Paint Table Saturday: Back to Middle Earth, a painting challenge, time at Brooklands and an unexpected trip to Mordor

The Legatus hasn't being posting on his blogs much of late for the shocking reason that he has actually been painting some wargames figures!  So what has engendered this return to painting after a very poor year?  It was actually prompted by two new ranges of plastic fantasy figures: the imminent Fireforge Forgotten World Kickstarter and the expansion of the North Star Oathmark figures.

I was very tempted by both these ranges but put off by the Fireforge ones as one of the first two planned armies was for undead.    Now I don't get the whole zombie/undead thing at all; it is just a genre I have no interest in.  My particular friend, Angela, vaguely remembered some Games Workshop issue last year with politically correct people from PETA objecting to fur on their figures and GW pointed out that their figures represented fictional races.   Was, she posited, (having studied philosophy) having undead opponents to your armies more ethically acceptable to some people as you weren't depicting conflict between humans?  Did this, also, make them happier to watch horribly violent TV and films as the battles were with creatures not people (former people, perhaps). Was it, she continued, like people who watch soft core sex scenes but claim that they don't like hard core sex scenes; a moral cop-out?  If you are going to watch people having sex, watch people really having sex not some, literally. emasculated version. I said I think that most wargamers just buy the nicest looking figures they can.  Well, I do anyway.  This discussion, however, coincided with the release by Games workshop of their Battle of Pellenor Field boxed set.

Carefully selected still of Ms Brook with a lovely pair of jugs

I had a fantasy revelation (which didn't feature Kelly Brook for once - goodness me she was looking ripe on Celebrity Antiques Road Trip last week). I have hundreds of GW Lord of the Rings figures and have even painted a lot of them.  Why mess around with other similar medieval fantasy worlds when I had already got figures for Middle Earth?  I managed to find the box on sale online for about £62; a considerable saving on the £80 asking price.  It is a big box with lots of plastic figures and a complete new version of the rule book. My daughter was enthusiastic and we have played LotR games before.  I decided to get going and paint some of the figures immediately, callously abandoning the Peninsula British and the Byzantines.  Bizarrely, given what I have said earlier, I started on the Army of the Dead and soon had the twenty figures in the box built.  I actually thought that they were such nice figures I wish I could have painted them in full colour but they have to be ghostly so I went down to Games Workshop in Epsom and bought some paint.

Under way with metal and plastic extra recruits

Oh. dear.  this is where it all went wrong.  I decided to use Citadel acrylics so that I could get the right colours. Then I realised that I had no idea how to paint using acrylics.  Did you use them straight out of the pot?  Did you have to mix them with water?  After undercoating them black and looking at other people's attempts online I saw that most people dry brushed them in pale grey.  How on earth do you dry brush with thick, gloopy acrylics?  If you thin them then they are too wet to dry brush!  I was getting very frustrated. I found the paint filling all the recesses. It was horrible. Then I tried to over-paint in a colour I thought was  the right shade of ghostly green.  This paint was even worse and had gritty lumps in it.  I went into another Games Workshop and the man told me that you had to mix it with something called medium, not water.  What? It seems Citadel paints are all different types now, not just generic paint. This man saved me and provided me with the right type of paint (I had bought one called 'dry' - I have no idea what it is for) which was no use.  It seems you need A-level chemistry to use Citadel paints now.  He also recommended I paint over them first with a dark green wash to recover all the recesses. Miraculously, it worked (I have never used a wash before). I carefully picked out details with the proper paint and highlighted the metal bits with a metallic silver and they look...well, OK at best.

Nearly done

I decided that twenty figures didn't look much like an army so bought ten more plastic (you only get ten figures in a box now!) and ten metal ones from eBay (I didn't even know that they had issued the Army of the Dead in plastic which is why I didn't have any in my collection).  Games Workshop were out of stock of the King of the Dead but I had one in my collection from the old Battle Games in Middle Earth magazine.

Here they all are completed.  I painted forty-one figures in just under six weeks which is not bad considering I had only painted four for the whole year before that.  At this point a new Facebook group I have joined, Sculpting Painting and Gaming, decided to launch a painting challenge for November; suggesting people paint for half an hour a day.  Inspired by my recent painting progress I decided to launch into the 36 orcs in the Pellenor boxed set.

Orcs!

