Paint Table Saturday: Danes and an off the wall SF project

I haven't posted for six weeks or so as I hadn't painted anything but this has changed this week when I finished my 1864 2nd Schleswig War Danish infantry, so I can have another Paint Table Saturday post today. 

Not surprisingly, given my glacial painting rate, I started these twelve figures in October 2015 but had real trouble finding uniform information about them. I started off painting them dark blue until a helpful Danish reader pointed out that actually only the jackets were blue and they were all wearing greatcoats which were almost black. I took this to mean very, very dark  blue but, in fact, the coats were very, very dark grey. Having painted them all blue I gave up on them for a bit and only sporadically went back to them. Over the last few months they have had much more attention and I finished them on Tuesday.  The backdrop, which enhances them considerably, is a painting by the nineteenth century Danish painter LA Ring, who painted some wonderful Danish landscapes.

The Little Hornblowerr in Hans Christian Andersen Boulevard, Copenhagen

These are a set of figures that I bought when they first came out, before I had seen the TV series 1864, which inspired them, of course. There is rather more information about the uniforms now, so that I could even do an accurate company flag. Unfortunately, North Star have temporarily taken the range off their website while they are running at a reduced staff level but I hope they get some more soon. They are even promising more figures for the range and I do have some Danish dragoons started. I used to travel to Copenhagen quite regularly (to the extent that I acquired a lady friend from the Danish Treasury) and remember a statue of a soldier in this uniform near to the Tivoli Gardens and Dansk Industri, where I was working at the time.

I also had a distant member of the family's Swedish branch, Lieutenant Johann Frederik Nielsen (1831-1886), who was in the Danish army at the time of the 1864 war.  One think I vacillated over for years was how to paint the bases. The beginning of the war took place in cold, snowy weather but by the end of the war the weather was unseasonably bright and sunny. Having read lots of depressing stuff about all the ways doing snowy bases didn't work. I abandoned my plans to have snow bases (which would meant a snow board too, of course) and went for mud with the sort of yellow grass you get after the snow has melted and a semi-frosty effect on the earth.

So what are my current three projects, now? Well I have put the Romans on the back burner again as they are going to take forever. Doing the black undercoat for the metal armour on the figures will take an age but every time I use some black I will paint one. So the next ones I work on will be the Lucid Eye Savage Core Atlanteans. 

I had started the seven figures they do but then spotted a new one I hand't got. I added some more character figures frm the range which were relatively new so then had a group of five extra on order. These are lovely figures to paint so I will keep them to hand. I have now based the extra Atlantean so need to get him to the same initial stage as the other figures and then I can do all eight together.

In the second row are five figures I said I wouldn't get because they are made in China (it looks like the poor Old Bat may not fully recover from the Chinese Virus, according to her doctors). Unfortunately, I caved in and am delighted I did, as the new Wargames Atlantic Afghans are lovely. It still took me over an hour to construct five, however, although they fit together very nicely. Somewhere I have some Perry metal Aghan figures I have undercoated so I will move these along together.

I had several girlfriends who were reptiloids underneath

The third group of figures is one of those insane impulse purchases I sometimes go in for. I am on the 7TV Facebook group (for some reason) even though I don't play the game (I may have the rules, somewhere) and someone showed some photos of some characters from the eighties TV miniseries V.  Now, I remember watching this in the summer of 1984 when ITV ran it against the opening of the Los Angeles Olympics, which the BBC had exclusive rights to.  Lo and behold, there it was on Amazon prime. I watched it again and quite enjoyed it. I noted a number of things. The special effects were pretty poor (but probably good for a TV show at the time). The accuracy of the aliens' blasters make Galactic Stormtroopers look like Stalingrad snipers (you would have to make it throw a one to hit). At this time, American actors had normal coloured teeth and not fluorescent white ones. Despite being resistance fighters, living in a series of secret bolt holes, they all had access to hairdressers able to blow dry their hair (even the men). Michael Ironside played a character appropriately called Ham. The best thing about it, of course, was Jane Badler in a cardboard scenery chewing performance as Diana; one of the best female SF villains ever (up there with Jacqueline Pearce's Servalan in Blakes Seven). So to find I could get a little model of her was enough for me to order all eight figures Crooked Dice make. They are promising more fairly shortly. More on this bizarre project as it develops but my initial main concern is finding the right shade of burnt orange! I am now watching the 2009 reboot but it is rather dreary so far, despite the presence of the luminous Morena Baccarin and, frankly, the special effects hadn't come on as much as they should have. At least the hair was more under control.

