Another birthday...

We don't really celebrate birthdays in our family or, rather, we don't celebrate them on my side of the family.  Mostly this is, I suspect, because mine, my mother's and my sister's birthday are all within two weeks of Christmas, so we have become used to the joint present and even, from real penny-pinching scum, the joint card.  There was only one advantage to having a birthday after Christmas, in that if there was anything on my list from Father Christmas that I never received then I could ask for it for my birthday.  Now the Old Bat (her family do do birthdays) bought me a joint Christmas and birthday present this year but it is a really nice one in the rather enticing shape of this dancing girlies table.  As ever, with the Old Bat, there is an ulterior motive, which is for me to tidy up my study which is a complete tip at present.  This may actually do the trick and I am well on the way to filing all my DVD's in albums which frees shelf space which enables me to put other stuff on the vacated shelves etc.

I didn't receive any hobby stuff for Christmas but my ever elegant sister gave me this so tasteful box of Humbrol paints for my birthday.  I looked at them and immediately though 'Dark Ages'!  Maybe it's time to finish my Carolingian Lion Rampart army this Spring.  My daughter got me some Superglue Gel, which I have had trouble getting lately.  I have some figures to assemble and I couldn't find it anywhere as both Waitrose and Sainsbury's seem to have stopped stocking it.  I can assemble my Brother Vinni Viking Shieldmaidens now.

Not sure about the paint job.  Not very well designed for sneaking up on things

Close to us we have a place called Garson Farm, which is one of those garden centres on steroids which also sells all the other unnecessary rubbish for your home (they call it 'indoor lifestyle') that you can shift in Surrey.  We have a lot of 'indoor lifestyle' shops in Esher, Cobham and Oxshott selling things like a wicker garden lounger for £12,000.  Garson's is particularly famous for its award-winning Christmas decorations shop (in addition to its award winning indoor lifestyle shop).  Every year the Old Bat goes to their 75% off post-Christmas sale and returns with more sparkly rubbish to add to the 35 boxes (plastic crate boxes not shoe boxes) of Christmas decorations in the loft.  I went there this morning with her and while she bought useful things like outdoor disco lights (so Guy can look at an outside moving lights display from his wing of the house), more Christmas tree decorations and some other stuff which I didn't really know what it was but had plastic flowers on it, I wandered around the rest of the recently vastly expanded shop.  The new restaurant was a disappointment; a breakfast menu of herb teas and smoothies was not what I was looking for.  Surrey wives, who are usually 15-20 years younger than their husbands, have to keep fit or they will find themselves replaced by a Croatian or Singaporean model (literally).  In the corner of the toy department, however, was a new dinosaur section, with a good selection of Schleich dinosaur models.  Now while these are very good they are usually far too big to use with 28mm figures.  However, today they had this splendid carnivore which is spot on for Lost World adventures and the Old Bat bought it for me as a birthday present.  Non-hobby Christmas and birthday saved!

Goodbye followers!

Google HQ plan their next Blogger enhancement

On Monday it looks like Google will start making it impossible for people to follow blogs on Blogger without a Google account.

"As part of this plan, starting the week of January 11, we’ll remove the ability for people with Twitter, Yahoo, Orkut or other OpenId providers to sign in to Google Friend Connect and follow blogs. At the same time, we’ll remove non-Google Account profiles so you may see a decrease in your blog follower count. We encourage you to tell affected readers (perhaps via a blog post), that if they use a non-Google Account to follow your blog, they need to sign up for a Google Account, and re-follow your blog. With a Google Account, they’ll get blogs added to their Reading List, making it easier for them to see the latest posts and activity of the blogs they follow. We know how important followers are to all bloggers, but we believe this change will improve the experience for both you and your readers.

Now although I have a Google account I do not put anything on my Google page  because I don't know what it is for except for extracting commercially valuable data.  I only joined it because there were one or two blogs I wanted to do but couldn't without having an account.  Many people, I suspect, don't want a Google account and so these people will start dropping off our followers list.  Maybe someone with more IT knowledge than me has a comment on this.