Progress is going quite well on these too but having doubled the number of Army of the Dead figures I had to order some more orcs too.  These are being painted in good old Humbrol enamels! The first seven days of November I did manage at least 30 minutes a day but on Thursday I was at the Burne-Jones exhibition at the Tate Gallery and Friday and today I was in Oxford for a dinner of Alumni from my school who attended Oxford.  It is not like me to attend a men only event but it turned out to be great fun even if there was no-one from my year there.  There was someone from two years below me who remembered me as the 'boy who used to draw pictures of naked women' (surely not).

I stayed at the relentlessly trendy Malmaison Hotel, which used to be Oxford Prison until 1996.  I have stayed at a Malmaison before (in Manchester - yes, I went there once) and the chain suffers from a overly precious self-aggrandisement and really terrible levels of lighting.  I kept crashing into objects as I couldn't see. Still, it was nice enough and the breakfast was very good.

2 Litre LC Supercharged Lagonda (1931)

Other than Lord of the Rings painting (I had to give up today as it went black this afternoon and poured with rain so I only managed four minites - hence this post) I have spent quite a bit of time visiting the nearby Brooklands museum.  Guy and I joined the Brooklands Trust in August, as it means you get in for free and we have already saved the cost of membership in just a few months.  It means we have access to the members' bar and balcony overlooking the site. Brooklands was the world's first purpose built motor racing circuit and was, for many years, the site of the Hawker aviation factory.  Over a third of all Hawker Hurricanes were built there.

There aren't many famous things that come from my home town of Staines, where I lived until I was in my twenties and where my sister still lives.  Linoleum was invented there and I remember a huge lino factory in the town when I was younger. The actress Gabrielle Anwar was from Staines (or rather Laleham, the posh end, where I lived) and went to the same junior school as I did. As a sixteen year old she appeared in the Staines and Egham News in this picture, saying how she was going to be an actress. I remember thinking at the time that you have no hope of becoming an actress and you are only in the newspaper because you look nice in a dance leotard.  I couldn't believe it when I next heard of her and she was starring in a film (Scent of a Woman (1992) ) with Al Pacino. Other than that, the band Hard-fi,  and comedian Bobby Davro (whose daughter was in my son's class at his (posh) school) complete a short and motley list.

The most famous thing, therefore, to come out of Staines (or Staines-upon-Thames, as it pretentiously renamed itself in 2012) was the Lagonda motor car. Guy and I were at Brooklands in September and they had a beautiful example there, complete with its radiator badge proudly proclaiming its town of manufacture.  My uncle Len worked at the factory (now the site of Staines' Sainsbury's) and my father-in-law owned two Lagondas in the past.  Most famously, Captain Hastings, in the ITV Poirot series (I am currently working my way through all of them), drove a 1932 two litre low chassis tourer, like the one we saw at Brooklands.

Vickers Viking replica (twin wing floats under the nose with wings against the wall on the left)

We had another look around the aircraft display hangars and found something I remembered from the days when all the aircraft were jammed into an old corrugated iron shed, before the recent museum expansion.  It was so jammed in before you couldn't photograph it and although they have removed the wings for display, it is now possible to get a shot of the replica Vickers Viking amphibian.  

The replica was built for the film The People That Time Forgot (1977) and featured on the poster.  In the film it was piloted by a character played by Shane Rimmer, who was the voice of Scott Tracy in Thunderbirds!

Awk! Awk! Awk!

In the film, the amphibian, as they call it, is attacked by pterodactyls and while our heroes set off to try and find Doug McClure, Rimmer's character sits with the plane (which he manages to land on an impossibly boulder strewn landscape), taking pot shots at the flying reptiles.

Unable to refrain from making comment about twin floats

I didn't see this film when it first came out, so only caught it some years later on, no doubt, Sunday afternoon TV, where my appreciation of the Vickers Viking was overshadowed somewhat (as were her feet) by the magnificent Dana Gillespie, as just the sort of cavegirl you want to discover in a lost world. 

Royal Canadian Air Force Vickers Viking IV

Only 34 of these aircraft were built and the Brooklands replica is the only full sized one of its type that exists today (there is a 7/8th sized replica in Canada which was also built for a film).  The prototype crashed in 1919, killing its pilot Sir John Alcock, who worked for Vickers, who had made the first successful non-stop crossing of the Atlantic (with Sir Arthur Brown) six months earlier.