So, what has been making me grumpy? Well, everything in the news, so I won't talk about that (several more people unfriended on Facebook in the last six weeks or so). Mainly, though, lack of social distancing in supermarkets. Rules vary, so Tesco are very strict (move in one direction, no overtaking and one queue for checkouts). If the person in front takes five minutes to decide what soup to buy everyone has to stop moving.  Get a move on!  Pea and ham or Lentil and bacon. That's it! Move! Move! Move! Don't stop! Cattle prods!

In Waitrose, however, it is almost a free for all, with people taking no notice of the distance rules and shopping in couples or families. Why does it take two people to do the shopping? You both write a list and then one person does it. It's not a social activity, unless you are very, very sad. If you see an unmissable offer on Brain's faggots then ring up your wife (who is probably called Vera or Mavis) and ask how many packs you need to stock up on. Well, you won't see them in Waitrose as they don't sell them, of course. Iceland, Asda or Budgens, probably. Actually I'm surprised the perpetually offended haven't objected to the name yet. Also.keep to the edge of the aisle so people can pass you (if allowed) if your brain is so small that you cannot decide what soup to buy. Do not block the centre of the aisle!

Victrix 12mm WW2

My wargaming related grump relates to Mr Non Sequitur. They appear in every manufacturer's model release thread. Proud wargames company with excellent new product says 'here are our lovely new 12mm WW2 tanks'. They want them to be admired. They want people to talk about what other 12mm WW2 will be coming out. No. Mr Non Sequitur says "What about the Persians?" or "Why don't you make Samurai?" No! That is not what we are talking about! Or. proud manufacturer with new 28mm range they have spent ages developing says 'Here are our lovely new 28 mm figures'. Mr Non Sequitur. 'Can you do them in 15mm?' No! No! No! 15 mm is for people who eat Brain's faggots and have wives called Mavis. They are for people with no appreciation of the proportions of the human body! They are, with very few exceptions (Copplestone Barbarica range) aesthetically offensive. Do not even get me onto 10mm and 6mm. Hello, we have made figures where their heads are the equivalent of two feet tall. I expressed an interest in the 12mm figures on the Victrix Facebook page and all these people appeared saying 'wish they had been 15mm'. No, they are not, so Victrix can sell more figures and tanks not supplement already existing collections. Then all these people popped up saying 'buy these lovely metal 15mm equivalents instead.' Guess what? They all had really weird proportions like most 15mm metals.

Another rant, about plastics companies asking customers for what they want released, will be in the next post.

Keeping it Baltic, today's music is Swedish Composer Lars-Erik Larsson's (1908-1986) enjoyable symphonies one (1927) and two (1936). Larsson is little listened to outside of Sweden, which is a shame as he wrote some fine, melodic music.

Today's wallpaper is Erigone: daughter of Icarius by the French painter Georges-Marie-Julien Giradot (1856-1914). He quite often employed this tight framing on his subjects rather than a more distant full figure view. Apart from his mythological studies he produced many paintings of village life. In a complex plot, even by Greek mythological standards, Erigone ends up being deceived by Dionysus who seduced her after disguising himself as a bunch of grapes. Hmm. Anyway Erigone is Virgo of the Zodiac.

Paint Table Sunday: Back to Napoleonics and on to US Infantry

Even though I didn't think it was a classic Salute this year it has got me energised about my painting again. Having finished the Byzantine archers just before I left for Excel last Saturday it was time to get going on another unit. So far this year I have completed three units. Not quite one a month, partly because I was in Botswana for ten days, so I should really have picked some figures for April which I could get on quickly with. 

