Wargaming highlights of 2017

My first ACW unit

Usually I start these posts with the words "it is time for my wargames review of the year", except this year it is three months past the time for my wargames review of the year but that isn't going to stop me.  It was a poor year, in many ways, which started well then got bad and saw a late rallying right at the end (rather like Napoleon at the battle of Marengo, in fact).


Figures Painted

2016 had been a dismal year, with just 10 figures painted. 2017, however, got off to a much better start, prompted by Eric the Shed's planned anniversary Zulu War games.  As my meagre contribution I painted 32 Zulus in January to add to the 40 I had already done. I followed this up in February with 12 Perry plastic American Civil War cavalry.  March dropped to six North West Frontier British but I finished another 17 in April. In May I got another nine ACW figures, three NW Frontier British done and June saw six more NW frontier.  Then I painted nothing until November when I completed my Sikh mountain gun, which finished off my initial force for The Men Who Would Be Kings rules.  So 2017 saw a much better 78 figures completed and an unusual amount of focus with just three conflicts represented.

32 Zulu Wars
21 American Civil War
31 North West Frontier

So why the big fall off after June?  Quite simply my eyesight deteriorated so that I could no longer see properly to paint. In particular, my left eye deteriorated to the extent that I could no longer judge distance in close up work, so I could not aim the tip of my paintbrush.  I have been having laser eye surgery for some time but in November I started a four month treatment of very expensive injections into my retina and this has transformed my vision.  Then, for Christmas, my sister gave me an optivisor type thing and, having sneered at these for years, I suddenly could paint again.  I had actually reached the stage where I was about to call time on painting soldiers which would. for me, have been like giving up women or wine.  Something so incomprehensible as to make life utterly worthless.  It was so bad I was actually considering starting on model railways instead.  Best just to go to Switzerland and have an injection, I thought. Although, that said, I have spent a lot of time in Switzerland and I remember it being full of model railway shops so I would have probably abandoned the lethal injection idea and come back with a load of trains, track and little tiny naked people playing volleyball, instead.


Wargames played 

Isandlwana at the Shed (actually in Eric's kitchen, not the Shed)

A cracking start (actually I hate people who say 'a cracking start'- I am becoming offended by my own use of sixties style cliches) to the wargames year was provided by the peerless Eric the Shed and his epic all day Saturday anniversary Zulu Wars games; Isandlwana in the morning and Rorke's Drift in the afternoon, on the 22nd January, the anniversary of both battles.. After that, though, there was nothing.  I did not get down to the Shed again.   Partly this was caused by the fact that my eyesight problems have damaged my night vision and driving at night is now difficult. I hope to risk it when the evenings get a bit lighter.


Scenics

Unlike Eric the Shed, I am useless at scenic items and I made no further progress on the plastic ACW buildings I started last year.  I did build and start painting the Renedra mud brick house (a truly horrible model to put together which needed trowel fulls of plastic filler). Unfortunately, I have now forgotten which colour I started to use on it, so work came to an abrupt stop.  To build an Afghan/Egyptian/Sudanese village I also picked up a number of other ready made and kit models at various shows.  I have just ordered a couple of vacuform models of houses, too, which will take me back to my Bellona days in the seventies.

I bought the very last model of Grand Manner's fortified house, which I may deploy for some medieval Hundred Years War Lion Rampant games. It is really a Scottish or Borders fort but the conical turrets will make it look more French, as will the pale ochre paint I am planning to use.  The Old Bat called it my Polly Pocket castle and said it would look better pink.  The less said about pink walls from her the better, at present.  Grand Manner, my favourite resin scenery manufacturer, are only going to be selling painted models from now on, which is disappointing.  It will be interesting to see if this gamble pays off for them.  Higher margins but less sales?

Rocks under way

More successfully, I bought a number of aquarium type rocks and started to repaint them for Lost World or Savage Core Adventures.  With more on the way I hope to have enough soon for some attempt at a scenic board for pulp games.  Next I need to stick on some 'follidge', as the annoying Terrain Tutor calls it.

