea that I had already seen this carriage, as a small boy, standing by the track back in January 1965.