So last week I decided to get started on assembling some of the new Perry Miniatures WW2 American infantry. These have a pretty simple colour scheme so I thought maybe I could get some done, start to finish, in a couple of weeks.  Oh dear.  Now I often read about wargamers who refuse to do plastic figures because they don't like assembling them and I have some bad memories of some Victrix Napoleonic French from years ago. I have always found the Perry figures easy to do, however. Not these!  To cement six pairs of arms to the bodies took me 38 minutes. Argh,  I thought. as yet another arm fell off as I tried to position it. The real problem is the arm poses that require two arms holding a rifle. The left hand is attached to the rifle so there are three gluing points: the two shoulders and the wrist of the left hand. As soon as you get one arm in place and try to attach the other you end up pushing the first arm out of place When you try and get the wrists in the right place for the hand on the rifle, one or other of the shoulders (or both) go out of place. All the time you are trying to manoeuvre the parts into place the glue is drying. The whole process is really, really stressful and not part of what should be a relaxing hobby! Some of them still aren't quite right and the shoulder joints will require some filling. Also, the Perries themselves say that not all arms will fit on every body but there is no information in the instructions to show which ones go with which, Very much the least enjoyable half an hour with model soldiers I have had for many years. I was going to build and paint a section of 12 men but don't think I can bear to build the next six for a while!

Before I could even build them I had another crisis as I was about to build the first figures but found that I couldn't get any glue out of all three of my tubes of Revell cement. It seems to be like Games Workshop liquid Greenstuff; you open it to use it once but the next time you want to use it it has all set. Fortunately, the people of the Painting, modelling and gaming Facebook group came to the rescue. After well meaning suggestions such as use a lighter to heat the metal tube, use a gas cooker lighter and use a guitar string (?) someone said any flame would do, given I didn't have any of the three things suggested. I actually didn't have any matches, either, so had to go to Tesco but using a candle flame soon had them unblocked, miraculously. I would have just gone out and bought another tube of glue but couldn't as it was ten o'clock at night. I am just hopelessly impractical!

 One figure missing, which I found after I took the picture, thank goodness

Instead, inspired by the three-ups of the Perry French Napoleonic infantry I saw at Salute I got my British 87th Foot out to work on. I put these to one side as I had a nasty attack of strap phobia but yesterday confined myself to shading the flesh and the trousers. This is a big unit, for me, of 24 foot and a mounted officer so they will take some time to finish. Now, too, of course, I realise that I have the stress of the arms to do, as I am painting them without arms so I can access the front of the uniform. Looking at the arms on the sprue I can't work out which arms will give which pose so that is more stress to worry about. Good job the doctor has just doubled the dose of my blood pressure pills.

2016  - 22

2017 - 17

2018 - 13

2019 -  12

I have enjoyed reading everyone else's Salute posts and looking at the pictures of all the games I missed. When I went round I thought that there was less, WW2, Napoleonic and ACW games than usual but it my be I just missed them.  Other people have said that the Blogger meet up was smaller this year (it was an hour earlier than usual) so I have decided to apply some science by digging out pictures from the last four years. Now, of course, people come and go ,so this is a only a point in time sample. The trend is down, however.  I don't post on my blog as often as I used to, so perhaps if there was a wargames Facebook meet up there might be more people but who knows?

My forces overrun the kraal and send the British scarpering

One thing I posted on my Facebook page but haven't mentioned here was another enjoyable Zulu ward game at Eric the Shed's.  This was a recreation of the Battle of Khambula held just a few days shy of the 140th anniversary.  We had five players: two for the British and three for the Zulus. I took control of the Zulu right wing and was immediately in trouble because I couldn't remember anything about the Black Powder rules; in particular how to activate my forces, so spent the first two moves immobile, waiting to see what everyone else did. In the end the game was something of a draw but miraculously I didn't lose a unit, unlike everyone else.

Eric's table was simple but effective and the battlefield layout was instantly recognisable from the central fortified British position on the hill. Eric's account and some excellent pictures is here.  What I really need to do is read up on the rules before I play a game so I have at least a vague idea of what is likely to be going on. Unfortunately, I play so rarely (this was my first game for a year) that I always forget the rules completely.