Beowulf, War and Peace and other TV

The Legatus has been watching a lot of TV lately and has also been dealing with a backlog on the digibox caused by lots of Strictly and, we are ashamed to say, I'm a Celebrity before Christmas. I still haven't finished watching Ripper Street, Banished or season one of Fargo let alone the new series.  With a new TV season starting since Christmas (glad that is all now packed away) there are a number of must watch shows coming up.

I am enjoying Dickensian, even though it is set in a period before my IHMN late 1890's period (I am working my way through the second series of Penny Dreadful, however - Dr Frankenstein's laboratory appears to be located about 100 yards from my office!)).   I also enjoyed Jekyll and Hyde (sadly, ITV has announced they won't be renewing it for a second season today), which had a fine design mix of Victorian London and thirties Pulp but then I am one of those people who looks up film production designers after I have seen a film.  "You don't come out of a film whistling the sets" a film composer once said, but I sort of do!  I am looking forward to the new series of Endeavour (just need to watch the last episode of series 2), Mr Selfridge (the Dolly sisters in this one), Gotham, The Musketeers, and Agents of Shield, all of which are due over the next four weeks. What I have to watch out for are series that might get me thinking about wargames figures and this weekend we had two which couldn't have been more different: War and Peace and Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands.

My first exposure to Beowulf was through a serialisation in Look & Learn magazine back in the sixties, where they had a fantastic cover painting (above) by Ron Embleton entitled Grendel: Terror from the Marshes so my visual expectations were rather different from the actual look of the show.  I was put off the new Beowulf from the moment I saw the recent trailer where ITV seemed to have hired a voiceover person from off the street (a south London street at that) who was unable to pronounce 'th', or anything else come to that. Never have I heard a continuity announcer on TV sound so thick.  The opening theme tune and title sequence were such a rip off from Game of Thrones as to be actionable.   Beowulf had every current fantasy cliche imaginable: Black costumes with too much leather and fur, elevated Edoras style great hall, feisty female characters holding down important positions (Blacksmith? Really?), shiny hilted Conan-style swords, politically correct but unlikely ethnic characters etc.  

The set under construction somewhere grim up north

The whole thing comes from Tim Haines, the Walking with Dinosaurs (and Primeval) man who also had a go at a fantasy series with the short-lived (but actually rather enjoyable) Sinbad a few years ago.  The opening monsters had that weird bouncy gait you saw in the evil dogs from Ghostbusters and there was a troll right out of Lord of the Rings.  The whole thing also, despite some nice set design for the village of Herot, looked like it had been filmed in an old quarry.  In fact it was filmed in an old quarry, in Northumberland. 

Joanne Whalley.  Yes please

The countryside looked  grim but then it is grim up North.  It's not a patch on Jekyll and Hyde, let alone The Last Kingdom but I will keep watching (as it has the magnificent Joanne Whalley in it) but all the female characters have long black hair (er, Herot is supposed to be in Scandinavia) and I couldn't initially tell who was who.   I doubt it will see a second series and seemed to struggle (unlike The Last Kingdom which was post watershed) with the constraints of its family time slot.  

Fiona Gaunt.  Yes please

On to War and Peace and here my expectations were shaped by the epic BBC series from 1972 with a career launching performance from Anthony Hopkins as Pierre Bezukhov and an eye popping performance by Fiona Gaunt as Hélène which kept the 12 year old Legatus entertained for all 17 hours of the series.     It was brave of  Andrew Davies to try to tell the story in six hours but it has had a positive effect on the pace and much of War and Peace the novel doesn't really relate to the story anyway.  The 1972 production was very much studio bound and shot on video with only the location battle scenes shot on film in Yugoslavia.

