2012 non-wargaming highlights...and a few lowlights

Olympics!

Well, it's still too dark to paint properly (although I have just undercoated my trolls from The Hobbit) so I might as well sit down and ramble away on the blog for a bit whilst listening to some defiantly non-Christmas music. Today we have Russ Garcia and his Orchestra's groovy Fantastica: Music from Outer Space.  Garcia, a prolific arranger and conductor also did the striking soundtrack for the original film of The Time Machine  (1960).

Wargaming highlights will be next but lets look at the non-hobby year first. Oh no, I'm starting to sound like that Meeples and Miniatures chap! 

Best Book

I've bought a lot of books this year and have no idea where to put them.  I wanted to put some more bookshelves up but my wife, who doesn't read anything except the Daily Mail, thinks they "ruin the look of the wall".  I'm seriously contemplating putting all my paperbacks on Kindle to gain space even though I don't like the look of the Kindle machines as their pages don't hold enough text to look like a proper book.  There's no doubt about my favourite purchase though: the monumental Ray Harryhausen: Master of the Magicks Vol 3: The British Films.  Well worth £100 (especially as they are now selling for £149 on Amazon).

Best Film

Berenice Marlohe in Skyfall

I didn't get to the cinema much this year and think I may have only gone to Skyfall, which was truly excellent although a James Bond film more in the nature of John Gardener's new novels in the eighties (which is a good thing).  It shows what can be done in giving Bond to a proper director and not a former second unit stunt director. John Glen, who directed five Bond films (badly) nearly killed off the whole series in the eighties by not understanding the essence of Bond at all.


Best TV show

This has to be Game of Thrones.  I think its older than 2012 but I only got it on DVD this year as I don't have Sky (as I refuse to give any money to Rupert Murdoch if I can possibly avoid it).  I haven't read the books (although one of my young ladies is urging me to) but it was great to see fantasy done in an adult way rather than the sort of Xena/Hercules approach usually seen in the past.


Best Musical discovery

I bought 1147 tracks on iTunes this year, it seems, plus quite a few CDs as well but probably the most unexpectedly enjoyable were Laurie Johnson's two orchestral jazz pieces: Symphony (synthesis) and Concerto for Trumpet, tenor saxophone and orchestra from The Musical Worlds of Laurie Johnson.  Johnson, of course, is better know for his groovy sixties and seventies TV music (The Avengers, The Professionals, Jason King as well, of course, as the theme music for This is your Life and Animal Magic).  

Best encounter with a fashion model

Coming across the winner of Britain and Ireland's next top model, Letitia Herod, on Oxshott station one morning.  It turns out she lives here and she certainly improves the scenery on the platform compared with my usual fellow travellers who include:  Mr Public Sector Cardigan (men shouldn't wear cardigans to work-it's not the nineteen fifties - also, don't wear your work ID badge around your neck before you get to work), Mr Nineteen Fifties Hair (again, it's not the nineteen fifties - no more Brylcreem) , The Grumpy Frenchman (cheer up for heaven's sake), Big Ugly (a bolt through your neck might actually improve your appearance), Once was Handsome (the bouffant Patrick Mower look is well past it's sell by date, as are you, I'm afraid), Madame Witches Hair (women in their sixties should not have long hair; especially long, frizzy grey hair.  Being French is no excuse),  Takes her Coat off Girl (actually we don't mind her), The Old Codgers (stop sitting on the aisle seats of the train when the inside ones are empty - it's not going to stop people sitting next to you), Mr Argy Bargy  (the ageing tango dancer look doesn't go well with your pin stripe suit), Slutty the Schoolgirl (goodness, you have grown out of that skirt haven't you?) Mrs Blancmange (you really shouldn't be eating chocolate for breakfast), Porridge-eating Baldy (you really shouldn't be eating porridge out of a Tupperware box on the train - get up earlier!), The Evil Twins (Do you know the Midwich Cuckoos?  That's you that is), Mr Broad-brimmed Hat (it needs a clean and it doesn't make you look like Terry Pratchett) and Mr House of Blues (you really are too old for that jacket).  