Another issue is that,all of my wargames rules are trapped behind a giant pile in my study consisting of cardboard boxes (mainly used to send Charlotte things to Edinburgh which she has forgotten), seven file boxes of unpainted figures and almost the entire output of Penthouse magazine from the nineteen eighties.  All need to be relocated so I can actually read my rules before a game!

I went off to MG day at Brooklands with Guy today, as his grandfather wants to buy him an MG (the Old Bat is resisting of course but then she resists anything which isn't her idea).  There were hundreds of MG's of every sort there but I really liked this one!

Back home for lunch and the light was quite good. I meant to get on with the Peninsular British but caught the end of John Carter (2012) on TV last night so did a couple of hours on this Modiphius Thark. There is still a lot to do on him but he is probably more than half finished now.. It's so nice to paint such a large figure. Maybe I should get some Victrix 54mm Napoleonics!

Last week I went to the Bonnard exhibition with my particular friend K, who used to model for me at Oxford, Not in the bath, though, as you would need hot water to keep the lady comfortable but the steam wouldn't be good for the paper.  Also, I remember the BBC drama on the Pre-Raphaelites where poor Lizzie Siddell had to spend days in the bath while Millais painted her for his Ophelia, As a result of being in the cold water she got very ill and her father, fifty medical bills later, demanded that Millais pay up for her treatment, which he did, fortunately. Interestingly, the landscape part of Millais'  picture was painted from the Hogsmill River in Ewell, not that far from where I live.  No such worries for Bonnard, who largely painted in the South of France, so his naked ladies (usually his wife and the occasional mistress) would not have been too cold, hopefully. This one, Nu dans le bain, was quite a late one, painted in 1936.  I first learned about Bonnard from an art book in our school library and I had several postcards of his paintings on my wall at college. 

Today's music is the soundtrack from John Carter (2012) by Michael Giacchino, which I had to buy, at great expense, off eBay not long ago as it is no loner available. I've played it a couple of times now and it's definitely growing on me, with some strong themes although some of it is quite remiscent of Howard Shore's Lord of the Rings and David Arnold's Stargate scores but that is a good thing!

Anna Gaël, the latest addition to Legatus' Wargmes Ladies

Finally, some of you (quite a few by the number of hits!) have noticed a few posts on Legatus Wargames Ladies this last week from Italy's Playmen magazine. It was designed as an Italian copy of Playboy from a time (1967) when Playboy was banned in Italy, Unlike Hugh Hefner at Playboy, Bob Guccione at Penthouse, Larry Flynt at Hustler and Paul Raymond at Men Only and Club, Playmen was very much the brainchild of a woman, Adelino Tattilo, who ran the magazine for over thirty years; choosing the centrefolds, cover pictures and championed its left wing, reforming written content. The effect that Playmen had on the social attitudes, fashions and culture of Italy cannot be underestimated. Tattilo was very interested in the cinema and there were regular pictorials from the sets of films being shot and virtually every young Continental actress happily stripped off for its pages, thankfully. We will be featuring some of these on Legatus Wargames Ladies over the next few months, as we have shamefully neglected it!

Salute Eve

Well, it's Salute Eve and I am looking forward to going up to London for it but I mustn't forget my ticket which is still on the printer shelf! I actually have no plans to buy anything this year because for all of the many projects I am working on I have plenty of stuff to paint. What I may keep my eyes open for is the odd scenic item, particularly for the North West frontier, as I am assembling a lot of buildings for that from various different manufacturers.

I am very tempted by one new plastic box, however. I saw the three ups at Salute last year and my exact quote about them was, having eventually found the Perry stand: 'There were two sets of three-ups for new sets: Agincourt mounted knights and US WW 2 infantry, neither of which I am interested in, fortunately'.  So why do I keep looking at the adverts for the US infantry in this month's wargames magazines?  I am not really sure. When I was at school we played a lot of WW2 games with Airfix figures and tanks but these were all post D-Day Europe or North Africa. Although I have been tempted by North Africa for many years (it was where my father was  in WW2) it really doesn't lend itself to wargaming except, perhaps, with micro-tanks or a very big Eric the Shed sized board. The War in the East has never interested me either and was often similarly sweeping in scale.  I still have some interest in early war skirmishing, perhaps, but the part of the conflict in Europe I have been most interested in is Italy. It was a mid-period part of the war with lots of towns, villages and countryside to fight through.