On this point, some have said that the new BBC production, of course, has many more extras in its battle scenes compared with the  1972 effort, comparing that with Sharpe style battles.  This actually is not the case.  The 1972 version (above) actually used three times the 500 extras the current version used.  I thought that the battle (Schöngrabern) depicted in episode one last Sunday looked rather less effective (excellent cavalry charge excepted) than the 1972 one (which didn't take place until the end of episode three).  Also, I don't know much about Russian napoleonic uniforms but at least the 1972 version got the shape of the shakos right but that was because much of the uniform  had been used in Waterloo (1970).

On location in Vilnius old town

However, I did enjoy War and Peace more than Beowulf (which was the opposite of what I was expecting) and the interiors and exteriors of the buildings (shot in St Petersburg, Latvia and Lithuania (mainly)) are a wonder.  I recognise some of the streets in Vilnius, which I last visited about six years ago.

Anita Ekberg in War and Peace (1956)

Apart from Gillian Anderson and, rather distractingly, Inspector Lewis' boss (in a scene stealing performance by Rebecca Front), I was not familiar with most of the actors but then I watch almost no British drama.  The leading ladies are all pretty but, given the fashions of the time they all looked as skinny as sticks and certainly didn't have Fiona Gaunt's embonpoint (and bear in mind that Hélène was played by Anita Ekberg in the 1956 King Vidor version).

Tuppence Middleton as a skinny Hélène  

After all the Daily Mail's hoo-ha about a 'sexed up' series it was all rather tame, as it has to be to sell to the Americans of course. Despite all the negative press they have been giving it in advance it must have been embarrassing for them that their TV critic loved it.

So, although I had a quick look for 1805 Russian figures (both the Perry and Warlord ones are for a later period) I am safe from being diverted on this.  As for Beowulf... well there is that 4Ground great hall of Heorot...

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year! Not.

The Legatus hates Christmas, of course.  I opted out of Secret Santa at work, the buffet lunch and drinks and only briefly attended the evening Christmas party.   I lasted ten minutes at the latter as I couldn't hear a single word anyone was saying due to the awful thump, thump music and acoustics of the brick lined nineteenth century warehouse cellar the event took place in.

Of all the aspects of Christmas I hate, Christmas music comes top of the list.  Even including Carols the problem is that the oeuvre of Christmas music is so narrow that we are talking about a few dozen 'classic' songs endlessly dressed up and re-recorded.  It says something about Christmas music when the last 'classic' was Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas is You, twenty one years ago.

Even the traditional songs and carols form quite a small group.  Of the latter Ding dong Merrily on High is my most hated, in that it sums up everything I despise about choirs.  This particular one encouraging choirs into more sub-Dickensian gurning and theatrical forced jollity than any other.  There is always a fat, bald, singer with wire frame glasses who thinks he is Mr Pickwick in every Christmas carol choir.  "We who wiggy-wig below", ho, ho ho, as they seem to be singing to my assaulted ears.

Seasonal favourite Winter Wonderland, for example, has been recorded more than two hundred times.  This song doesn't actually even mention Christmas, with the lyrics being written by an ailing Dick Smith while looking at the snowbound Honesdale Central Park in Pennsylvania.  Written in a sanatorium while suffering from tuberculosis, Smith died less than a year later, a day short of his 34th birthday.  Such should be the fate of all who promote Christmas 'cheer'.

Christmas means that Classic FM becomes unlistenable to, as every other tune is a seasonal one.  So I have to switch it off every five minutes or so rather than just waiting to turn it off when the endless adverts for dental implant specialists (tells you a lot about the average listeners) Dawood & Tanner come on (although, interestingly, they are pioneers in 3D printing of false teeth).

Fortunately, we do not get quite as inundated with Christmas music as in North America, although Tesco is pretty unbearable at the moment.  Waitrose, thank goodness, do not play music and do not let their staff wear Christmas hats.  Guess who gets my Christmas shop?