To do this I bravely invested in a hot glue gun and made exactly one piece of scenery by sticking an aquarium plant on a large washer.  I haven't touched it since, though.  The Terrain Tutor did have a good tip in suggesting coating plastic plants with Games Workshop wash which  removed the shiny plastic look very well.  I now have a huge plastic crate full of plastic follidge, which I aim to start working on now it is the spring, appropriately. probably while the Old Bat watches Gardeners' World; the TV programme I detest the most.  Get a proper hobby - not grow your own dump fill!


Shows

Salute!

I did attend Salute, as usual, which I didn't really enjoy for the first time, although I did enjoy the Wargames Bloggers Meet (above- I am on the far left - picture from Wargaming Girl's blog).  I've just got my ticket for this year, though!  Eric the Shed kindly gave me a lift to Colours, which I hadn't attended for a few years and I bought some scenics (the advantage of going by car not public transport).  I didn't attend the other of the three shows I usually do, Warfare in Reading, as I was on my way back from El Salvador


Lead pile and Kickstarters

Lead pile reduction didn't go so well this year and I bought over 150 figures but given I painted 78 figures the net increase could have been worse.  Some figure arrivals came through Kickstarters etc, such as the Peninsular Wars figures with the Forager rules, some more of Dark Fables Egyptian ladies and the early twentieth century Germans from Unfeasibly Miniatures.  I also got some Foundry and North Star Darkest Africa, Artizan and Perry Northwest Frontier, Perry ACW, Victrix EIR, Lucid Eye Savage Core, North Star Muskets and Tomahawks highlanders, Manufaktura slave girls and Crooked Dice female cultists, Biggest figure was Antediluvian's Retrosaurus which is also my favourite of 2017. Apart from the NW Frontier figures I didn't paint any of these because of my eye problems but hope to move some along this year.  I did sign up to the Drowned Earth Kickstater but cancelled it when I found out it really wasn't suitable for solo play.


Wargames Rules

As I said I might in my previous review, I did buy Chosen Men and The Pikeman's Lament.  Pikeman's Lament looks good (although I am still not entirely convinced about small bodies of pikemen in skirmishes) but Chosen Men was just terrible, as it couldn't work out whether it was a one to one game or not.  I sold it on, which is why it isn't in this picture.  As a result of stating my unhappiness with the latter, I was steered towards the Forager Kickstarter.  Death in the Dark Continent was a new glossier edition of some rules I had already played and, indeed, owned but I like to get rid of my old ring bound rules, as they look ugly on my bookshelves!  Battle Companies was also a glossy hardback of rules which first appeared in White Dwarf years ago.  The children and I had some great games using this in the past, so I was happy to get it all in one volume with added companies from The Hobbit.  I picked up the new supplement for Congo, even though I haven't played the rules yet but I enjoy Muskets and Tomahawks, which is by the same people.  The most interesting looking rules are Savage Core, which is very Lost Worldy and I have at least one solo scenario for.


Wargames Blogs and Facebook

My Punic Wars blog; the latest to get the widescreen treatment

I only posted 39 times on my main blog (this one) in 2017, which is the least since 2011.  Mainly, of course, because I wasn't painting very much.  I only posted on five of my other blogs too.  The number of visits is around the same as last year, averaging about 10,000 a month.  The most popular post, with 1082 views, was one of my paint table Saturday ones which also looked at the Spirit of Ecstasy sculpture, not coincidentally, I suspect.

I am still posting on Facebook, although not much about wargaming, admittedly, and now have 151 'friends', up from last year's 107.  I have only had to delete a few because of political content. Why do people assume that their politics is shared by everyone else and write as such? I have joined several more of the very useful Facebook groups; including the one for the interesting looking Rebels and Patriots rules.  I did see a post that seemed to indicate that more people were joining these than using blogs these days and certainly I now only tend to look at other people's blogs if they link to them from Facebook page.

Plans for the this year

I want to finish my Carthaginian war elephant crew and then, I think, concentrate on my Afghan Tribesmen so that I have both forces for the North West Frontier.  More ACW plastics, some Darkest Africa and maybe finish some units which are well on the way (like some of my Indian Mutiny troops).  Also Savage Core, both figures and scenery, will be a priority.