James Coburn follows Giovanna Ralli. Well you would, wouldn't you?

When I was small I always remember lots of  American WW2 films set in Italy and usually filmed there in the sixties. The key one I remember was actually a comedy and was Blake Edwards' What did you do in the war, daddy? (1966).  Ironically, this was filmed in California (albeit using a splendid but budget busting set of a Sicilian village) as Edwards didn't want to be away from home at that point due to marital issues. I remember seeing it on TV at school in the early seventies and being impressed by the village itself, Henry Mancini's jovial soundtrack and, in particular, Giovanna Ralli in her first Hollywood film. She did a tasteful pictorial for Playboy Italia ten years later, at the age of 41, and you can see a shot from it on Legatus' Wargames Ladies here.

But I can't buy anything at Salute unless I finish my unit of Byzantines for Lion Rampant as I said I wouldn't purchase anything unless these were done (they should have been finished last month but an unexpected ten days in Botswana put paid to that).  So, it's just the varnish, then the metal work and then the static grass to do. It's going to be close!

The Blogger's meet up is an hour earlier this year, at 12.00, to avoid a clash with the Lead Adventures Forum meet. I intend to get there just after eleven to avoid the queues. Last year I didn't get the free figure but I'm not bothered about this year's so don't mind if I miss it. No doubt I will do a post when I get back tomorrow, moaning about my feet and the poor light.

It took me many decades to track down the soundtrack of What did you do in the war, daddy? but I eventually got it as part of a Henry Mancini boxed set. It's much more a comedy than WW2 soundtrack, although the Swing March theme tune is unbelievably catchy. Apart from bouncy faux Italian music it also has an anachronistic sounding Mancini ballad which is tragically dated.

Tour Food and Drink: Stages eight to twelve...and pickled in the Loire

Thumbs up for the Tour so far

It's something of an odd Tour de France route this year: No Brittany, no Normandy and no Loire.  In fact western France has been pretty comprehensively ignored this year, apart from a couple of stages in the south west.  So, the Legatus' culinary Tour goes into Alsace and the Vosges for the next three stages which is about the only area of France I have never been to, in over fifty years of travelling there.  

Stages 8 and 9

My lack of knowledge also applies to the wine and food of the region which is, not surprisingly given it's history, rather Germanic.  I struggle with understanding Alsatian and German wines especially as regards how they are classified and organised regionally.  Neither seem very popular in a Britain now largely focussed on new World wines and, in fact, my local Tesco didn't stock any Alsatian wines.  This may also have something to do with the fact that these areas are less popular with British wine-loving tourists (unlike the Loire, for example, as we shall see later).  Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying that when I bought the wines to accompany this part of the Tour I had no idea what I was buying.

Stages 9 and 10

These were the first table wines of my vinous Tour, having left the beer and fizz behind in the first seven stages and I spread the two bottles I bought over three stages.  Both, at £9.99 and £10.49, were rather more than I usually pay for everyday drinking but, as ever, at this price range, the extra was worth it.  The Pinot Blanc from Calvet was quite floral but, oddly, also musky. I had low expectations of it but it was very good.  Sainsbury have just dropped it to £6.99 (annoyingly) and it's a bargain at that.  The Pinot Gris from Cave de Beblenheim had a lovely straw colour with an unusual smoky taste and rather oily texture. Both were very good but the Pinot Gris just edged it.  Splendid!

Now what food could I have to match these wines?  Well, it obviously had to be something regional, so we went for that prototypical Alsatian dish choucroute garni.  Not having been to the region and had it in situ, I just turned to one of the greatest cookbooks ever written, Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961) by Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle and Julia Child.  I think I'll have to do a post on my favourite cookbooks!  Child used the success of this book to launch her popular TV series in the US.  This absolute masterwork is the only French cookbook you will ever need and the Legatus' copy is very well thumbed indeed.  It was a present from an ex-girlfriend, V, who we will encounter later in the post.  The Legatus was taught to cook by his father, from about the age of eight.  My mother was not much of a cook and struggled to cook toast, let alone anything else.  So if we were ever going to get anything decent to eat, it was cooked by my father.  By the time I was fourteen I was handling a lot of the family cooking duties, particularly at the weekends.  It was either that, live on my mothers key recipes (fish fingers, Bejam burgers (she never did get the hang of defrosting), Fray Bentos pies, spam fritters and Vesta curry) or starve.  My father had, coincidentally, learnt  a a lot of his cooking technique from one of his friends, a TV chef.