Some years ago I did a three week tour of  Canada and the US and found Christmas music playing everywhere: airports, hotels, shopping malls and even government buildings.  I had breakfast, lunch and dinner every day to an accompaniment of the same two dozen Christmas 'favourites'.  Even worse the North American appreciation for what makes good Christmas music seemed to be forever stuck in the thirties (Santa Claus is Coming to Town was also written in 1934), forties (White Christmas and The Christmas Song) and fifties (Little Drummer Boy - I hate that one).  There was no leavening by more comparatively recent numbers by the likes of Slade, Wizzard, Jona Lewie, The Pogues or even George Michael.  It was all Bing Crosby, Perry Como and, worst of all, Andy Williams.  I was hearing Andy Williams' It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year at least half a dozen times a day.  It was everywhere, like a sort of aural Black Death. There was no escape.

Claudine Longet. What was it that attracted her to the 5' 6" tall, nearly twice her age multi-millionaire singer?

When I was younger the Andy Williams show was a staple of my family's Saturday evening TV viewing. Apart from the oleaginous Andy it also introduced the world to the Osmonds, for which it can never be forgiven. Also slinking around on the show was Williams' French wife, Claudine Longet.  Longet was a "dancer" at the Las Vegas Folies Bergere who Williams literally picked up at the side of the road when she was 18.  They separated in the mid seventies and she set herself up with a skier, Vladimir Sabich, who was later shot dead by Longet in what she claimed was a tragic accident, while he was showing her how his pistol (!) worked. This despite the fact that the autopsy showed that he was shot in the back from over six feet away. Amazingly, Longet was only found guilty of criminal negligence and served only 30 days in prison on the grounds that she had to look after her three young children.. Williams supported her throughout financially and emotionally but after her short sentence she dumped the children and hopped off to the Caribbean with her defense attorney who she later married. 

The Andy Williams Christmas Album was released in 1963 and it's standout hit, It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year was, comparatively, a slow burner.  Santa Claus is Coming to Town, for example, sold over 30,000 copies within 24 hours of its release in November 1934.  It wasn't even the single released to promote Williams' album; that was White Christmas.  But over the ensuing years its popularity, boosted by Williams TV show, grew like toadstools in a rotting tree stump.

Now, I have to confess to actually owning a copy of The Andy Williams Christmas Album because, having moaned about its North American ubiquity after my business trip, my 'friend' bought it for me for Christmas 'as a joke" thereby injecting it, like a virulent bio-agent, into my household.  "Oh goodie!  Christmas tunes," said my daughter who wears a Christmas hat for the entire ten day period that now makes up Christmas in Britain.  So I had no choice but to endure it again and again that year as she happily span it on my CD player. Actually, having this abomination played all the way through made me realise that It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year is a positive highlight compared with much of the teeth-rottingly syrupy, candy-coated, sugar-frosted dross of the rest of the album. Silver Bells possibly taking the Smartie covered biscuit as the most musically inept and annoying song on there. It's as if someone had said, "Let's write a Christmas standard!" and then totally failed.

The Legatus plays only one Christmas album and then only late at night on Christmas Eve when I will indulge in a glass or two of Port and the spare, elegant tones of A Dave Brubeck Christmas to celebrate the fact that the whole ghastly season will shortly be over.

I will return after Christmas with my annual wargaming and non-wargaming highlights of the year. Until then, I wish all my readers a better time than I will be having!  Bah!  Humbug!

Come Fly with Me - The Lockheed Constellation for Frank Sinatra's centenary

One of the great album covers of all time

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mr Francis Albert Sinatra, one of the very few male singers I listen to.  I have been enjoying Sinatra’s wonderful 1958 album Come Fly with Me.  Apart from the class of Mr Sinatra and the Billy May Orchestra, in supremely glossy form, I am very taken with the wonderful cover for this album, which comes from a time when air travel was still a glamorous adventure.

A grinning Sinatra indicates to a, no doubt, lovely young lady that she should hop on with him to the TWA Lockheed Super Constellation in the background. The blue sky, the shiny airliners and the waiting stewardess all promise a brightly coloured and supremely glamorous international fifties adventure.