Best foreign trip

The Battle of Bunker Hill monument in Charlestown

Not too many this year, thank goodness. Mostly B's this year: Bucharest, Belgrade, Boston, Bogota as well as Dubai, Houston and...Edinburgh.  Most enjoyable trip was to the splendid city of Boston as there was some good military content, a superb art gallery, excellent food and the presence of my particular friend Sophie from Vancouver, who was single-handedly trying to re-energise Boston's retail sector.  Also I felt very intelligent giving a talk at MIT!

Best Artistic Experience

This one was also from Boston with the very rare opportunity to see all of Renoir's great dance paintings in one place at the Museum of Fine Arts. Dance in the Country and Dance in the City were brought over from the Musée d'Orsay to be shown alongside the Museum's own Dance at Bougival.  All three paintings were produced by Renoir in a frenzy of activity over three weeks in 1883 but they don't look rushed, just full of movement.


Best Exhibition

Warner Bros Harry Potter Experience was utterly brilliant even for someone whose interest in the series starts and finishes with Emma Watson.

Best Olympics Experience

Wiggo on the Portsmouth Road!

I've always enjoyed the Olympics although the closest I had got to them until now was competing in the Olympic trials for archery back in 1980. To have the games come to London and discover all the cycling events were coming through my village was doubly exciting, therefore. I remember I was having tea in Claridges with the Egyptian investment minister (as you do) when everyone started cheering and that's when I discovered that we had beaten the French (again).

Although I enjoyed my two visits to the Olympic stadium  to watch the athletics (I went to the rowing and the fencing as well) nothing really beat the sight of Bradley Wiggins at full pelt carried by a positively peristaltic wave of cheering as he powered down the Portsmouth Road to take gold at my birthplace, Hampton Court.


Best Olympic Party

We're all quite relaxed by this point

The one I attended at Canada House with an increasingly "relaxed" silver medal winning ladies rowing eight. Good fun was had by all!

Best Martini

Surprisingly, it was the one I had in the bar of the Howard Johnson hotel in Bucharest.  Really cold and with just one olive.  It was by far the cheapest too!  Excellent!


Best Wine

Probably this bottle of Château Prieuré-Lichine 1995 which I had in the Tate Gallery restaurant.  These can be a bit hit and miss, I gather, but we had a good one.

Best New Beer Discovery

A Harpoon I had at lunch in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

This would have to be Harpoon I.P.A. from Boston although it was best on draught at the trendy Hotel Marlowe  in Cambridge, Mass.


Best Meal

 Prosciutto San Daniele con Burrata Pugliese e inslata mista

 Ravioile ripiene di Taleggio, bieta e noci alla maggiorana

Controfiletto di manzo arrosto

My overseas eating experiences were disappointing this year and although I had some good solid peasant food in Belgrade my best meal was in the ever reliable Latium in London accompanied by a former PA of mine.  It's the only place in London that cooks my beef the way I like it too!  The wine list is fantastic: their Casale Marchese Frascati is the sort of wine I used to drink in Rome when I worked there and bears as much relation to the Frascati you get in Tesco's as Kelly Brook does to Ann Widdecombe.


Worst meal

Eats shoots and leaves

I attended some Olympic-linked business events run by the government in Lancaster House in London. I went to the China day which had a rather weird fashion show attached to it but I was very disappointed with the food.   Frankly, I don't consider a glass tumbler containing a few bamboo sprouts and leaves as lunch! However, looking at some of the Chinese models they look like they eat exactly that all the time.



Best wildlife

Eats shoots and leaves

My view tends to be that the only good animal is a cooked animal but I was rather taken by the pandas at Edinburgh Zoo.  They are just so ridiculous!

Worst Jubilee nonsense

Not the BBC's coverage of the Jubilee sail pass (although that was so bad my father in law, who is involved with the Dunkirk Little Ships organisation, got engaged in a long correspondence with the Director General of the BBC).  No, it has to be this little display my wife put up in our front garden for the Jubilee period.  Gnomes !  Argh!

