Paint Table Sunday: Roger, Roger and more on dinosaurs!

I have had a couple of good weekend's painting, Last Sunday I had a bit of a frustrating day as I wanted to finish my Lucid Eye Jaguar Tribe figures as I had painted and varnished them, however I couldn't find my superglue to attach their shields. I opened a new one about two weeks ago so know it is in my room somewhere but where exactly I couldn't fathom. Rather than wasting any more time on looking for it I decided to have a go at painting my Star Wars droids instead.

I undercoated five of them them last Saturday, so took a deep breath and painted them using a method I saw on You Tube using Citadel's contrast paint; the first time I had really used it. Given that one coat of this was enough, followed by a few silver bits and painting the blasters black, they are unique for me in that they are almost entirely painted in acrylics, The other unique thing was that they took less time to paint than they took to assemble!  I did the last four this weekend. Anyway, here they are. I didn't like the very thick plastic bases they came on so, in another first, I mounted them on transparent bases so I can use them for number of different scenarios. Now I want the core boxed game for the Clone Wars but fortunately it is out of stock everywhere!

So here are my current projects as of today. At he front re the Savage Core Jaguar Tribe and I have to just finish  then varnish their shields and add static grass.  Next I have got out the 1864 Danes again as they are well on their way and not too fiddly. A new lady pirate (see below) has found her way in there too. Behind are the next group of Savage Core figures but they still have a long way to go.

I have been humming and hahing about The Drowned Earth solo Kickstarter but it is quite expensive and we have just had to buy a new cooker. The Lockdown is seeing people work on more solo adaptions of rules, which is a good thing for me as solo play is really all I am going to be able to do, going forward. Also, I won't get frustrated with myself because I don't understand the rules and won't ruin everyone else's game by being slow and useless!  My doctor says that my dyspraxia does contribute to my inability to play games, interestingly. Maybe Savage Core is enough.  Perhaps I will just buy their Baryonyx model, as it is the local dinosaur!  

The Drowned Earth Kickstarter is going tremendously well (they don't need my money) and they are now planning to include a big herbivore. They were having a poll to choose between a ceratopsian (not a real one; an imagined one) and an ankylosaur and the ceratopsian has won, Why no love for ankylosaurs? There are plenty of toy triceratops' and styracosaurus' on the market but I have never seen an ankylosaurus.  When I was little it was a very popular dinosaur.

Ankylosaurus seems to have fallen out of fashion, sadly. I am not up to date on the surprisingly fast moving world of fossil classification to know if it has gone the way of brontosaurus and been removed from prehistory. Or maybe it is too hard to mould? I had one of these model kits when I was little. I took the cover illustration rather literally and painted it a lovely glossy chocolate brown with a nice silver top.

Of course I have also bought into the Jurassic World Kickstarter, so that will be enough dinosaurs for a while.  I had this small Copplestone Castings nanotyrannosaurus on my desk and on Saturday I painted it start to finish. Good dino practice! It's about 9 cm from nose to tail so would also work as a bigger beast for my 18mm fantasy figures. Maybe the Antediluvian retrosaurus next!

I have had another Kickstarter arrive in the form of some figures for Pirates of the Dread sea. I didn't bother with the rules but just went for the human and skeleton pirate figures as I still harbour (so to speak) a desire to do some Pirates of the Caribbean the Online Game type, skirmishes.  As usual I will saw off most of the slot so I can mount the figures on washers like my other pirates.  They are big figures compared with my Foundry ones but match very well with the Black Scorpion ones I have.  The Contrast Paint I used on the droids should work well on the skeleton pirates.

Where I used to work. The Old Bat asked architect Richard Rogers where she could get a model of it for our wedding cake so he got his studio to build one: one of only four architetcts' models of the Lloyd's Building in the world.

I am now officially a pensioner, as I got my first monthly payment from Lloyd's of London this week. It certainly helps towards the household bills, which I need with three non-contributing parasites living here (well, alright, the Bag for Life contributes a bit). The Old Bat has been off work for so long that she no longer gets sick pay and isn't entitled to statutory sick pay. Never mind, we won another contract on the back of the one we are working on at the moment, which is something.  Guy, at least, has got his contract for his first job in September, which is better than some of his other friends who have had their offers withdrawn due to the Chinese wrecking the economy.