However, all is not quite as happy and optimistic as it might appear. Beatles producer George Martin was in the studio with Sinatra when he was shown the artwork for the cover. Apparently, he was furious at seeing the illustration, saying it looked like a TWA advertisement. Whatever he thought, the cover went out and the fact that Capitol records gave an acknowledgement to TWA on the reverse of the cover does make you wonder if there wasn’t some early product placement going on.

The second issue faced by the record company was that the family of Rudyard Kipling objected to Sinatra’s performance of On the Road to Mandalay and, as a result, on all copies of the record issued in the British Empire the track was replaced by Chicago.

Although, looking back at it today, the Lockheed Constellation looks like the epitome of fifties travel, in fact, by this time it was already becoming obsolete. It was the last gasp of a way of flying that was to disappear with mass jet flight. The De Havilland Comet had already become the first jet airliner and the first production Boeing 707 flew the same year that Come Fly with Me was recorded, 1957. The first Douglas DC8 flew the year the album was released, in 1958. These intercontinental jet airliners killed the Constellation dead for anything other than local flights.

The original version of the Constellation

 

In 1937 Lockheed had been working on a four engine pressurised airliner to be called the Excalibur. However, this planned plane was cancelled when Trans World Airlines, encouraged by shareholder Howard Hughes, requested a plane that could carry forty passengers 3,500 miles, way beyond what the Excalibur could have managed. So Lockheed developed the Constellation instead and the first one flew in January 1943. During World War 2 they were used as long range troop transports. Post war they at last were able to fulfill their original purpose as airliners with the first one being delivered to TWA in October 1945. They launched their first regular transatlantic flight with it in 1946. A Lockheed Constellation still holds the record for the longest non-stop passenger flight as on TWA’s inaugural flight from London to San Francisco in October 1957 the plane stayed in the air for 23 hours and 19 minutes.

The Super Constellation

 

In 1951 a lengthened version, with capacity for 109 passenegers, first flew. It is instantly recognisable by its square windows as seen on the cover of Come Fly with Me.

This is how air travel should be!

 

The plane’s elegant profile came from the fact that no two bulkheads were the same shape. Unfortunately, this made the plane expensive to build and less able to cope with pressure variations and all subsequent airliners used the cheaper but less interesting tube shape. The last scheduled Constellation flew on a passenger route in 1967.  856 Constellations were built and just 19 civilian and 8 military versions survive.

Although the Constellation would be instrumental in making flying much more attainable for ordinary people it was a very luxurious flying experience in its intercontinental days. Proper beds were made up for sleeping and passengers sat in large armchairs eating real food and drinking drinks served on silver trays.

Coffee, tea or me?

Of course, partly, all of this luxury was because people really needed to be induced to fly in the days when planes fell out the sky rather more than they do today. However, it was also because flights were expensive and rich people tend to be fussy about such things!

Come fly with me!

 

So today we can only dream of boarding a Constellation accompanied by a lovely woman dressed in the fashions of 1958.  It would not just be your travelling companion either, as you would have been able to look forward to being pampered by beautiful stewardesses.  In those days they had to be young, slim, well educated and single as this TWA recruitment advertisement from the fifties shows.

Today is also my sister's birthday and she is shortly off to San Franciso for Christmas which means I will miss out on one of her superb Christmas lunches.  At least these days it won't take her nearly 24 hours to fly there!

It’s nice to go trav’ling. Or it was.

What's going on...technology, a big car and wargames worries

Steve Barber tree under way

My blog posts have been as scarce as my painting time of late.  I am really struggling with this dark weather and just cannot paint under artificial light, even with daylight bulbs.  Increasing numbers of evening events mean that I have had to miss trips to Shed Wars too, disappointingly.  I have done a little bit of painting on my Neanderthals and have four close to completion now.  Thinking that the problem is in painting figures I have just started work on a tree which will hold the Golden Fleece for next year's planned Jason and the Argonauts campaign at the Shed.  Over Christmas I am going to put together some scenario ideas for Eric to work his gaming magic on.  The only problem is that I can't find the Golden Fleece itself but it must be somewhere on my desk.  I need to search for it...