Best Discovery

The Legatus with V in Brasenose.  Splendid girl!

A tea chest full of old letters and photos from thirty years ago which reminded me of quite how many girlfriends I got through at university and how many I had completely forgotten about in the intervening three decades.


Worst discovery

 One of M's mugshots

M at my City leaving party in 2008

In trying to find her contact details finding that one of my friends M, a beautiful, classy and well-educated woman, who used to work with me in London, turned up on US mugshot sites having been arrested three times for trespassing, disorderly conduct and resisting a police officer.  I wish I could contact her and find out what's wrong.

Next time we'll look at the wargaming/military side of things.

ACW Federal Regular Infantry

It's not all pork pie and claret this Christmas; I've actually finished some figures today!

These are going to be for the unit of Federal Regulars who fought at Bull Run.  They were a composite unit formed from men from several different regiments.  A few more regiments like these may have made a difference to the eventual outcome.

Perry Miniatures don't make the correct figures for these troops but fortunately, and rather to my surprise, Crusader do, under their rank and file range.  I am very fussy about mixing figures from different manufacturers but while these are a little shorter than the Perry figures they aren't that different and, crucially, the muskets are the same length.  In separate units the difference will be unnoticeable.  I will now order the rest of the figures I need for the unit as Crusader also do a command set.

As regards painting, I saw several mentions that in this period the regulars had dark blue trousers but then again some illustrations had them in the paler blue.  Some had them in the pale blue but with a broad dark blue stripe down the outside of the trousers.  Given that it is a composite unit I might paint the others up with these different trousers.  

They look a bit squat in the picture as I only managed to get one done before the battery died in my camera and my wife's camera battery had packed up too.  I'll try to get some better pictures when I do the whole unit.

Christmas is saved!

Well, when I last posted Christmas was looking grim but everything turned around in 18 hours!  My younger sister-in-laws family announced that they were all ill but were going down to my other sister-in-law for Christmas anyway.  Her children have not only had every child illness going but now they are working through ones even Dr Miriam Stoppard has never heard of.  Snivelling scum! My wife, worried about our children picking up dreaded diseases before exams in January said that we weren't going down for family Christmas, therefore, but we would do it at home,  This was 2.00pm on Christmas Eve!  Straight off to Waitrose to buy Christmas dinner.  Just got one of the last Turkeys, the last sprouts, etc etc.  

Return home and the evil troll family (as Guy calls them) have decided not to go to Christmas lunch at all as the boy troll is too ill.  He is the one who eats all the sausages and bacon rolls at lunch.  So my wife's parents persuade us to go down for lunch the next day after all.  The children are upset as they wanted to do a Christmas meal at home for the first time.  So we cook it all for Christmas Eve dinner.  Very continental!

Yes, that is a full sized dinner plate it's on!

Next morning my daughter gives me the GW The Hobbit trolls set and a massive pork pie for Christmas.  She paid for it all herself with money she had earned doing some work at a craft fair.  What a good girl!  Glad I got her the One Direction tickets now!

My brother in law goes for more bacon rolls.  But not this year, matey!

Went down to my sister in law's and without the troll family it was much more civilised.  There was more food for a start as the troll family weren't there to scoff it all before anyone else got a chance.  Still no first course but my brother in law opened a bottle of Bollinger before lunch and a Berry Bros Margaux at lunch.  Shock! 

Then my parents in law gave me the Saul David Military Blunders book.  An excellent choice which they decided upon on their own!  

Today I have been happily making trolls all day and even doing some painting.

Christmas saved!

Happy Christmas to all our Readers!