I am working my way through the trashily enjoyable Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World on Amazon Prime and I really must get some Lost World tribe of the week games worked out.  All the sets look like theey are made of MDF anyway,  Although Jennifer O'Dell's, jungle girl Veronica is the obvious sex symbol, I find myself strangely drawn to the Rachel Blakely character (perhaps because she is a better actress). She certainly contributed to my colour choices for the Lucid Eye female explorer I painted a few years ago.

Jennifer O'Dell and Rachel Blakely, Splendid!

The two actresses posed for this particularly effective picture back in the show's heyday (if, indeed, it ever had one).  Which reminds me, my second collection of Facebook Lockdown Lovelies is on my Legatus' Wargames Armies blog here. I am running a long way behind because these posts take ages to do!  Rather than posting pictures of actresses from the past, as I have been doing, many are doing things like putting up pictures of their ten most influential albums, I realise how poor my comprehension is of pop (and especially rock) music when I see these. In most of the ones I have seen so far I don't even know the artists let alone having heard of the albums. Maybe one day I'll put mine on here. Not that I can ever choose ten of anything in these type of things and they would vary from month to month, of course.

First random annoyance of the week is...people who describe other people as 'folk'.  Folk? Really? I just find it a very odd and old fashioned term. It just engenders a vision of people dancing around maypoles in some yokel part of Britain wearing big hats and chewing straw.  No doubt the whole folk music and Morris dancers thing interpolates itself into it. The term seems more popular in America and, perhaps, up North (I do not study Northern culture if it can be avoided). It's like using 'personages'.  It's also like the way American call drinks 'beverages'.  I have no rational explanation as to why these annoy me but they do!

Second annoyance of this week are people who write LOL after a supposedly amusing comment they have made on Facebook. Almost without exception the comment is not amusing but people feel that they have to be funny even if, like me, they have no sense of humour. LOL, appalling netspeak though it is, should be used as a reaction to someone else's comment, not your own. It's like those tragic celebrities who clap themselves on TV shows or people who laugh at their own supposed witticisms, like Eurosport's annoying cycling commentator Carlton Kirby. Oh, he does think he is amusing. but he is just annoying. Grrr!

Anyway. today's album is His Dark Materials by Scottish composer Lorne Balfe, one of the Hans Zimmer school. I really enjoyed the TV series although I have no knowledge of the books and haven't seen the film The Golden Compass (2007), which covers the same story, even though my old college appeared in it.  Interestingly the music was written before the TV series and is more in the way of a stylistic dry run for the actual soundtrack which I then had to acquire too. Atmospheric stuff but more suitable for painting steampunk figures to, I think.

Dakota Blue Richards: Little girls get bigger every day

In the feature film, the young heroine, Lyra  was played by Dakota Blue Richards, who I only remember from the Oxford-set detective series, Endeavour. She is the type of actress who reprehensible Fleet Street photographers always seem to want to pose in profile. 

Today's wallpaper is an illustration by Maurice Milliere (1871-1946), Born in Le Havre, he received most of his artistic education in Paris, where he became a top illustrator for magazines like La Vie Parisienne and  Le Sourire. He, essentially, developed the genre of what would become pin-up art, with his saucy, under-dressed, young. modern ladies about town and was a great influence on pin-up master Albert Vargas.

Paint Table Saturday and what's coming up...

Getting there

I actually took time off today from working on my latest paper to do a bit of painting on my Neanderthals (mainly because the Old Bat was out for the day!).  I think it's about two months since I did any painting (also Neanderthals) but I did a bit more on the second batch today.  Even though they are taking longer to paint than the Sistine Chapel they are actually not far off now and I may do a bit more tomorrow.  This will complete the seven Lucid Eye Neanderthals and although I said last time that it looked like news of the promised Savage Core rules had gone a bit quiet this is not the case.  At Salute I picked up the Atlanteans and the last of the Amazons but next will be the Jaguar tribe, I think.  I have been worried about picking up a paintbrush as I didn't want to see how bad my eyesight had got but the recent laser surgery I had does seem to have helped.  It's not what it was a year or so ago but I can definitely paint again, even if not to my previous standard.  This is quite exciting and has had me thinking about what to do next.

What I should really be working on is Argonauts, for a possible Shed Wars campaign later this year so I am going to dig some figures out for that.  I have just found some Foundry Harpies and will base these tomorrow.  I will paint them like the ones in the Harryhausen Jason and the Argonauts I think.  The Foundry figures come in two types, ones with bird like legs and ones with human legs but I don't think I am going to worry about this.  One of them has a bush that would put a seventies Penthouse Pet to shame!