Musical Accompaniment

While writing this post I listened to the extended version of John Williams' The Lost World: Jurassic Park which has made me want to get my Retrosaurus on the go!

Paint Table Sunday and goodbye to TMP

I have managed a bit of painting this weekend and my first company of Perry plastic Confederates are at the varnishing stage.  I need to make sure the varnish is OK. first, though! Since I started these, Eric the Shed has painted hundreds of fantastic looking Napoleonic British, though.   I wish I could paint faster.  These ACW figures were supposed to be an experiment in quick, wargames standard painting but it has not been a success!

Anyway, I have started on the second company of nine figures.  I have 18 companies of nine to do altogether!  I am managing to focus quite well, though, by alternating with the North West Frontier and these are the last nine figures I need for my initial The Men Who Would be Kings British force.  I based some more Perry Afghans last week too and my Perry mountain gun arrived too.

Today I hoped to get quite a bit of painting done as it was nice and bright.  The Old Bat, however, started grumbling about the front lawn needing a cut, though.  I refused to do that and told her that gardening was her job.  Then I had to do the supermarket shopping (with added vegetarian nonsense as Charlotte has returned from Edinburgh) and this involved two hours at two different supermarkets this morning (because the two of them are so fussy about which particular food has to come from which supermarket).  

Then, after a quick mozzarella and prosciutto sandwich with the start of today's Giro d'Italia stage, I had to take a load of garden rubbish to the dump and there was a huge queue. The Old Bat loves the new shop at the dump where, instead of taking rubbish out the house, you give good money to the French for someone else's rubbish. Today she reserved a garden umbrella stand.  Except we don't have a garden umbrella so now she is bidding for one on eBay.  This will now destroy any chance of us having a nice summer.  It looks like I may have to go back to Botswana between now and the end of August, which is annoying as I have to fit it around my week's holiday in Cowes but can't control when I go as that is up to the President of Botswana.  

This week, after thinking about it for some time, I have decided that I am finished with The Miniatures Page.  This week the editor posted this as a topic:

While I'm in a pensive mood (grin) what's with the small but vocal minority of British wargamers who resent sharing their hobby with anyone else? They sneer at wargamers from other places and their contemptible views. They act as if the hobby belongs to a single country. I've never seen this from any other nationality. Australians, French, Germans, Canadians, Americans? Happy to share. This applies to TMP, in that I get a steady line of criticism that TMP is 'not British' or 'anti-British' or 'should use GMT' or just somehow unacceptable because we're not headquartered in the U.K. If you're from the U.K.: Do you see British wargamers who are like this? How common are they? What causes this?

I was so incensed about this I did actually post a reply (above) and found myself unexpectedly supported by John Treadaway (I only discovered this from the poisonous Frothers, when someone pointed it out to me).  It seems to me that dissing (to use an American term) British wargamers, who make up the second largest national group on TMP is akin to budget jewellery boss Gerald Ratner saying his products were 'crap'.  British wargamers reacted with polite incredulity but that didn't stop the increasingly wayward owner/editor of the site deleting people's accounts (some two dozen have been terminated).  I won't go into the peculiar personality traits displayed by the editor but I have now removed TMP from my bookmarks bar and replaced it with the Lead Adventure Forum.  I already feel more relaxed.

I didn't, in the end, buy in to The Drowned Earth Kickstarter, despite some really lovely miniatures and instead will concentrate my energies on the imminent Lucid Eye Savage Core rules by Steve Saleh, to support his miniatures line.  This will give me all the jungly fun I need, without the need to spend a fortune on SF buildings, and it seems that forces will be quite small too (less than ten) a side.  The rules are imminent, it seems.  

I now have a big shoe box full of potential jungle scenery and all I have to do is work out how to attach it to the CDs I am going to use as scenic bases.  I like the CDs as they are thin and avoid the 'big step' look of MDF or hardboard.  I still haven't bought a hot glue gun yet (I try to avoid going into B&Q as it makes me feel uncomfortable) , although at least the Old Bat knows how to use one.