The Legatus is not fond of Christmas, or at least, all the nonsensical commercial frippery attached to it and tries to ignore it as much as possible.  Unfortunately, my wife and daughter love it and have surpassed themselves as regards the installation of a ludicrously over the top Christmas display in our living room this year.  This is what 31 boxes of Christmas decorations looks like.  No wonder there is no room in the loft for my boxes of plastic figures!  What's worse is that the two armchairs that usually sit here are now in my study, the door into which you can just glimpse through the forest.  As a result I have no access to most of my DVD collection so had no luck when trying to extract my favourite anti- Christmas film, Gremlins, for a late night spin the other day.  I went off to try to buy some Champagne at the supermarket today, in anticipation of my birthday in January, (there are some superb half price offers on at present) but gave up when faced with a non-moving, 400 yard queue to get into Sainsburys car park.  On Friday it took me 20 minutes to find a free parking slot in our local Tesco.  It could have been worse, it took my sister-in-law two hours to get out of Tesco's car park in Salisbury on Friday! Madness!

Kelly Brook, a most unlikely, but nonetheless welcome, Christmas angel

Perhaps people are stocking up because the end of the World didn't happen last week, as it surely can't be because the shops are shut for one whole day next week.  I have to go down to my sister in law for Christmas lunch this year rather than my sister, who has decided to de-camp to Australia for the holiday.  This is a most depressing prospect as my sister cooks an excellent Christmas lunch whereas my sister in law is to cooking what Kelly Brook is to particle physics.  You get one slice of Turkey, one (burnt) sausage, one bacon roll, one potato and three sprouts.  If you're lucky.  If you're unlucky one of my children's cousins hoovers up all the sausages before you can get to them.  There is no starter, no stuffing, no peas, no carrots and no wine!  The problem is that my wife's family has no interest in food (or drink) whatsoever.  My father-in-law puts Worcester Sauce on everything (he even asked for it when eating in Gordon Ramsay at Claridges - he was lucky not to be thrown out).  My wife largely lives on Slimfast shakes because she can't be bothered to make herself lunch.  My mother-in-law (an otherwise estimable woman) has said if she could take one pill a day with all the required nutrients in she would, rather than waste time with eating.  Argh!  

I'd volunteer to cook it myself except they have an AGA, a worthless piece of outdated nineteen twenties technology, which should have been scrapped fifty years ago.  The AGA was invented in Sweden (Aktiebolaget Svenska Gasaccumolato) which is to haut cuisine what Kelly Brook is to neurosurgery. It might work well at heating freezing Nordic kitchens but as a means to cook anything it is utterly useless. It only has two rings for a start. Only someone totally disinterested in cooking would own an AGA! It dries out a Turkey so that it has a texture like shredded rubber from the sole of a twenty-five year old deck shoe. This probably explains why the Legatus always loses weight over Christmas! Sigh!

I only remember my father giving me two pieces of advice: "Don't ever dance.  Dancing is only for women, children, homosexuals and black people" and "there are only five important things in life: food, wine, women, art and music and they are all basically the same thing."   So that's probably why I have opened one of my remaining bottles of Mouton Rothschild today and am drinking it whilst listening to Meredith Willson's excellent two symphonies, which I have recently discovered.  Willson is better known for writing the musical The Music Man and more pertinently for this time of year, the seasonal standard, It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.  All I need is my Canadian friend Sophie in her little Santa outfit  (it's the boots that do it) and I would feel rather more festive than I do.  

Speaking of particle physics, my tragic daughter asked for the thrilling volume SuperFuel: Thorium, the Green Energy Source of the Future for Christmas.  I think that could be nearly as bad as the bottle of Draino my wife asked for once.  My son asked for an iPad mini; the search for which began to resemble the quest for El Dorado.  I'm sure Apple are deliberately restricting the availability of these. After telephoning John Lewis every four hours for four weeks we tracked one down in Cheadle (wherever that is).  

Time-wasting machine

To add to my pre-Christmas cheer I have to write two strategy documents by the end of December.  One thing about being a consultant is that you don't get any days off. If you don't work you don't get paid. So Christmas Day and Boxing Day is costing me £1500 in non-chargeable days.  Grr!  What I really want to do  is get some painting done but if I try to do any when my wife is around I get harangued for not helping the children with their revision.  They both have re-takes in January on account of being bone idle slackers who spend all their time playing Xbox or watching Made in Chelsea rather than revising.  One of the other parents at Guy's school actually threw their son's Xbox out of his bedroom window.  Something I can sympathise with!