There is also a full sized, flying replica of Alcock and Brown's trans-Atlantic Vickers Vimy at Brooklands museum today, too and at the recent First World War commemoration day they got it out of the hangar and ran the engines, which certainly generated an impressive sound.  Next weekend its militaria day so I will probably go along again, even though it means missing Warfare (I really don't need any more figures!)

The only sight in Iceland I expected to see

I did have an unexpected work trip in September when I had to go to a country I had never been to before, Iceland, (my seventy-first country).  The weather was supposed to be cold and wet so I wasn't expecting to see much of the place other than the hotel and football stadium (they are trying to finance a new one, hence my presence) where my meetings were.  I had a meeting with the Icelandic Football Association about this and met the current chairman.  Now what I know about football could be written on the back of a very small postcard ('it's a game for primitive thugs' as my father told me just before I went to one of the only two matches I have attended: the 1970 Schoolboy International against (West) Germany (we won 3-0, shockingly).  I had no idea, therefore, that the bright lawyer who is now chairman of the Icelandic FA, Guðni Bergsson was a well known footballer in the nineties for Tottenham and Bolton Wanderers. 'That must have been great,' said someone I met in London afterwards. Er...

Fortunately, I met a very nice lady architect at the accompanying conference who didn't seem to mind that I had been chatting up her daughter and the next day we had a trip to the Snæfellsjökull where I was very excited by the sight of the volcano from Journey to the Centre of the Earth! I actually expressed the opinion that I had no desire to ever visit Iceland, given it looks like Mordor, in one of my blog posts a few years ago but I grudgingly admit to being rather impressed by its stark landscape.

Things were also helped immeasurably by the fact that the weather was unexpectedly (and atypically for the time of year) very good and that the lady architect and the Icelandic chamber paid for most of my meals and drinks (Icelandic beer is very good which it should be at £10 a glass).

It was certainly nice on a business trip to be driven around and see some of the sights, something I rarely get to do as I am usually stuck in some ministry or other.  Iceland does feel like the edge of the world, however. There is a small possibility of another overseas trip before Christmas but this would be back to Botswana.  My passport has actually expired so I am going to have to run around next week and get a new one sorted out.

Sleeping Beauty (1910)

Today's wallpaper distraction is Sleeping Beauty by Bernard Hall (1859-1935).  Hall was born in Liverpool but spent much of his life in Australia, where this picture was painted, and was the director of the National Gallery of Melbourne for forty one years.  His works are traditional; nudes, interiors and still life and he had no time for modern art at all.  He died in London during  a rare working trip back to England.

Today's music is Canteloube's Sons of the Auvergne, music inspired by a very different volcanic landscape.  I have the Victoria de los Angeles version and although I don't like her voice as much as Netania Davrath, the de los Angeles version has wonderful orchestral accompaniment by the Orchestre des Concerts Lamoureaux which just tips it.  I first heard the famous Baïlèro when it was used for a Dubonnet TV advert back in the seventies (which featured Richard Stilgoe playing some Bohemian artist in a bucolic landscape).  I wonder what happened to him?  He is one of those professional smart alecs (like the equally annoying Stephen Fry) which only Cambridge University could produce.

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.

Houston, Bogota, Barranquilla and Medellin

Barranquilla - hosts the second biggest carnival in the world after Rio

Well, I am back at home properly after over a month away from home; so no painting done but some inspiration at least!  IThis last trip was a bit of a gruelling one given the number of flights (nine), airports and hotels. I have had two weeks in Cowes to recover and work by the sea, which is very therapeutic.  For quite a lot of the time on the trip I was in a hotel for just one night before moving on to the next place so didn't even get a chance to unpack. 

The living room of my modest suite in Houston

I cheated a bit on the way out and took a stopover in the relentlessly trendy Hotel Zaza in Houston, where I met up, once again, with my particular friend S.  You can't fly to Colombia direct from London and I would rather do the bigger portion of the journey on British Airways (good for my air miles) than fly to Frankfurt, Paris or Madrid and fly most of the way on some dodgy foreign airline.  Although I have to say that Avianca was very good flying within Colombia.  BA have said they won't introduce a direct flight to London from Colombia because if they did it would essentially bankrupt Iberia (which they own).  Avianca want to fly to London but have only been offered Gatwick which they don't want.  So it's a two flight journey.  Breaking what can be a 24 hour plus trip is a good idea, therefore.   Usefully now too, Houston has introduced a system at immigration that means that if you are leaving the airport or are in transit with hand luggage then you go go through a fast track procedure.  This meant only a five minute wait rather than an hour and a half like every one else.  I can easily do a two week trip on hand luggage now.