I've been selling some plastic figures I am never going to paint on eBay, such as Gripping Beast's stumpy gnome Vikings and Victrix's hideously complex British Napoleonic infantry.  A lot of metals will follow when I can sort them out.  So I shouldn't be looking at any more but a number of things have (inevitably) caught my eye.  First up, because I have already ordered two packs, are Perry Miniatures Afghans.  These will probably be smaller than the Artizan ones I painted but hopefully not too much smaller because variety is certainly needed for these.   I also have four Studio Miniatures figures somewhere as well, so I will do a comparison picture when they arrive.  The imminent arrival of The Men Who Would be Kings is driving this, of course.

Not on sale yet but very interesting to me are the forthcoming Victrix Early Imperial Romans.  The Warlord ones are uselessly small and I have got rid of all mine but these will work with my Foundry Germans and Renegade (and others) Ancient Britons.  Although it appears they will all be in Lorica Segmentata (ruling out the invasion of Britain, annoyingly) I will be able to use them for Boudica's rebellion.  Very excited by these.  The good news is that they will have pila and sword options (I always have my Romans with pila rather than waving swords about).  They look a bit too 'active' for me but we shall see.

A range I have managed to resist (so far) is Firelock Games lovely new pirates.  Seeking $15,000 on Kickstarter they raised $200,000 more than that!  I am happy to wait for when they are on sale, though as I'm not short of pirates to paint.  The real attraction for me is that they are 17th century figures with musketeers equipped with a collar of bandoliers; just right for Henry Morgan's time.  Nearly all the other pirate ranges are for the early eighteenth century.  Now my Panama project can proceed and I can recreate this Angus McBride picture.  The range will include ships and rules, called Blood and Plunder, too.  Excellent.

This, I want!

I haven't thought much about the Lord of the Rings for some years, given the disappointing support from Games Workshop for The Hobbit.  Now, however, they have formed a special Middle Earth division (well four people) within Forge World and are promising to reintroduce out of production figures, source books and scenery.  Even better, they have some new figures underway, including these wonderful Iron Hills dwarves (below).  These and other things like a plastic Lake-town House kit demonstrate that, contrary to rumours last year, Games Workshop have renewed their licence from New Line.

I recently watched a really annoying YouTube video by someone (I won't give his name) who attended the recent GW event at which all these things were revealed.  I can't find a link to it now but this fellow blathered on for nearly an hour to impart five minutes worth of information.  Seeing people talk to camera on YouTube videos just demonstrates why TV presenters earn big money.  Everyone thinks they can do it and almost no-one can.  This chap spoke much to fast, slurped coffee throughout his piece (you can tell he isn't civilised enough to drink tea) and even broke off to look at his mobile phone when it pinged.  A shame, because the information was quite interesting. In fact he was nearly as bad as biodynamic twiglets Hemsley + Hemsley (I am glad their woeful on screen performance has received bad reviews), an advert for whose spiraliser now keeps popping up on my screen!  One thing Mr Annoying YouTube said was that the pack of 12 Iron Hills Dwarves would be a very reasonable £40.  Sorry, matey, that isn't a reasonable price to me!  I'll still get them though. What Games Workshop don't seem to be able to work out is that I will only buy one box at £40 but if they were £20 I would but three or four.  They will be resin not plastic though.

Photo finish

Another good episode of Rick Stein's Long Weekends last night with him visiting Bologna.  He cooked far too much fish again (Bologna is not really a fishy city) but there was lots of pasta and Parmigiano to compensate, although how he found people who cooked ragu Bolognese with tuna I don't know. .It's almost worthy of Hemsley + Hemsley.  Indeed a good helping or three of pasta (the  sausage ragu recipe looked well worth trying) would not only be good for the twiglet sisters but also for the podium girls at the Giro d'Italia, which is taking place at present.  Here they are crossing the finishing line and looking forward to a nice bowl of lettuce.  During Milan Fashion Week some years ago I was invited to the birthday party of a Brazilian model at a trendy Milanese restaurant (Savini, I think).  There were lots of other models there and they were literally eating plates of lettuce.  Tragic.