My current two legions need a boost

In fact, I did get a bit of painting done today on some ACW figures and some Back of Beyond ones, which were a complete impulse buy a couple of weeks ago.  However the light had gone by three so that's why I'm writing this instead!  I also bought a lot of Carthaginian Wars period Romans off eBay a week or so ago as I have decided to boost the size of my two painted legions for this period.  Currently they are in 12 figure units but I want to push these up to 24 figure units.  I have also based some Lusitanians which I might have a go at in the New Year.

I will do a proper review of the year the week after next!

Ho, ho, ho!

Bombsight: German bombs on London during the blitz

London is under there somewhere

I was equally fascinated and appalled by the new interactive Bombsight map which shows the site of every bomb which fell on London during the blitz, from October 1940 until June 1941.

I had tended to think that the bombs were concentrated on the East End and the Docks with a few stray ones over central London.  The reality is staggering.  Even out as far as where I live, in Oxshott, there were dozens in the immediate area.  This is a quiet suburb (it would have been even quieter seventy years ago) about nineteen miles from the centre of London and yet each one of these dots is a bomb impact.  I live along the bottom edge of this map which covers an area of about four and a half miles by two and a half miles.  Not a lot of area for such a lot of bombs!  Scary

We really don't have any appreciation of what our parents and grandparents had to live through...

The Hobbit: Escape from Goblin Town

I suppose it was inevitable, but having resisted buying The Hobbit: The Escape from Goblin Town at the weekend (mainly because Games Workshop in Epsom wouldn't answer the phone, as I wanted to check whether they had any in stock) I was in Oxford Street today having just changed $1000 back into sterling.  Even £75 seemed like a small amount, therefore.  Or rather £75.10 as GW charged me 10p for the bag to take it home in!   Talk about mean!  

My daughter, Charlotte, is more excited about it than my son, Guy, who used to be my regular LotR opponent, as he now only wants to kill zombies on his xbox (and I refuse to do zombie wargames!).  GW man in the shop said that they had been selling really well but then the North Koreans keep saying that their rocket programme is doing well too.  So, now it's time to put on some Howard Shore and, as the annoying chap from Meeples and Miniatures always says "lets see what we have in the box".  Well , not that much compared with some other GW boxes I've bought.  There is actually white space, which isn't such a bad thing as I often find that once I have taken everything out of a box like this I can't get it all back in again without it bulging out everywhere.  Like trying to put a tent back in its case.  Not that I have ever camped in a tent, of course.  That would be ghastly.  Except possibly in the Ngorongoro Crater with a large tent you can stand up in, seat ten for dinner and have a lovely girl in a pith helmet to fetch your claret for you.

First out the box is all the usual bases and dice plus a rather clunky 24 inch ruler.  I know it's supposed to be everything you need to play the game in one box but do GW really think that people don't have tape measures or rulers at home?  Maybe they don't and it's only wargamers who have a surfeit of measuring instruments.  I suppose if you had just unpacked a box in your tent in the Ngorongoro Crater to have a quick post-prandial skirmish along with the Quinta Do Noval 1896 (which I remember having at our final legal dinner at College - it's still the only nineteenth century wine I have ever had) you'd be jolly miffed if you didn't have a measuring stick.  It would also be useful for swatting the girl in a pith helmet with if she didn't get more bottles fast enough.