This meant I got to the hotel before S and so settled down with a St Arnold's Amber Ale: a very good "craft beer" from Texas.  I had an enormous suite, which was rather a shame considering I was there less than 24 hours.  I woke up early in the morning, as usual the first day, but managed to find the Tour de France on live  TV and with Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin commentating too!  S observed that she thought that the Tour podium hostesses weren't up to much this year and that it must be the recession.  A rather catty remark, I thought at the time, but actually, on reflection, I think she was right.  They were a long way from the former Miss France's we have seen in the past.  S had turned 43 just a few days before and was feeling old.  As indeed she was, as I sensitively pointed out, given that she was now mid-forties.  I had the resulting bruise  on my arm for some days afterwards.

A very leisurely breakfast followed in the hotel's attractive semi-open terrace; as I feared it would be the last decent one I got for two weeks; based on the dismal breakfasts from my visit to South America in May, anyway.  S had a small bowl of fruit which is why she is thin and gorgeous and I am not.  The only good thing is that as thin people get older they start to look haggard!

A model of the new El Dorado airport in Bogota

I spent quite a lot of time behind the scenes at airports on this trip, which was fascinating, and learnt a lot of useless information.  For example: the most common item of dangerous cargo which Colombian airport security has to extract from packed suitcases is...inflated footballs!  Well, maybe it isn't that interesting.  S didn't think so, anyway.  I was told to put it on my blog so I could bore everyone else.  So I have. 

Barranquilla airport

Another interesting thing I discovered, on visiting the Caribbean city of Barranquilla (where I met the very leggy Miss Barranquilla but sadly didn't get a photograph of her - I felt rather shy as she was wearing so little, oddly), was that it was the site of South America's first airport in 1919.  Set up by the Germans it was initially for seaplanes only. Barranquilla is at the mouth of the Magdalena river which runs right down the centre of this mountainous country.  To get freight and passengers to Bogota in the old days you would fly up the river from Barranquilla and then everything would be unloaded onto mule trains for the six day trip to Bogota. When the Second World War started the Americans put pressure on the Colombians to kick out the Germans (they didn't want German planes so close to the Panama Canal) so the German-formed airline, Scadta became what is now Avianca.  It is the second oldest airline in the world after KLM (by a number of months).  These classic pictures came from Barranquilla airport's conference centre lounge where they had an interesting display about Scadta and the early days of flying in Colombia.  It all looks a little too pioneering for me.  There must be a nineteen thirties pulp wargame in here somewhere with American agents, dodgy Germans, smuggled gold and possibly a local, leggy  femme fatale.  Hmm.

Barranquilla airport

I've never arrived at an airport before and been greeted by a band and whisked off to the VIP room for drinks and nibbles (including Miss Barranquilla) but there you go.  Friendly people in Barranquilla! Barranquilla was hot: 33 degrees.  Exactly the same as in Britain I discovered.  Typical that I miss the only decent weather we have had.  I came back home to find English girls all have brown legs and are wearing shorts.  Most unusual (but very welcome)!

Girl in Cowes last week

I had to be in Bogota on two separate occasions on this trip so ended up staying in two different hotels.  The small but chi chi Sofitel was very nice and did impressive things with scrambled eggs for breakfast.  Even more impressive was the fact that they had English breakfast tea made with leaves and skimmed milk.  How civilised!

The restaurant was all in with the bar, which I don't usually like, but with the clever use of curtains they made the area look quite different in the evening.  I'd happily stay there again.

The Stygian lobby of the Bog

The hotel I stayed in when I returned to Bogota, after my first side trip to Medellin, was the unfortunately named Bog, which opened fairly recently.  The room was very nice although, like a lot of modern hotels, it took twenty minutes to work out how to operate the lights and the curtains and even longer to work out the mechanics of the shower, which had two alternative shower heads, horizontal jets and three separate controls.  I sent S in there to twiddle knobs at random, until she worked it out (the Legatus is not good with machinery). She got squirted unexpectedly by cold water on several occasions which serves her right for giving me such a thump.  The Bog also suffered from that other annoying characteristic of hip hotels in that the place was mostly so dark you couldn't see anything.  Presumably this is because old people don't stay at hotels like this.