I didn't buy Crooked Dice's female minions at Salute but now they have previewed something even more desirable - female cultists,  These will work with my In Her Majesty's Name cultists, provided I paint some Victorian style laces on their boots!

Having discovered that my cable package includes Eurosport (I had no idea) I have been enjoying the Giro d'Italia and with it some appropriate food and wine.  It's actually quite difficult to get a good selection of Italian wine in supermarkets these days but I have matched regional wine with many of the stages.  I need to plan for the Tour de France in advance.  With Eurosport I will be able to watch the Vuelta too, although that will be tricky to match food and wine as I am boycotting Spanish produce.  I did write a piece on one of my favourite Spanish  recipes during last year's race but didn't quite finish it, so I will hold it over until August.

Italian music today. too. with Charles Dutoit's excellent recording of Resphigi's Pines of Rome, Fountains of Rome and Roman Festivals.  All very nostalgic of the long periods I spent in Rome in the late eighties and early nineties, where I lived in either the Excelsior Hotel (as featured in the film La Dolce Vita) or the Grand Hotel (designed by César Ritz in typical restrained style).  The opening piece of the CD is I Pini di Villa Borghese.  The Borghese Gardens were a short walk up the Via Veneto from the Excelsior and contain the Borghese Gallery which is full of the work of my favourite sculptor, Gian Lorenzo Bernini.  I used to spend a lot of time in the Borghese Gardens (there was a big gym underneath it which my gym in London was a reciprocal member of) and I used to go running there when I was training for the 1987 London Marathon.

A very thin and fit Legatus, photographed by an Italian princess in 1986

I knew several lovely Italian princesses at the time and one of them was a Borghese, who I first met when I sat next to her at a dinner party, where the host served spring onions (which appeared to be something of a novelty to the Italians) as a starter.  She picked one up, looked at me and crunched the head off.  "I like strong things!" she growled.  Splendid girl.  She was a direct descendant of the man who was married to Paulina Borghese, Napoleon's sister.

The fourth piece of the Pines of Rome is I Pini della via Appia Antica and on my longer weekend runs I used to run out of Rome along the old part of the Via Appia Antica, which still has its Roman stone surface.  This piece is a depiction of the marching of a ghostly Roman legion, so is excellent for painting Romans to!  I haven't started my Victrix EIR figures yet, as I know if I start them I will get distracted from the ones I should be doing.  I might take them to Cowes.

Nude (1873)

Today's wallpaper is also Italian and is a painting by Vito d'Ancona (1825-1894) who specialised in portraits and landscapes.  He also fought as a volunteer in Garibaldi's army in 1848.

Paint Table Saturday: North West Frontier and mud-brick houses

Sadly, I didn't get my first company of ACW Confederates finished over the long weekend, due to tedious family commitments, although I did get some progress made on them.  So this weekend's plan is to get these first nine figures finished.

Also on the go at the present are the last nine figures for my TMWWBK 1878 North West Frontier force.  These are six British infantry, to complete the two units of the 70th foot and three Sikh gunners.  The weather wasn't brilliant again first thing this morning but it looks like iis brightens up now.

The missing element has been the mountain gun for the Sikh artillery, which I ordered back in February.  The crew arrived but not the gun.  There was no explanation from North Star and I had to ring them up.  They told me that they had been having 'production difficulties' with all the Artizan artillery. Anyway, the gun turned up this week, although it has something of a bendy barrel, which I hope I can straighten.

More annoying is that this gun appears to be the RML 2.5" mountain gun which didn't enter service until 1879 and my force is designed for 1878.  On The Mminiatures Page at the moment there is a poll which, essentially, asks if you are fussy about historical accuracy in your wargames armies. There were people who said things like "I can't be worried about the difference between a Belgic or stovepipe shako"  What?  This is a historical hobby not Hollywood!  I am compelled to get things as correct as I possibly can. 