Stages 8 to 10

Anyway, here is my version of the dish.  Not ever having had it before it was hard to tell if my approximation of it approached the real thing but it included most of the key ingredients: wine, pork, fat bacon, Frankfurters, smoked sausage, potato, apple, juniper berries and, of course sauerkraut.  The fact that it worked perfectly with both wines was probably the best way of telling that it was a success, I think.   Served with a good French, wholegrain mustard, of course, I made so much of it that it easily lasted three days!

Stage 11

So, leaving Alsace, the Tour took one of it's transfers (my daughter thinks this is cheating and that they should cycle the whole way) for a stage from Besançon to Oyannax through the Jura.  I'm never going to find a wine from the Jura in  a local supermarket, I thought, and I was right.  Fortunately, in nearby Cobham we have an excellent shop called The Wine Reserve, which tends to concentrate on the £20 and up price band (which you can do in Cobham).  Blow me down they had a wine from the Jura, although this now takes the record as the most expensive wine I have had to buy for the Tour at about £23.  This was a direct hit though, as the Tour rote passed through Arbois, which is about 25 miles south-west of Besançon.  I can't say I have had a wine made from the poulsard grape before and it reminded me of some of the red Swiss wines I used to have in Zurich, which were not that distinctive and equally overpriced.  Still, you have to suffer for authenticity, sometimes!

Stage 11

To go with this I had some of the local cheese of the Jura, Comté, which was a typical semi-hard cows milk cheese from the region.  Frankly, I needed something a bit lighter after all that Choucroute and sausage and this, which came from Tesco's surprisingly good regional cheese selection, was nicely nutty.

Stage 12

Stage 12 started in the Beaujolais region and I managed another direct hit on the route for this stage as the peloton went over Mont Brouilly, on the slopes of which are grown the grapes for my favourite of the Beaujolais crus.  Duboeuf's Beaujolais Nouveau, a brilliant way to sell a usually horrible wine, was always one of the better ones so I thought this was worth a go.  It was definitely Beaujolais, without taking the enamel off your teeth.  Back in the eighties my friends and I would always drink Beaujolais Nouveau on the third Thursday of November and all the City wine bars would offer it.  This seems to be a habit that has almost died out now.

The race finished in Saint-Étienne, from which comes the rather extraordinarily named and interestingly shaped Jesus a l'ancienne sausage, one of the very best cured sausages I have ever had from anywhere (Waitrose delicatessen counter has it, sometimes).  It was perfectly set off by a good helping of cornichons.

Cornichons are not the same as the similarly sized gherkins sold in Britain.  The key difference is the vinegar they are in. Cornichons have a very light vinegar flavoured with tarragon and mustard seed.  You also usually get a few tiny silverskin onions in the jar too.  There are UK firms, such as Opies, who purport to sell "cornichons" but you really need to get the ones produced in France to get the correct taste as the UK made vinegar is not right.  They are neither as sweet nor as sour as some of the equivalents you get in Britain and the US.  They really set off sliced cooked meats and pate perfectly.