Fortunately, on the roof they had a very nice outside bar with a good view of the city.  I had the best Vodka Martini of my trip there and S had one of those girlie cocktails (a Mojito?).  We had some strange crispy cracker things with them which were so hard I was worried they would crack my teeth. Having had a nasty visit to the dentist last year I didn't want to risk that again.

For breakfast I had a weird mixture of scrambled egg and some local, rice, beans and chorizo concoction. The two actually went together rather well and it was one of the better breakfasts I had in Colombia.  S had coffee and a croissant.  We had rather overdone the cocktails the night before and she was suffering somewhat. Fortunately, my recent training in Poland had stood me in good stead.

V looked after me very well

I then had to leave my delightful local assistant V in Bogota (which S was rather pleased about for some reason -perhaps it had something to do with the fact that she was half S's age) and take the 27 minute flight up to Medellin (it would have been ten and a half hours by road).

Half way back up to Medellin airport

I also left S in Bogota, to do even more shopping, and went up to the F-AIR Colombia Air Force show in Medellin. Formerly the most dangerous city in the world (6,500 murders a year) two really good mayors have transformed the place (only 450 murders this year which in a city of 4 million people isn't too bad).

Come on, it's only 16km!

It is now the Barcelona or Milan of Colombia. The city is located in a deep valley with the airport on the other side of the mountains and you have to go over these (it looks amazingly like Switzerland) and then descend to the city on a forty minute 16km switchback which offers up quite staggering views of Medellin. This used to be the single most dangerous road in the world and you couldn't drive along it without paying the drug cartel's enforcers for passage.  Now it's an excellently surfaced road (one of the few in Colombia) and on Sunday morning I watched dozens of Colombians cycle up this huge hill.  No wonder they did so well in the Tour de France this year.

Canadian CF188

I'd never been to an airshow before.  Not one with trade stands selling missiles, and such like, anyway.  The flying aspects of it were a bit weak, really, as the show was at Medellin airport and they could only do displays by closing down the airport for a while.  We had several aerobatic displays from the Colombian Air Force which just made me realise how very, very good the Red Arrows are.  It was a shame that S wasn't there as the Canadian forces were there in some numbers and Canadians abroad love to congregate.

Colombian Airforce Beechcraft

Kfir fighters.  An Israeli variant of the Mirage 5

OV-10 Bronco.  Used to attack narcotics factories and guerrilla bases

UH-60. Likewise

Still there were some interesting planes there, including a lot from the Colombian Air Force.  It is quite clear that most of the Colombian planes are designed to observe and then bombard guerrillas and drug facilities on the ground.  The Black Hawks seemed particularly heavily armed with all sorts of stuff on pylons plus side door pintle-mounted Gatlings as well.  Scary!

Now of course the Legatus doesn't know very much about modern aircraft so was very grateful to this very smart Colombian Air force publicity officer for helping to identify the aircraft.  She took a picture of me (for some reason) so I took one back of her and then she came over to chat.

There are a number of women pilots in the Colombian Air Force as, indeed, there are flying airliners for Avianca.  I always feel reassured whenever I have a lady pilot as I reckon they have to be twice as able to get the job!

VIP pavilion (right) with very large Canadian plane

View from the pavilion balcony

Centre of activity in the show was the blue VIP pavilion which had a balcony from where you could get a good view of the show and the flying displays.  On my second day I was taken up there and found it was also a very good place to observe the fine Colombian ladies at the show.  None of this politically correct nonsense in Colombia there were lots of glamorous ladies to help flog the bombs, rockets and torpedoes.

The first hostess arrives - as seen from my excellent balcony viewpoint

Guarding the entrance to the VIP stand

Private jet sales girl was having trouble with her hemline  in the wind, entertainingly

 What aeroplanes?

Whatever she is selling I'll buy it!

Even better, after half an hour a whole host of blue-clad lovelies appeared to get me cold drinks, bombard me with goodies and generally just waft about leaving trails of perfume as potent as the trails coming from some of the display aircraft.

Another ridiculously large suite

At the end of our second stay in Medellin S appeared in the hotel bar wearing a pink, lacy mini dress and not, I hate to admit, looking her age at all.  That's not what I said to her of course.  Having emptied the shops in Bogota she was coming with me to my next destination - a country I had never been to before: Panama.

More on this next time and there are even some wargaming aspects to it!