Anyway, I sent off for the Perry Afghans with mountain gun set (and some more Confederates in frock coats) as this appears to be the 7lb gun which was used before the RML 2.5" was introduced, so it was in service in 1878.  I will use it with my Sikh crew, therefore.  Here we have some Sikh artillery with a 7lb gun.  What it means, though, is that I still don't have all the elements of my British force yet,

When the light is too poor to enable me to paint I have been working on my Renedra mud-brick house, which I bought at Salute last year.  I am hoping to use this for games set in the Sudan, Egypt, Afghanistan and Darkest Africa.   Looking at the box it looked like a very nice model and has something of the old Airfix Fort Sahara about it.  One of the things I am often tempted by is some sort of French Foreign Legion escapades and there are good ranges from Unfeasibly (although beware the latter's postal service - best to order them from Mike at Black Hat Miniatures) and Artizan but I have resisted so far!

Once you start to put the thing together, however, the experience is less happy.  This is the fourth Renedra building I have made and the least satisfactory from a construction point of view.  The first one I built was the ramshackle barn which was OK to put together, although the roof never fitted properly.  It was also rather flimsy and needed a base (I  don't like bases on buildings).  Next I made the American Church (the best of the four for fit) and the American store which needed a bit of filling but not too much, really.

The mud-brick house was, however, a pig to do.  The parts didn't fit well at all and the separate components, like the little wall and the stairs, took no account of the wavy surface of the main building's walls.  There was barely enough plastic from these pieces to contact the main house and have enough glued surfaces to make a strong fit.  Once the pieces were stuck I then dribbled more plastic cement down the joins to help bridge the gap.

In the end, however, I had to resort to a lot of Humbrol plastic filler.  Now this is what I cover my figures' bases with, usually but it is designed for plastic kits and I used to use it for its proper purpose when I use to make 1/72 aeroplane kits.  Usually, with those, you only needed  a bit along the wing roots and down the fuselage centre line but the mud-brick house needed more filler than Amanda Holden's face.

Fortunately, the filler apes the surface of the building so when it was undercoated it actually didn't look too bad.  Somewhere I have the accessory kit which gives you a dome and a canopy, which I bought in Orc's Nest, but I have no idea where it is.  I will buy at least one more, despite it's shortcomings, as by flipping the front and back parts you can have the stairs on the other side.  In fact Renedra offer two at a discount so I could build a domed one and a flipped one.  Not looking forward to it, though.

The question, then, is what colour to paint it?  Mud bricks vary depending on the mud, of course and I did start looking at different mud brick buildings in different parts of the world to see if I needed to paint them differently, depending on where they were supposed to be located..  This, I decided, was insane, so I am going for the Egypt/Palestine look (above) which is pretty spot on for Humbrol 121, which is the colour I paint the bases of my figures for these hot countries with.  They seem to be mostly rendered in more mud rather that the bright white you see in the Middle East.  I am going to paint the ready made model and the 4Ground one in the same colour.

Oxshott brickworks (demolished in 1958)

 The area today - just more million pound houses (except the ones which back onto the old clay pit which cost twice that!)

Talking of mud bricks, we bagged up the soil from where the Old Bat dug out her new pond and took it to the dump (sorry, waste re-cycling station). The earth in our garden is clay and is not nice granular Monty Don Gardner's World type soil but you have to dig it out with a pickaxe and it comes out in hard-packed, grapefruit sized lumps.  There is a reason that there used to be a big brickworks in Oxshott, although today only the clay pit is left.  We took these to the dump (sorry, waste re-cycling station) and were told that we would now have to pay £4 a bag to leave it in the skip there and we had six bags.  We are allowed one free bag a day, we were told, so I asked if we could come back for the next five days and dump the rest for free and they said that would be fine. I couldn't dump them all at once, even thought they will likely end up in the same skip. The logic of this escapes me. It's the same amount of earth going in the same place but by polluting the environment with five extra car journeys it's free, whereas dumping it in one go would have cost an extra £20. That's a box of Perry ACW artillery, I thought, as we drove the bags back home again.