Inside we have no less than six printed items.  Black and white instructions for the figures (those that have multiple parts anyway) and the scenic items like the Goblin King's throne and all the planking.  There is a separate sheet for the limited edition Radagast the Brown figure.  Also included is a separate colour A4 card with Radagast's statistics and a scenario on the other side. There is a two page summary play sheet which could have had a lot more information on it.  There is an A4 44 page introduction to the game with most of the pictures coming from a Goblin Town skirmish but containing a few stills from the film itself, as well, which is always useful for reference.  Finally,  the rules themselves which are in a small A5 format book.  These are 144 pages and I will leave it to others far more clever than me to point out any differences between the old LotR rules and this updated version, although I gather monsters are stronger.  One thing I did notice was that the writing is very small and I couldn't possibly read it without glasses, so that means, inevitably, buying the full-sized hardback version, I suppose.

One other thing I noticed in the main rule book was this picture of mounted elves.  These don't look like the existing Galadhrim knights so are they something to come?  They don't look like a conversion, either

The first sprue contains all the principal "good" characters.  Some are multi-part and need arms sticking on.  The detail is very good for plastics and many (although not all) of the faces do look exactly like the characters from the film.  Still, I would have preferred metal, or, rather, Finecast for these.  Maybe these will come out in the future.

There are two identical sprues of goblins; all one piece figures.  Many people have commented that they don't look anything like the goblins in The Fellowship of the Ring (although no-one actually called them "goblins" in that film) but that isn't GW's fault as presumably they reflect the creatures from the film.  They're bigger than the old goblins and look more orcish  They are very nice except that they are covered in boils.  It is weird, I know, but I really can't stand figures with lumps and boils on them; just as I don't like misshapen ugly figures, even if they are supposed to be ugly.  The Warhammer giant is a figure I would never buy, for example, as his body is just too slack, soft and nasty looking.  That's why I could never paint zombies.  Too ugly!  The other thing I don't like is the nasty pink tinged white that the GW painters have used on them.  I will have to see what they look like in the film, of course, but I am hoping for more of a grey colour.  Sorry that the picture of the front of them isn't very good but I had two attempts at doing them and have had a long day so couldn't face it again.

The "special edition" Radagast figure has no less than six pieces and is a very curious figure indeed.  I can't say that I am that excited by having a plastic model of the worst Dr Who ever, but there we are.  It also features another dislike of mine, scenic items attached to the figure.  Grr!

The biggest figure sprue in the box features the Goblin King (another very ugly figure) and his throne, plus some other bits.  The throne is very detailed, if rather Warhammer-like but, again, I believe it is based directly on the item from the film.

Finally, you get two sprues of the infamous planking that makes up Goblin Town (it seems).  Others have said that they will make their own, which seems sensible. The floor elements themselves are very solid with deeply etched detail top and bottom.  They are covered with horrible skulls, bones and worse, however.  This is not good if you want to use multiple sets to build a bigger environment because of the repitition.  I wonder how many sets at £35 you would need to build the layout that they used in this month's White Dwarf?  Some of the fittings on the posts look quite flimsy, too.

So, all in all it's an interesting set and I am sure that I will paint all the figures eventually, although not before getting some more colour photographic reference of the actual characters from the film.  GW usually paint their Lord of the Rings figures too brightly compared with how they look in the films.  The Bilbo figure on the front of this month's White Dwarf, for example, has a bright red jacket, whereas all the stills I have seen from the film have it a much darker shade.

Usually with a set like this I would start by painting something from the rank and file but for this one I think I may start with Bilbo Baggins, simply because there is more photographic reference around for him.  It's got me even more keen to see the film, anyway!

Back from Belgrade and Dubai...

Well, I've had rather too much travel of late but, hopefully, that's it for 2012.  This month I have been to Serbia, which I hadn't visited before (I think it's the 58th country I have been to), and the UAE, which I had.

Belgrade, I suspected, would be a horrible city full of seventies concrete buildings.  Well it wasn't.  It was very attractive and, better still, it was 22 degrees centigrade - not bad for early November.  I didn't have much time there, just two nights, so didn't get a chance to do any sightseeing, which is a shame as there was an interesting looking castle in the centre of the city.  While walking from my hotel to a TV studio (to appear on breakfast TV, which was a first) I passed these two heavily damaged buildings.  I was told that it used to be the Serbian defence ministry until it was restructured by Tomahawk missiles.  Serbia, in some ways, is not as advanced as the likes of Hungary or the Czech Republic, as they essentially lost a decade of development since the fall of the Iron Curtain because of the war.

