Still around...and even doing some painting

The eagle of the 45th in the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards museum in Edinburgh Castle

I've just been catching up with everyone else's blogs and realised that it is ages since I have posted.  This is largely because I am working on a new contract which is taking up all my time and am trying to avoid taking on some international trips. However, it looks like Serbia and Dubai are on the cards in the next two months and maybe another couple of long haul trips as well.  I did fly to Edinburgh recently and fortunately it was smooth flying in both directions so I'm not too stressed about it yet.  

I managed to visit the small but interesting military museums at Edinburgh Castle when I was there and was amused to see the uniform of the late Field Marshal Sir John Stanier on display there. About twenty years ago I was on a flotilla holiday in the Ionian with my girlfriend and future parents in law and Sir John was on one of the other boats.  He tried windsurfing for the first time but fell and got stuck between the board and the boom, face down in the water.  In classic Baywatch style I dived off our boat and extricated him.  He was jolly grateful and I was plied with huge glasses of Sangria as a thank you on board their yacht.  Too late I discovered that the Sangria was made from red wine and gin rather than lemonade (they didn't have any lemonade).  Swimming back to our boat was, as a result, somewhat enervating and it was lucky I didn't need a lifeguard myself (Erika Eleniak, please, not Pamela Anderson).

They had some very famous battle paintings of Scottish regiments in the main war museum in the castle including Closing the Gate at Hougoumont by Robert Gibb and Alphonse de Neuville's Tel el Kebir depicting the Black Watch.  It nearly made me want to paint some highlanders.  Nearly.  They also had the eagle of the 45th Regiment captured by Sergeant Charles Ewart of the Scot's Grays at Waterloo. I was very excited to see that!  I don't think I've seen an actual eagle before.

I have had to clear nearly everything of the workbench as I needed the space for actual work.  I now only have one set of figures on it and managed an hour or so on them today.  I'm hoping to do some more tomorrow.  They are plastic and I am actually enjoying painting them for a change.  Other than Lord of the Rings I haven't ever painted more than a couple of figures out of the two dozen or so boxes of plastics I have picked up.  For this set, however, I have seven figures well on the way and another 17 on the go.  The odd thing is that I never considered buying these but was passing Orc's Nest with a friend and she made me buy them.  I have had to go and buy a load of books on them as I had very little information on them.  It's going to be a unit of about 26 figures and I don't know whether to put them on here when the unit is finished or just put on the first half dozen when I get those done. Hmm.

Away from these, the big temptation at present is the fact that Warlord Games are now selling Conquest's superb French Indian War range in the UK.  I actually have the first eight packs or so of these but never painted them because it always looked like the line was about to fold.  Now, however, I have no excuse.  Now where on earth is that one I started four years ago?