First Wargame of 2015: Pirates at the Shed

Spectacular scenery

The splendid Eric the Shed came though again, to get the New Year off to a splendid wargaming start.  This time it was pirates, using a version of Muskets and Tomahawks.  More here on my Swashbuckling blog.

Eight for August

I have now added he grass which I had forgotten when I took these pictures!

So, in the end I did just get eight figures completed for August, even if I did have to finish them at midnight on Sunday 31st!  First off were another seven Afghans.  I now have just ten to do,  This batch includes some with swords and they all have their arms held as if they should be carrying shields which, interestingly, the Studio Miniatures figures have.  Did Artizan just forget to include shields?  I've just ordered a pack of Studio Miniatures Afghans to see how they compare in size.  The Sikh Wars figures I have are slim, more anatomically correct, Perry Miniatures in style but the Afghans look chunkier.  We'll see.

Lastly, I finished one of those non-unit figures that lurk around on the workbench for months.  A Black Scorpion pirate girl for my all female crew.  Anne Bonny from the new North Star range is also now well underway and I have undercoated Blackbeard's crew.  Next up will be the North West Frontier British, who I have now started, plus some more odd figures which are close to completion but I couldn't quite get done by the end of the month.

I couldn't finish them as I spent the weekend down in Cowes for the Cowes-Torquay-Cowes powerboat race.  I have been watching this since I was about eight, although it is a shadow of its former self with only just over a dozen competitors this year.  I remember the whole width of the Solent being taken up with a mass start in the seventies and eighties but this year the whole field could fit into the Royal Yacht Squadron haven.  Although it was nice to see the original Dry Martini, which won in 1974, competing again.

While walking along the front my son, Guy, said that there was a Lancaster about to fly over.  It wasn't a Lancaster, however, but a B17!  I've never seen one at all, I don't think, let alone one flying!  It was en route to the Bournemouth air show. It was the Sally-B which is based at Duxford, somewhere I really need to visit.   I only had time to grab a quick shot as it thundered overhead!  Impressive!  I always wanted to build the Airfix kit when I was younger but had never saved enough pocket money to be able to afford it!  Thanks to Airfix (or rather Roy Cross) I always think that they should be silver though!

Osborne Court

Just along from our house in Cowes is Osborne Court, a large Art Deco apartment building, constructed in 1938.  My father-in-law told me that it was paid for by the German government with the idea that it could serve as the German army headquarters when Britain was invaded.  I couldn't find this mentioned anywhere else but he is usually reliable on history and has been visiting Cowes since the mid-thirties himself.  An intriguing thought, anyway!

We haven't had a musical interlude here for a bit but there is a musical link to Cowes and Osborne Court in particular.  I am currently listening to a CD of music by the largely forgotten British composer Albert William Ketèlbey (1875-1959).  You might not think that you know any of the composer's work but the first few bars of In a Persian Garden should be very familiar.

Rookstone, the house of Albert Ketèlbey, Egypt Hill, Cowes

Ironically, Ketèlbey was tremendously famous in his day and was heralded as Britain's greatest living composer in 1929, as his work was performed more than any other British composer that year.  He is also believed to have been Britain's first millionaire composer.  Yet by the time of his death in 1959 he was almost forgotten; his melodic, programme music becoming very unfashionable.  Now he is rehabilitated somewhat, with compositions such as In a Monastery Garden, In a Persian Market and Bells Across the Meadows being performed regularly and receiving airtime on radio.  In fact, the latter composition was actually banned from radio broadcast (the first recording banned by the BBC!) during WW2 in case people thought that the bell chimes in the piece were the warning for a German invasion!

Born in Birmingham, the son of an engineer, he began piano lessons at the age of eight and started his formal studies at the age of eleven at the School of Music of the Birmingham and Midland Institute.  At the age of eleven he performed his own piano sonata in Worcester Town hall and greatly impressed Sir Edward Elgar, who was in the audience. At thirteen he won the Queen Victoria scholarship to London's Trinity College of Music, beating one Gustav Holst into second place. At Trinity he won numerous prizes and became a very young professor there; affecting a tail coat to make himself look older.  His first major compositions followed at the age of eighteen and by the age of twenty his Piano Concerto in G Minor won the Tallis Gold Medal for Counterpoint.