I was in London the next day so decided to walk from Waterloo to Dark Sphere and see if they had a box of Perry Artillery.  Having trudged all the way there I found it closed due to a power cut.  Grr!  So (take that Mr Treadaway) I trudged all the way back again.  I was very early for my lunch with my former PA (or 'Mexicans' as I told the Old Bat) so I walked across Hungerford Bridge, for the exercise (two runs last week) and headed up Charing Cross Road towards Orc's Nest.  This was fatal as I stopped off in one of the second hand bookshops and acquired books on Gustav Klimt's drawings and late nineteenth century and early twentieth century erotic (well, saucy rather than erotic, really) postcards.

Pork and black pudding.  Yum,yum!

I got to Orc's Nest and bought my Perry artillery there, although it was more expensive than it would have been in Dark Sphere ,who usually offer a 10% discount.  We had lunch in the Portrait Restaurant in the National Portrait Galley, which I hadn't been to before but is a favourite of my sister..  In fact, I can't have been to the NPG for decades as they have a whole big modern extension I don't remember at all. I chose the NPG because I don't like the new decor at the National Gallery Cafe, my previous favourite in the area.  The only problem with the Portrait Restaurant is that it is so popular you can't just turn up.  I booked five days ahead and the earliest booking we could get was 1.45pm.

The restaurant has a wonderful view over the rooftops of the National Gallery next door and across to Nelson's Column and the Houses of Parliament.  The food and service is truly excellent.  They indicated, when booking, that you would only get an hour and a half slot (I hate that, who can eat a proper lunch in an hour and a half?) but we were still there at four thirty and we never felt hurried..

Today's music is a recording I have been looking for for ages, as it is not available as a digital download but I managed to get the (imported) CD.  It is John Lill's Brahm's Second Piano Concerto; a live recording of his winning performance at the 1970 Tchaikovsky Piano Competition.  I first heard this performance on a record I borrowed from Ashford Library when I was about twelve.  Although I have a very good performance by Ashkenazy with Haitink and despite Rozhdestvensky's USSR Radio Symphony Orchestra sounding a bit like a chamber orchestra, Lill's performance, especially in the second movement, is electric.  I don't usually like live recordings but this is excellent.

Tropic evening (1933)

Today's artistic distraction comes from one of America's finest illustrators, John LaGatta (1894-1977).  LaGatta was born in Naples in 1894 and after his family moved to New York studied art at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts, having first started off in his father's jewellery business. He first came to prominence during the period of the First World War, going on to do illustrations for the likes of Life, Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal and Cosmopolitan, together with advertising work. In 1916 he joined the Amsden commercial studio and never looked back. Unlike many later illustrators, who worked from photographs, LaGatta always used models, who he carefully selected himself.  LaGatta's family, although having aristocratic lineage, were very poor and later in life, as a successful illustrator, Lagatta very much appreciated the finer things in life. At the beginning of World War 2, LaGatta moved to California and taught at the Art Center School in Los Angeles. He died in 1977.

Women were very much LaGatta's favourite subject and even when depicting women in clothes (as he largely had to do for his magazine and advertising clients) his approach was unbelievably slinky; delivering some of the most sensual paintings of women ever produced.   Perhaps surprisingly, this rather daring nude was produced for a lipstick advertisement in 1933; one of a series he did in the late twenties and early thirties.  I can't see you being able to get away with an image like this in an American women's magazine today!

Paint Table Saturday and a Blast from the Past

Well, it's Salute plus one week and I have a long weekend to get some painting done.  One of the things I am aiming to achieve this week is to assemble my Renedra Mud Brick house and look at the colour scheme I might need for it, so I have been looking at lots of pictures of these buildings in Egypt and Afghanistan.  They will also work for the Arab settled parts of Africa too.  As far as my Salute purchases go I have filed and based my Iron Duke Indian Mutiny British Command, my ACW Confederates in Frock coats and some Perry Afghans.  I haven't touched the Victrix Romans yet as if I open those I know I will get completely distracted.  Rather annoyingly, I bought a set of Little Big Men shield transfers for these at Salute and only a few days afterwards they brought out transfers for Legio II Augusta.  This was the unit Cato and Macro, from Simon Scarrow's books, served in in Britain and a few years ago LBM kindly made me some Legio II shield transfers for the Warlord plastics as they didn't have them.  I will have to order some now!