At weekends I seem to have spent a lot of time out and about.  The Old Bat is working in a trendy dress shop during much of the week so she doesn't have time to do food shopping, which means that I have to do it at the weekend.  This is better, time wasted apart, as the bill is always about 30% less if I do it as we don't end up with piles of expensive and unnecessary fruit, (fruit is for monkeys), chocolate ice cream, Nutella and Cadbury's drinking chocolate etc.  Still, what with other weekend journeys for various things (like driving my son about) by the time I have finished my trips the light has gone.  

At least the Old Bat's parents have promised to buy Guy a car when he passes his test, although given his driving style is entirely informed by watching episodes of Top Gear I really don't think the prospect of having him let loose on the road is a good one.  At least Guy knows the car he wants (guess what, yours will cost less than a Forge World Smaug, matey) as we went over to the parents in law this weekend  (more painting time lost) to clear their garage so my father-in-law could get his new car in it.  Guy was very taken with it and took it for a short whizz up the drive, much to our terror.

Now, of course, many people change cars to something more practical as they get older.  My father-in-law (who is 87) has no truck with this and instead has got rid of his Subaru in favour of this handy little runabout.  We took it out for a spin and it is quite the scariest car I have ever been in, on account of the fact that it weighs two and a half tons but can do 0-60 in 5.2 seconds.  Guy likes it a lot.  Fortunately he can't be insured to drive it until he is 23!  It did, however, take four of us to guide it into the garage and he needed four spaces at Sainsbury's in which to park it.  Practical it is not. It's not like he doesn't even have another Bentley.

Our neighbour across the road (really!)

Another reason the Old Bat isn't getting on with the shopping is that she is faffing about talking to builders about getting the drive widened.  To do this we need a lot of bricks to go in as foundation.  Fortunately, the lady across the road is having a vast extension done to her house and has let us have the required bricks, which are now piled up on the front lawn, looking messy.   The Old Bat is also worrying about painting the hallway a controversial new colour, using a pot of paint we had that she rejected for the extension. Every time I object to some shade I get told I don't like change.

This is true, of course, and I am conscious that I am getting worse but I don't care.  Lately, even more than over the last year, everyone keeps telling me to get apps (the first thing I did when I got my mobile phone was delete all the apps) for this that and the other.  Even my Kindle is nagging me when I log on to Yahoo mail and it tells me to get the Yahoo app. The truth is I don't understand apps.  I don't even like the word (I don't like sloppy abbreviations) and even if I successfully download one I can either never find it or get it to work (like Blackberry messenger - it's on my work phone somewhere but who knows where or what it does).  My friend Bill is Mr iPad and had one way before anyone else.  He is always showing me the latest app.  There is one where he takes a picture of the label of a bottle of wine and then it is supposed to tell you all about it.  Except, of course, it never works!  None of these apps ever work.  Someone at work downloaded a bus route finder one for my phone.  "It's brilliant!" he said.  No it isn't because I can't work out how to use it.  I have this theory that 99.9% of apps are a total waste of time and have no use whatsoever.  They are just time wasters for people who cannot read. I was having dinner this week at the local pub with my friend (Mr iPad) and the waitress had a mini tablet to take the orders.  I asked what the soup of the day was and of course her tablet froze at that point.  She had to go and look it up on the blackboard! Excellent!