He met his first wife, Charlotte Siegenberg, while acting as musical director of the Vaudeville Theatre, where he started work at the age of 22.  For over forty five years his compostions made him "The King of Light Music" and in 1926 sales of the sheet music for In a Monastery Garden, the composition that made him a household name in 1915, passed one million copies.  He composed a lot for the pre-sound cinema and was also involved in the early days of gramophone recording.  His wife died of pneumonia in 1947 and he moved out of London to the south coast to recover from a nervous breakdown. There he met  and eventually married Mabel Pritchett, then the manageress of a hotel he was staying in and who had initially refused his request to have a piano installed in his room. They moved to the Isle of Wight, which was where Pritchett's family came from, in 1948, initially living in Bembridge. The following year the couple moved to Cowes and Rookstone, a bungalow on Egypt Hill, where he continued to compose, although his music had faded from popularity after World War 2.  He wrote one piece, in 1952, named after a place on the Isle of Wight, On Brading Down (which is just above a splendid Roman villa and well worth a visit if you are on the Island), but it wasn't published and is now lost.

Osborne Court, Cowes 1958

In 1959 he moved to Osborne Court on the Parade at Cowes but died there on December 1st the same year.  While Osborne Court is still there today and, hopefully. listed, given it's prime seafront position and the alarming rate of development in Cowes (a pub had gone from the high street, I noticed this summer, to be replaced by yet more luxury apartments), we don't know how secure its future is.

Osborne Court today

Last summer I was walking up Egypt Hill in Cowes and noticed that Rookstone, the bungalow he moved to in 1949, had been demolished and replaced with a rather horrible (and expensive looking) modern monstrosity (not that Rookstone had any architectural merit but that's not the point).  There were several letters of protest to the Isle of Wight County Press at the time but to no avail.  Fortunately, I had captured it in the photo in this post a few years ago.

Back from Cowes...

Our house is in there somewhere!

Like many people I have taken some time off recently but not that much as if I don't work I don't get paid, so I just had a few days in Cowes this year.  Also Charlotte was working for the BBC at the Edinburgh Festival and couldn't get away until Monday.

Cowes Week seemed much quieter this year and there was a distinct shortage of really good yachty totty, sadly.  Still, we enjoyed those tanned legs which were very much on display given another welcome summer of shorts and the equally welcome dismal failure of the attempted return of the hated maxi dress - what a disappointment that  was in the the seventies for the Legatus, just when he was first showing a real interest in young ladies.

There were a lot less tents and stalls along the parade this year and the ones that were there were largely just clothes or food stalls.  No enticing ladies trying to get you to win a boat this year.  I was quite tempted by the paella stall but wasn't sure about eating anything from somewhere where it seemed to sit out all day and you didn't know if they just kept adding stuff to it for days.

Kaboom!  Eric's new light up flickering explosion markers were put to good use!

I was very busy before I left for the Isle of Wight so never got a chance to report on my visit to Eric the Shed's, where he kindly hosted a game of VBCW for Alastair, Matt, Mark and I on his new extended board, which is now vast.  He has a full report on it here but I really enjoyed using an aircraft for the first time in a wargame, to successfully bomb an enemy Renault tank.  This was the second time I had played Bolt Action and I am really starting to like the rules.  I must get some more WW2 figures finished!  I might see how they work for Back of Beyond games.  That is three games this year!

Having not looked at any blogs for a bit (the house in Cowes has no internet access) I am amazed at how much has gone up in a week.  It will take me some time to catch up.

Sophie was asking me what had happened to my final Tour de France food posting.  Given its limited appeal I will put this up separately later.  That said, I have recently written a food-based piece for the next edition of the new Wargames Bloggers Quarterly, which looks like it could become a major force in the wargames world, given the calibre of people involved.  Many of my favourite bloggers are working on this and the first issue contains an excellent photograph by Big Red Bat, of his Cremona game, detailed inside.  The design of the pdf magazine is really excellent and easily looks as smart as the professional print magazines out there.

Usually I take some figures down to Cowes to paint but given our short stay this year I didn't bother.  However, all was not lost on the hobby front as Hurst the ironmonger had restocked with my favourite washers!  I bought all they had, 200 of them, which should hopefully keep me going for a year or two.  I am going back at the end of the month so hopefully they will have restocked.  It made my week!

Anyway, while watching the Ride London cycle race on TV yesterday I cleaned up and based my Artizan Designs North West Frontier figures.  There are some good second hand bookshops on the Isle of Wight and in one I got this Michael Barthop illustrated history of the North-West Frontier.  Can't wait to start these, although I am planning to finish my tribesmen first.  I did manage to paint their shoes yesterday in the limited time I had!

