Miniature Wargames

I've just picked up the October issue of Miniature Wargames in the village shop.  It is the only useful shop we have here.  Famously, the Daily Telegraph ran an article about it a year or so ago saying it must be the only village shop in the country which sells two dozen types of de luxe Champagne (vintage Krug, Dom Perignon, Roederer Cristal etc).  You can even get Cloudy Bay sauvignon blanc there.  But then if you are a premier league footballer, Andy Murray, Max Clifford, Colin Montgomerie, or any of the other peculiar people who live here, you need to be able to get some stylish fizz at short order from somewhere.  Most of the shops in our village are interior design shops which sell ludicrously expensive things for your deluxe home.  My wife has been banging on about our household insurance because the two sets of curtains we have in our living room (which were a hand me down from a friend) cost £15,000 and she is worried that our insurance won't cover them.  Of course it won't!  Who on earth spends £15,000 on two sets of silk curtains except a total idiot?  Maybe I should sell them and get a Lithuanian au pair girl for a year, instead.

Anyway, this month's Miniature Wargames, compared with Wargames Illustrated, is rather tragic; primarily because a lot of its content relates to Colours.  So, this is the October issue which is published at the end of September but Colours was 8th and 9th September.  They really have got it a month wrong; it should have been in the September issue published in August.

The only answer to this is to take these two young ladies from the production team and give them a good spanking.  No wonder the chap in the middle looks so smug.  Actually he looks like he has just swallowed a cactus, but there we go.

There are two interesting articles, for me, inside on Platea and Queenston (1812) but I really have no interest in this fashion for mid-thirties alternative history (A Very British Civil War etc.) which also features in this issue.   A Very British Civil War posits a battle between communists and fascists which, we admit, has a little bit of resonance for me as two of my great uncles were part of Oswald Mosley's bodyguard.  Another great uncle was in the Luftwaffe in World War 2 but we really aren't a family of fascists.  Honest.  When my son took my great uncle's medals to school during WW2 week he got into trouble for promoting Nazism, but that is another story.  

The really good news in Miniature Wargames is that they seem to have summarily dumped Steve Eardley as a columnist, thank goodness.  Eardley, who thought he was a much better writer than he was, used to drive me completely mad. He obviously thought he was a "controversial" voice a la Mike Siggins, except Siggins could actually write and did regularly offer up interesting pieces.  I didn't want to know that Eardley was drunk when he wrote his column, or that he was a committed Christian or that he was some sort of anti-capitalist (i.e. a communist) who felt that no-one in the wargames industry should actually make any money.  The editor rather cooly says "I am sure all readers will join me in wishing him well with his future writing projects".  Yes, for the Morning Star,  no doubt.  So long and thanks for all the (rancid) fish.

I admit to being somewhat choleric today as I have picked up a nasty bug from the perpetually snivelling children which means I have a shocking headache, a cough and am rapidly losing my voice, which is unfortunate as I am supposed to have a meeting with a Moroccan princess on Thursday.  As you do.  Oh well.  I am somewhat cheered by the arrival from Big Red Bat of a positive horde of Ancient British chariots which are destined to be the next unit I paint after I finish the Prussians. Contemplating all that plaid is not a good thing, however.  Time for a glass of Krug, I think.