Strange corners of my 'playroom': As a pre-I'm a Celebrity... Jorgie Porter looks down from the 2014 FHM calendar on some random dinosaurs and a Zulu Wars meerkat

I don't want to read things on my phone or "other mobile device" because I can't; even with glasses. I can't abide squinting at some tiny little screen in an attempt to look at stuff.  Recently the publisher of FHM in the UK has announced they will be ceasing publication of the print magazine because “men’s media habits have continually moved towards mobile and social”.  Well, mine haven't (not that I read FHM) but the monthly circulation of FHM had dropped to less than double that of Miniature Wargames and the circulation of Nuts, which has also ceased print publication, was less than MW per issue.  The real issue is that young people can't read or, at least, not much more than a few paragraphs and only if the text is broken up with pictures.  They have the attention span of gnats and, of course, this is exacerbated by the constant interruptions they get from their pinging mobile devices.  They have to stop what they are doing to read some inane posting on Facebook.  The only reason I will miss FHM is that the  Old Bat used to get me the calendar issue every year for Christmas, as she knows that pictures of skinny, under-dressed women cheer me up.

I look at emails on my mobile phone only so that I know I have been sent something, so that I can then look at it on my 25" screen at home.  This increasing move to mobile delivery is ageist!  Wait until all these twenty five year olds get to my age and realise that they can't see!  Last week, we had a training course on using social media at work.  I thought that having a blog and Facebook would make me up to date but I had no idea what they were banging on about regarding hash tags and WhatsApp.  Why would I want to be connected to other people all the time, anyway?  I spend most of my time avoiding communicating with other people!  Grr!

A shadow of its former self

Of course, in my favourite wine bar you often can't get a phone signal at all because it is built under the railway arches on the South Bank.  I went there for lunch recently with a Canadian lady friend.  I usually go in the evening but it was quite crowded, unusually, at lunch time.  This is because of the horror of Christmas office lunches.  I hate Christmas with all it's forced bonhomie, conspicuous consumption and trashy decorations.  Unfortunately, I have several lunches and dinners out this week and no doubt will have to put up with ghastly Christmas revellers sat next to us.  Even worse there is an office Christmas party.   Something I have not had to endure for many years.  I am now working in an office that has over seventy people in it.  It has been made clear that I am expected to attend.  The question will be how quickly I can escape as there is dancing scheduled.  Horrors!  I also know for a fact I won't be able to hear what anyone is saying either!  Anyway, speaking of everything getting worse I had, for lunch, the sad shadow of what the Archduke wine bar used to call the Archduke Trio.  This used to be three interesting, different, sausages made by a local butcher near Waterloo station.  You even got a napkin with some bars of the Archduke Trio printed on it. Today, you just get three indifferent Lincolnshire sausages which are far too soft and cheap tasting.

Fortunately, lunch was saved by a really good Carignan from Languedoc. This was very yummy indeed, although the Archduke's wine prices are usurious.  Fortunately, my friend insisted on paying.

Wine at lunchtime work functions in the City these days is very, very rare. So I was surprised at what was served after a recent morning seminar by a large accountancy firm.  Then, of course, I realised that it was a shipping event and the maritime organisers, rather than the accountancy hosts, had insisted on the wine.  The shipping industry still holds by lots of wine at lunchtime.  The Pouilly Fume, not a wine I habitually drink, was rather good.

Back on technology, my daughter wants a new iPod Touch for Christmas as hers has packed up and in researching this I have had a nasty scare about my iPod.  I have just discovered that Apple have withdrawn classic iPods but haven't replaced them with anything equivalent.  The iPod Touch (which is all that is available) does not have anything like the memory of my iPod classic and is twice the price.  Since I learnt this last week I am now dreading the time my iPod packs up (I am on my fourth).  I now look on my iPod (which I love more than my wife) like having an ageing relative or a goldfish. You dread discovering that one day the thing will have packed up and will be metaphorically floating upside down in a fish bowl.  New ones are still available for £450 (more than double the old list price), which shows how much everyone realises they are better than the iPod Touch (which you can't control without looking at, either).  It's all about Apple not wanting you to keep your own purchased material at home but forcing you to keep it on the Cloud, it seems.  This is like streaming films and music.  I've paid for something and I want to access it whenever I like, not rely on some rubbish internet/phone connection to access it.  I have the best fibreoptic internet connection I can get from my provider and it still is really slow quite often.  Streaming doesn't work!