The Serbs do like their meat!

The food was very good, provided you aren't a vegetarian, as was the wine, but the great discovery was the local eau de vie, rakija, especially the quince one!   I had a thing with a Bosnian Serb girl once and was amazed to meet someone who could have been her twin there. Spooky!  Quite a few leggy blondes but most of the girls seemed to be dark haired.  Many of the girls were very tall (as were the men - there is a reason that they are good at basketball).  Much better scenery than average! 

Sort of local...

I was only back for a few days and then it was off to Dubai.  I find Dubai completely uninteresting and cannot for the life of me understand why people would want to go there on holiday.  It has no history, no old buildings ("Old" Dubai was built in the sixties as far as I can see) and all the culture is imported.  Everyone speaks English because virtually everyone there is from abroad (mainly South Asia, although I did have a lovely Russian waitress at one restaurant).  I thought I'd met one local lovely but she turned out to be from Bahrain...

Gin for her, Vodka for me and very big olives indeed!

The only good thing about Dubai is the hotels, which are very good, and I actually managed to have the first decent Vodka Martini I have ever had in the Middle East there.  Usually they are far too weak but this one, apart from suffering from the current annoying fashion of having too many olives, was both strong and cold.  B worked her way through a lot of gin and tonics, which I always think is an odd drink to find a German having, and nagged me about my lack of progress on the Prussians she bought me.

The breakfast buffet was pretty good and the hotel went up in my estimation when I discovered it had the true sign of civilisation: HP sauce. 

Wine is very expensive in Dubai and the cheapest bottle on the hotel wine list was about £40 but for slightly more we got a very nice, but strangely smoky-tasting, sauvignon blanc from the Lebanon which we chose on the basis that there was no point in paying over the odds for something you could get at home when you could pay over the odds for something you couldn't.

Since I returned earlier in the week I haven't had any time to paint anything but did put some filler on some bases, including the last three figures to complete my Dutch Jaeger unit.  However, I need to get back to those Prussians.  Arriving at home while I was away was a complete impulse buy, the Hasslefree Miniatures 54mm Christmas pin up girl.  She came resplendent in a nice red box but I have absolutely no idea what to do with her.  Cast in a lovely ivory covered resin it almost seems a shame to paint her and no paint job I could manage would do her justice anyway.  Hmm!

There has been almost universal condemnation of Games Workshop's The Hobbit figure prices but the cost in the UK seems to be a fraction of what they are charging in some overseas markets.  It's not like I don't have any Lord of the Rings figures to paint and I haven't yet seen a figure I really want (unlike for the LotR films).  One of the annoyances for me is that the main characters have come out in plastic.  I still see plastic as something for rank and file troops so, however good they are, the plastic characters aren't going to be as good as the old metals or even the new Finecast.  It's not just the detail, it's the poses, which in plastic seem that bit more ungainly.

Talking of The Hobbit, Mike of Black Hat, pointed out to me that he had got me the 10mm Battle of Five Armies when it came out but that he hadn't painted any of the figures.  Well, I have!  Exactly two stands.  I enjoyed painting these, I seem to recall, but got quickly bored by the prospect of having to paint dozens of stands.  They are certainly the smallest figures I have ever painted!  Still, who knows what I might do when the film trilogy gets to that point.  Someone said on one of the message boards that someone else has the rights to do The Battle of the Five Armies in 28mm which is why GW had to go to 10mm.  I don't know if this true or not but surely they wouldn't miss the opportunity to sell lots of figures for the only real battle in the book?

I've really got the urge to do some painting, having been away, so hope to have some time at the weekend.  I think my wife is off selling her friend's ludicrously expensive Christmas tree baubles at some Christmas fair on Saturday so I may get some done then, if it's not too dark!