Servants of Ra completed

I have finished the first of my In Her Majesty's Name companies from North Star: The Servants of Ra.  They are even due to see action, as I have a game scheduled with Alastair at Guildford the Monday after next.  We were due to have the game on Monday this week but I had to cancel due to having to see  a fellow from Brazil in London.  We met at the Charlotte Street Hotel which is very close to an old office of mine.  

St Giles Rookery in the mid nineteenth century

Now a very trendy area full of advertising agencies, architects firms, film companies, restaurants and bars the area immediately to the south of Charlotte Street used to be the location of the St Giles Rookery, one of the worsts slums in London and the setting for Hogarth's Gin Lane.  By the time of In Her Majesty's Name, however, the slum had been cleared, partly to make way for Oxford Street.  Many of the Irish immigrants who lived there moved to the East End.

It was worth missing the game, though, as the man from Brazil has promised me enough money for speaking at a couple of overseas events to keep me in figures for a decade!  No doubt, however, any money will actually all be hoovered up by my wife's plans for an extension to the house.  I had to pay for a shed this week to hold everything that will have to be removed from the garage when it is demolished.  I was imagining a couple of hundred pounds from B&Q but no, it has to come from John Lewis so is costing more than ten times that, even after our 25% discount. 

Or you could buy a brand new Ford Fiesta

The proposed extension is to provide a bigger bedroom for my son (not a wargames room, sadly) and will have a bathroom, so my wife was looking at  her favourite bathroom shop in Oxshott.  She was very excited when she saw they had some ex-display clearance bargains including this "tasteful" malachite bathroom accessories set.  My taste in furniture runs to the more modern or, at a pinch, Art Deco but the Old Bat likes her interiors to look like a nineteenth century Parisian bordello.  Fortunately, this little set was reduced but even more fortunately only down to £7,100.  Still, a saving of over £4,700.  It's a towel rail, a loo roll holder and a toothbrush mug for heaven's sake!  Who'd pay £11,846 for that?  To be fair they do throw in a  bathrobe hook and a tissue box cover as well.  Only in Oxshott!

Here is a better photograph of Akhenaten reborn and Zairah (more about her back story on my Victoriana blog).  The picture of the two figures I put up originally was a bit wobbly as I have had the stress of having a non-functioning computer for most of the week.  The PC started to power down randomly last week and fearing a drive crash I spent most of the weekend ensuring everything was backed up.  In the end the machine completely died on Sunday evening but I was too busy in London to get it looked at.  Fortunately, the excellent KAD computers in Esher (conveniently next to the Majestic Wine Warehouse) sorted it out in a couple of hours.  It was the power unit, not the drive and was well worth the £80 I paid them (plus the £100 I spent in Majestic, of course).

Guy was very disappointed, as he has been banging on about me getting him a new computer so he could play bigger online games on it.  We used to play Pirates of the Caribbean online, the only computer game I ever really got into, apart from the original Tomb Raider (I have a Copplestone not Lara Croft figure somewhere). Disney closed the game down last September but a group of amateur programmers have got together to rebuild it.  Amazingly, Disney have given them all the code, the rights to the characters and the music for free, providing they don't make a profit on it.  This has reignited my interest in trying to make some models of the buildings in the game.

Sir Lawrence conjures up a mummy. Or is he just showing Zairah the pose he requires again.

I have also put a bit more up on the Victoriana blog about Sir Lawrence Swann whose name, of course is a conflation of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, the Victorian classicist painter and Kingdom Swann, from Miles Gibson's enjoyable novel Kingdom Swann: The Story of a Photographer (1990).  Swann is a sort of Alma-Tadema painter anyway and the book is littered with references to Alma-Tadema's real models. Gibson's book was turned into an equally enjoyable BBC film, Gentlemen's Relish (2001) starring Billy Connolly and a pre-Primeval Douglas Henshall (playing his character with a nineteen sixties Michael Caine accent).  Both are well worth seeking out although the DVD is hard to get.  I had to get mine from the US so it's Region 1.  Incidentally, I had some Gentlemen's Relish (Patum Peperium) for the first time recently and I am afraid to say that I found it absolutely disgusting.  It smelt like cat food but no self respecting cat would eat this appalling product.  

Anyway, I hope to finish a couple of "unofficial" figures for the Servants of Ra this weekend which I may field in my game with Alastair!   The Scotland Yard company is next!

Today I am listening to the soundtrack of The Mummy (1999) by Jerry Goldsmith which contains many excellent tracks for Egyptian adventures!