In fact it was with pate that I first had them on a French holiday just after finishing law school.  I, and three of my friends from college, had arranged to take a driving holiday in the Lore Valley.  Well it wasn't a driving holiday so much as an eating and drinking holiday which engendered a life long interest in the red wines of the Loire (a restaurant near Waterloo station called RSJ has the best Loire wine list I have seen in Britain).  It all got a bit complicated in the months leading up to our planned trip, however.  I had known B for several years at college as we used to go to the student common room to watch Doctor Who every week.  He was the first person to buy me any metal wargames figures.  I was painting a lot of Airfix plastics and he saw some of the Games Workshop dwarves and bought me a dwarf flame cannon for my birthday.  Through this I discovered a whole new world of metal figure painting, as I left the 20mm plastics behind never to return to them.  J, a lovely redhead, had the room next door to B in our final year at college.  Unlike me, who lived out, these two had snagged rooms in college for the third year.  Rather than trudge all the way back to North Oxford when I fancied a cup of tea I used to pop up to B's room.  As soon as he flicked on the kettle switch at the wall (students don't seem to be allowed kettles in their rooms these days due to the dreaded health and safety) J would hear the noise and pop in too, so although we had been at college for two years that was the first time I got to know her, as she was a physicist.  Also on the same floor was another girl V, who had a tedious boyfriend when we were at college.  The tedious boyfriend played hockey (field hockey, for you North Americans) which I always thought a bit suspect as even though I know it can be  rough, tough game I always thought of it as a rough tough girls' game.

The Legatus, his girlfriend V, his best friend B and his ex-girlfriend J in Normandy, July 1983

Anyway, immediately after we left university J and I started going out, much to B's annoyance as he had been pursuing her for the whole time we were at college.  However at this point she was living back home in Cheshire which wasn't too handy.  She then moved to Somerset, which was equally inconvenient.  So although we had quite a few passionate weekends she decided to tell me the day before B's birthday party in May that she thought we should give up on it, due to the distance.  That's annoying, I thought, as she was a lovely girl with a fantastically perky body. I had to see  her at B's party where we were going to plan the final details of our holiday in the Loire. In fact, the party turned out to be just B, J, V and me for dinner.  V picked me up to give me  a lift to B's and we got on like a house on fire during the car journey over, and  she told me she was feeling fed up as she had just broken up with the tedious hockey playing boyfriend.  Anyway, both feeling unloved V and I got totally hammered on the remainder of B's cooking Marsala and the other two retired (separately) in embarrassment at our increasingly friendly antics, leaving V and I to it.

This left me in the slightly delicate situation, six weeks later, of travelling to France for two weeks in a car with my immediate ex-girlfriend J, my new girlfriend V who was J's best friend and B who had been trying to win over both, unsuccessfully, for four years.  Fortunately, everything seemed to go well on the ferry over to France and the initial drive through Normandy.  It was only when we stopped at the first of the many excellent little French hotels we stayed in (thanks to a hotel guide produced by a man called Arthur Eperon, whose choices were infallible) that we had a problem.  Both V and I thought that we would be sleeping in the same room but J flat out refused to share with B (much to his disappointment as he thought his time had come).  Sadly, we were too impecunious to have a double and two singles so I had to stay with B while the two girls shared.  B and I amused ourselves by imagining what the two girls were up to (usually involving the ewers and basins that were a feature of many of these hotel rooms) but I realised that this was going to be a very long two weeks indeed.

My somewhat grumpy mood was lifted at dinner by a truly excellent meal.  The restaurant was so good we stayed an extra day and stayed there on the way back too.  I had local pate for my first course and they came with a little terracotta pot of cornichons.  I've always liked pickles but these were something else.  They became a key feature of our meals and V and I started to buy jars of them for our picnics (we only ate dinner in restaurants).   Anyway, J being a sensitive girl and knowing what I was like, took it upon herself to go for a walk with Bill every night after dinner for at least an hour and a half.  B was happy because he was with J, J was happy because she didn't have to look at V and I and V and I were very happy indeed; often several times an evening.

Pain tortue!

By the second week, however, V's levels of passion had increased considerably.  It couldn't have been the wine as we were drinking the same amount.  It couldn't have been the increased sunshine as we got further south as it was sunny and hot throughout.  The only think I can think of was her enormously increased appetite for cornichons.  We were now buying a jar a day in the little supermarkets where we got our lunches of bread, cheese and ham.  V was polishing off cornichons at an amazing rate. I wondered whether they were raising her heart rate, or something, and increasing the blood flow to her sensitive regions.  Well, we were very discrete with each other the first week, as we didn't want to upset the others but she was getting more and more touchy-feely by the second week.