Although we got back from Cowes on Saturday I spent an inordinate amount of time walking yesterday, as the main road was completely closed for the Ride London cycle events.  We had the 23,000 amateurs coming past the end of the drive in the morning, in the pouring rain, and then the professional road race in the afternoon.  It meant, however, that I had to park the car a mile's walk away, the other side of the course so I could take the Old Bat to work.  I had to do the walk six times between Saturday night and Sunday night, which essentially used up all my painting time.  Oh well, maybe I can do an hour this evening if the light holds.

Another big addition to the lead pile arrived this morning in the splendid shape of the new North Star pirates.  Forty two figures plus five pre-order specials.  I really like the monkey and the treasure chest!  You can read more about the figures on my Swashbucklers blog.  The Assassin's Creed character will be winging his way to Scott in Middle Earth (Scott, I've sent you an email via your blog Gmail address) because, for some reason, I hate the stupid looking hooded character!  He is nearly as annoying as BBC gardening presenter Monty Don or the most annoying person on TV, Gok Wan.

I will use the cabin boy to represent John King, an 11 year old pirate I learnt about from an excellent pirate exhibition I went to in Houston a few years ago.  I'm going to have to be really disciplined and not start work on the pirates now!

Something for the Weekend: Pirate women by Norman Lindsay

We haven't had something for the weekend for a while but given that I have just signed up for the North Star pirates pre-order I thought I would post these sensuous pirate pictures by Australian painter Norman Lindsay.

They are on my "adults only" Legatus Wargames Ladies blog here.  It's not really an adults only subject, of course, and the Legatus does not think that naked bodies are rude but some people (including a lot of Americans) do, so we have to be careful our blog isn't deemed objectionable by the puritans at Blogger and are required to flag it as adults only.  I like Americans and travel to their country reasonably regularly but they do have a much less relaxed attitude to nudity than Europeans, which I find rather odd.  As a pertinent example, in 1940, Lindsay's wife took 16 crates of his work out of Australia as they were worried about a potential Japanese invasion.  They were on a train in the US on which there was a fire.  The crates were hastily evacuated and the contents, as a result, were discovered by American officials who promptly destroyed the whole lot as "pornography".   The word Philistines does not even come close.

Back painting once more...

More Mexicans!

Things have been tremendously busy in the life of the Legatus and have not been helped by several IT issues meaning that I haven't had any spare time and if I have I haven't had access to a computer for long periods of time.  All is now sorted and so I hope to catch up on various urgent tasks, not least of which is sending out my prize draw winners figures, as it is now a month since the draw.  Apologies to the winners but getting to the post office has been impossible.  Anyway, this weekend I managed an hour or so on my next unit of Mexicans and finished the nine other figures I have been working on, in a somewhat desultory manner, for the last few weeks.

I finished 17 figures in May which was my best month of the year.  The longer evenings are certainly helping on the painting front.  I don't know if more than 17 will be possible in June but maybe a dozen is more realistic.  I didn't mange any in June last year but this June I have already managed five so far.  These pirates have been sitting on the paint table for far too long but now they are done.  I'll probably dig out a few more to keep building on them ready for the new Osprey On the Seven Seas Rules which come out in August.

I haven't done anything for IHMN for a bit but here are two new figures.  Firstly we have the North Star Moriarty (who will actually be Alberich von Tarnhelm in my companies).  More on him in my earlier post here.  I don't know where the monster figure came from, maybe he is a Foundry figure, but given the excellent news of the new IHMN Gothic supplement (online only at present) I knew I needed to get him painted.  

Next up were another three Afghan tribesmen from Artizan Designs.  Although irregular figures always take longer to paint, I am keeping a batch of these on the go and just painting the odd colour when I have time.  I have another six under way at present.  Very easy figures to paint.  

Finally, I did a test figure for the Orinoco Miniatures Latin American Wars of Independence British Legion.  This was also a nice easy subject so I will work on a few more.

£500 to move this two miles?

Lots of expenses this month what with the dreaded extension and things such as moving Charlotte from her halls of residence of the first year into her flat for the second year of university.  To move two suitcases and seven cardboard boxes of stuff Pickfords wanted £420 with VAT on top.  What a joke!  Fortunately we found a local firm that charged the comparatively bargain price of £192.  10 boxes of Perry plastics saved!