The only box of plastic figures I have ever completed!

A similar concern to the vanishing iPod concerns the fact that it seems Games Workshop's Middle Earth licence runs out early next year and the fear is that they will just pull everything from sale.  If they can do it with Warhammer they can do it for Lord of the Rings. This will send prices rocketing on eBay.  I have a lot of unpainted LotR stuff but you can bet that I will be short of one vital box when finishing an army.  Maybe the trick is to keep the figures from the armies I like and sell off the unloved ones when the prices on eBay go up.

LtoR: North star Prussian, Dane and Austrian

More wargames stress has been caused by someone observing that the North Star Prussians and Austrians don't match the new 1864 Danes for size.  I hate it when companies do this (yes, Warlord Games).  It seems that the Prussians are a bit bigger but the Austrians are ludicrously large.  I will have to see!  A very helpful chap posted this comparison shot today at the Schleswig wars group, however ,which offers some hope for the Prussians at least.

Now, linked to this is a scenery issue (and of course I always have scenery issues).  Is there anyone (is it even possible in this scale?) who makes bare, branched model deciduous trees?  Firs and spruce aren't right for Denmark in 1864 so what do I do about winter trees?  I can't recall ever seeing a leafless tree in a wargame.

I have based a few  figures for my first Frostgrave band but the North Star metals are quite small.   I haven't tried assembling a plastic figure yet.  Eric the Shed has been dissecting the rules but his analysis is just making me think that the game will be too complicated for me.  I really am not very good at playing games!  I mostly like painting figures and now I can't see to do that.  Perhaps it's time to take up model railways instead!

A quick trip to Warfare...

As I have said before, the Warfare show in Reading is not one of my favourites to travel to, as driving in Reading is like driving in the Monaco Grand Prix with no pit exit lane.  The awful one way system means that you can be doomed to circle around the centre endlessly, like Halley's Comet or, if you get in the wrong lane, be slingshot off to somewhere odd like Basingstoke, with no way to turn around for five miles, while being cut up by angry men in Vauxhalls.  So what a relief to get a lift from Eric the Shed and arrive stress free.  

I took my camera but really there isn't much to photograph, as the trade stands are trade stands and the hall is cramped (it was busy too) and the games are mostly of the tournament type.  Rank after rank of wargames on largely identical green baize cloths with that sort of toy town scenery.  It is the wargames equivalent of battery farming but I think, perhaps, that my exposure to Eric's marvellous scenery has spoiled me. We did have a chance to talk about planned campaigns for next year including Jason and the Argonauts and Frostgrave.

My limited purchases were all on my pre-show list, pretty much. Frostgrave soldiers and some lady Vikings from the Dice Bag Lady plus a couple of lady Dark Ages archers, which were a new release at the show from Elite Wargames and Models.  I was going to buy the female Frostgave sigilist and apprentice to lead my lady Vikings but the figures were tiny.  In fact all the metal Frostgrave figures were smaller than I expected.  I went for the Norse-looking Enchanter and apprentice instead but I think some of my lady Vikings will dwarf them.  

I thought I had bought the 7th Voyage Ray Harryhausen  type rules when they first came out but have been unable to find them anywhere so I picked up a copy, as one of the stands had them at a third off.

Finally, and the only thing not on my list, was a bag of 10mm Republican Romans from Newline Designs.  I have always wanted to do the Punic Wars but am I ever going to be able to paint enough 28mm figures?  I will see if I can actually paint them but they look, unusually for this scale, quite good anatomically.  I will have to make a decision about basing and rules.  I sold my Warmaster Ancients rules years ago (foolishly, as the cheapest they go for now is about £32 a copy second hand)  but maybe I should just use Hail Ceasar or some such.

It's too dark to paint this afternoon but maybe I can do some basing.

Thanks to Eric for the lift!