The island in the Loire at Gennes in July 1983

This all came to a head when we arrived in a little town called Gennes, on the Loire.  We arrived there just before lunch, checked into our hotel, picked up a picnic and then wandered down to a large island in the river which was just trees and grass with shady beaches by the river.  It was wilder than it is now and there were more trees.  It is now more like a formal park.  We found a quiet spot, bunged some bottles in the river to cool and had another nice picnic.  It was very hot indeed and after lunch I was resistant to V's suggestion we go for a walk. Especially as the others were dozing off, which seemed like an excellent post-prandial activity to me.  V, however had other post-prandial activities in mind and tugged me off to a secluded spot in the bushes.  She wanted to take the picnic blanket but couldn't because J was fast asleep on it.  She did, however, take the jar of cornichons, on the rather curious basis that if we were missed we could claim we had gone to have something else to eat.  Anyway, some time later after we had got very hot indeed, she started to munch her way through the rest of the jar of cornichons and I wondered whether they were actually addictive (and also whether she might be pregnant - I had already had one scare earlier in the year with a girl at law school)

Anyway, we returned to our picnic site to find that the others were now awake.  J raised an eyebrow in a way that would have made Mr Spock proud.  V decided that she wanted some apricot tarte for pudding and tried to get me to go back to the village to get some (I think she was planning that we could go up to the hotel room).  I refused as it was too hot to trek all the way back across the bridge. I told her to get some Coteaux du Layon to go with the tarte.  Sweet Loire wines were another discovery of the trip.  This was enough to get B to accompany V as it gave him an excuse to walk with her and visit a wine shop.

Our hotel in Gennes, La Hostellerie de la Loire in 1983

The hotel today. Sadly closed

On my own with J ,she started a "I didn't want to stop seeing you because I didn't like you" speech.  Oh dear!  Now she was getting all touchy-feely. Then she was saying that it was really too hot for clothes and did I think that anyone would be able to see us from the far bank.  Fortunately, it didn't all end in tears but that was due to clever time management, good acting and, eventually, a confession from J to V that was received (thank goodness) with some amusement.  V eventually went off with a ghastly South African and I haven't seen her for ten years.  B became my best man, lives three miles away in Cobham (where the good wine shop is) and we still meet every week for dinner and lots of wine.  J and I kept casually interacting for a number of years despite us both moving on to other partners.  She eventually married my other best friend from college which is not too awkward (mostly) and B and I regularly go down to see them in the West Country.

The gherkin last week

Ironically, B now actually works in 30 St Mary Axe, the erotic gherkin itself, as it was dubbed back in 2000. But cornichons are, for the Legatus, the real erotic gherkins, not just, of course, an excellent accompaniment to cooked meats.

The bridge from the Ile de Gennes to Rosiers before the French destroyed it in 1940,  This is the bridge ,replaced in 1948, just visible in the shot of the island above

There is a World War 2 story about the Ile de Gennes where all this cornichons-fuelled passion took place more than thirty years ago.  In 1940, 10,000 troops of the German 1st cavalry division were held up for several days at Gennes and Saumur by 800 cadets, armed with their training rifles and some light artillery, of the Saumur Cavalry School, as they tried to cross the Loire.  The cadets kept fighting despite the fact Pétain had called for a ceasefire and essentially surrendered France to the Germans,  The cadets are, therefore, now remembered as one of the earliest examples of the French resistance.  At Gennes the French had blown the bridge but on the evening of June 19th (two days after Pétain's call for a cease fire) 500 German assault troops in rubber boats stormed the island only to be seen off by the cadets.  Eventually the Germans gave up on trying to get across the Loire in the area and had to go around the cadets.  The German commander, General Kurt Feldt, was so impressed by the actions of the cadets he mentioned them favourably in his report and released the 200 captured cadets rather than imprisoning them.  The hotel we stayed in in Gennes was actually on the Avenue des Cadets du Saumur.

Make love, not war

I didn't know, at the time of what now seems like a dreamily bucolic episode, that the quiet island we had frolicked upon had been the site of such a bitter battle.  The British and French have an engaging distrust of each other, not to say nearly 800 years of conflict, but thanks to George Bush and his "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" slur the French have an undeserved poor military image for many younger people today.  The actions of the Cadets of Saumur, I would venture, are more typical of France's proud military history .

I'm sure its down to the cornichons.