The work on the extension is driving me mad, not least because the Old Bat keeps wanting my opinion on carpets, bathroom tiles, lights, curtains and all sorts of other nonsense. I also thought that after pneumatic drilling the garage floor away it would quieten down; but not so far.  It's very hard to research the economic impact of direct flights to Bogota with a constant grating, high pitched whining in the background.  But enough of the Old Bat, the brick sawing is nearly as bad.  Also the builders have added significantly to our weekly shop by consuming huge boxes of tea bags (I always wondered who bought those 240 bag boxes), cans of Coke and biscuits.  I can't say that I have seen Wagon Wheels since the seventies but the builders love them.  And Club biscuits and Jaffa Cakes and Penguins and Hob Nobs and Kit Kats and chocolate caramel digestives.  It all got really out of hand when the Old Bat bought them Bahlsen Choco Leibniz biscuits at £1.80 for nine.  Can't they eat custard creams and bourbons like everyone else?  I'm going to do the next biscuit shop!  Maybe I'll get them fig rolls, that will teach them!

The scariest children's TV show ever made

My mother used to get my sister and I these "figgy biscuits" when we were little, largely, I suspect, on the basis that we hated them so much that we couldn't bear to eat more than one at a time.  I particularly remember being given them as a "treat" while watching Tales from Europe on television after school.  This was a collection of children's TV series from Europe (obviously) which were either dubbed or just had English narration over the top.  I particularly remember one featuring some boys and a motorbike filmed in Istanbul I think.  Every time I go to Istanbul, now, I think of fig rolls.

The really memorable Tales from Europe series, of course, was the utterly terrifying The Singing Ringing Tree.  Forget Dr Who, I never hid behind the sofa for that, but The Singing Ringing Tree gave me nightmares for decades.  Originally an East German film made in 1957, you can buy it on DVD, if you really want to scare your children to death, although the DVD is in its originally filmed colour, which is somehow less scary than the expressionist black and white version the BBC showed in the sixties.  Everyone is used to seeing people of "reduced stature" these days thanks to science fiction films and, indeed, the Paralympics, but in 1964 the scampering dwarf from Das singende, klingende Bäumchen  (it sounds even scarier in German) frightened the life out of me.

Girders!  We'll need biscuits after shifting these!

Anyway, stuff keeps arriving on large lorries at 6.00am in the morning, much to the neighbours' delight.  Do I really want to spend £4,500 on steel girders?  I do not but because of the sort of soil we have here we have had to have a complicated foundation put together with a sort of cage of girders underpinning tons of concrete.  You could build a rocket launching pad on the foundations!

I do have a floor, somewhere

My room is total chaos at present and is not helped by the fact that I have bought a couple of those CD album cases to hold my DVD collection.  I had filled all my shelves and had built up an overflow of three piles of DVD's which were over a three feet high and kept falling over.  So all the boxes are going to the dump and I will put them in the sleeves.  Except I don't have time to get on with it.  I haven't even unwrapped the second case.  I did start on my unwatched TV series and have already filled one 500 disc capacity case and have only reached the letter L.  I've still got the rest of my unwatched TV series, unwatched films, watched films and watched TV series to go.  In the meantime I can't find anything!

I don't need any more figures, of course, but was in Orc's Nest this week and saw the new Victrix Greek Unarmoured Hoplites and Archers so picked them up for no real reason whatsoever.  I constructed a few and had forgotten quite how long these multi-part plastics take to assemble.  I'm thinking about Greeks again because of the recent release by Foundry of the Steve Saleh sculpted Persians which have, after many years, seen the light of day for the first time.  These would be perfect to pitch against Macedonians.  Although I don't have any phalangites painted I do have 66 Greek skirmishers and 24 cavalry painted for the Cynoscephalae force I did for a Society of Ancients game in 2007.

My Foundry Greek heavy cavalry from 2007

I think Persians of this period are among the very worst wargames armies to paint.  The troops usually rate low points in most rules so you need lots of them and they have extremely complex patterned uniforms.  They are like Celts!  Or samurai! Anyway, I found a couple of Spartan officers I had started some time ago, so hopefully they will give me the opportunity to do a post on my Spartan blog this month. 

Now it's time to pay the builders their weekly money again!