This weekend I want to finish my first company of Confederate infantry which will be this company of Virginians.  It's the black bits next, though, so I went to Kingston this week and bought three more Winsor & Newton Series 7 brushes at £35!  Although you can get them cheaper online I like to check the tips of each before I buy them.

I've been reading lots of post Salute blogs and enjoying all the pictures of games which I completely missed as I walked around ExCel.  However, without wanting to sound like the didactic Henry Hyde (wargaming's own Gwyneth Paltrow) I wish some people would expand the width of their blogs so old people like me could read them and appreciate their pictures.  This one, for example, could do with expanding and bigger text.  As you can see there is lots of expansion room on the page.  It's not hard to do.  Even I managed to do it and I am completely computer illiterate, although you do  have to re-format your title picture, if you have one. 

I had quite a quiet day the Sunday after Salute and had a nice chat with my friend over breakfast in Sainsbury's.  She has taken up yoga and, like all converts, is now urging me to do the same (my doctor has suggested it too).  Having seen the ladies doing yoga in the Village Centre, however, I would need to go on a six month fitness regime before even joining.   One of Guy's schoolfriend''s mother was a typical Oxshott yummy mummy and spent around four hours a day in the gym.  She does triathlons; ironman ones, not those silly little ones like I did once on the Isle of Wight.  In fact, she did the round the Isle of Wight cycle route (62 miles) before lunch a year or so ago.  I used to do the London to Brighton bike ride (60 miles) ad it used to take me six hours. The Isle of Wight route is much hillier, too.   Talking of fit, while I was undercoating some Confederate infantry on Sunday,  the Old Bat was chatting to Louise Redknapp and Daisy Lowe, annoyingly.  Oh, how I enjoyed Miss Lowe's Playboy pictures a few years ago.   She does yoga, I believe.  Seems to work.

One of my ex-girlfriends from College is very into yoga, to the extent that she used to go and study in India once a year and had a yoga book importing business.  She wasn't that flexible when I knew her, though, sadly.  Unlike another girlfriend of mine, K, who unexpectedly got in touch with me this week after not communicating for ten years (we had lost each other's e-mail addresses and she had moved house).  K, who I was at College with too, was always doing dance classes at Pineapple after university.  She was always very skinny and very, very flexible.  I dug out a sketch of her I did at university, when she weighed about six stone ten (94 lbs for Americans). I haven't seen her for 20 years (she lives in Cambridgeshire) but we were very close and we are going to meet up again in London soon.  As a result (and the college Gaudy in two months) I am trying to eat less (no more cooked breakfasts, sniff) and went running again yesterday  morning (37 minutes!). I suspect K will not have been subject to middle age spread; she was always taut and trim.

Today's music is the Ashkenazy/Ghindin recording of the original versions of Rachmaninov's Piano concertos number one and four, which are very much the less performed of his four concertos..  The first was written when he was only seventeen and owes a lot to both the Grieg and the Tchaikovsky.  This early version is not nearly as successful as his later revision, which is what is performed today,  With the Fourth, however, the original version is actually superior (especially in the last movement) and contains about three minutes of extra material.   Ashkenazy, as might be expected from a pianist, is a sympathetic conductor although the Helsinki Orchestra are not a patch on the LSO, who accompanied him when he played these pieces under Andre Previn.  Forty year old Ghindin, who I haven't heard before, is excellent.   Fascinating recording.

Today's wallpaper is The Victory of Faith (1889) by the Irish painter St George Hare. This gently sensual picture actually has a religious theme and depicts two Christian women imprisoned in a Roman amphitheatre, while barely visible lions glower through the bars in the background. The white girl is tied to a stone pillar on which a cross has been scratched. The dark skinned woman is supposed to be her Ethiopian maid, with them both being due to be thrown to the lions the next day.  Their tender touching of each other may be intended to depict their shared faith but now it seems likely that Hare copied the pose from a French erotic postcard!

Hare (1857-1933) produced a number of pictures of chained women for supposedly religious, uplifting paintings. This picture was well received at the time, however, and is now on display in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, to which it was donated in 1905.