Paint Table Saturday, Warfare and a taste of the past...

Having finished a big piece of work this week I thought I might have a weekend off and catch up on some painting. I didn't get much done on the ACW figures this week, although I have now started the first company of Confederate Infantry,  I need to do the shading on two more horses for the cavalry and then I can paint the harnesses and manes and eyes etc on the second half dozen horses.  This week I have researched US cavalry horse blankets so now I know how to do those, so they will be next (blue and  orange, who knew?)

The six figures in the back have the horses and harnesses complete and of the six in the foreground just the black ones need shading.  Since I took this picture I have put the base grey coats down for the first company of Confederates.  I think these will be Texans.  I did look at some Redoubt flags for these but they seemed huge (some people do over-sized flags for some reason) and even I can paint a Texas flag!  I do need to research the sizes, though.

Eric the Shed kindly picked me up from home today and took me to Reading for the Warfare show.  I usually do three shows a year: Salute, Colours and Warfare and this is the end of the season show for me.  Nothing until Salute next April now.  Warfare is always very cramped and certainly seemed busy this year.  Eric picked me up at 8.30 and we were there within an hour, half an hour before doors opened, and there were very few parking spaces left.  By 10.30, apparently, people were having to park a mile away.  

My first port of call was to Dave Thomas' stand.  How much of my money has this man had over the years?  My key objective was to get a couple of Renedra's American buildings to start my town of Centerville.  They didn't have the basic farmhouse but I got the store which can be made as a house anyway and the rather dinky church which I hadn't seen before.  Given I already have painted their barn I feel I have made a good start.  I might try and get one started this week.  In the background you can see an odd fellow who was wandering around the show wearing rabbit ears.  Frankly, I don't want to see anyone wearing rabbit ears unless they are female, dressed in a strapless corset teddy, collar and cuffs and have a cotton tail.

I also picked up a pack of plastic hills (or, rather, bluffs) from Kallistra, which are needed for the Centerville layout.  This saves all that fiddling around with mod-roc as espoused by Terence Wise.  These things were all on the list.  Today's impulse buys were the new African princesses from Copplestone Castings, which I was going to get anyway (honest!), as you can never have enough African princesses.  These will see service for Congo.   The other impulse buy (well, it probably isn't an impulse buy if you ask them if they have got it when you can't see it on the shelves) was the new Warlord Games Stuart tank.  I still have a hankering to do WW2 in the Pacific and this will work for that. I better get some more plastic cement!

I hadn't had breakfast and when I got home the family were all out so I cooked myself brunch.  Some years ago I found a load of letters from ex-girlfriends at university and my letters to my mother from there, in my mother's loft.  This week I was looking for something else in my vast pile of file boxes when I found this box of letters again, organised by year and while having a big mug of Lifeboat tea and some Boots diabetic shortbread (very good, unlike most diabetic biscuits) I re-read some of them and was taken back in time to 1979 (my first term).  One letter was about my first trip to Dungeons and Dragons at Jesus College where one of the other players was involved in importing the rule books.  I noted that I wasn't going to get the rule book as it was a staggering £8.  My college food bill for a term was £40.  The first letter discussed the food in Hall which was...variable.  Despite my college's food being ranked second at Oxford by a review at the time, some of it was decidedly odd.  I had met a nice redhead, C, at the law interviews the previous year and I literally ran into her after being in the college for less than five minutes, on my way to my rooms on my first day. 

1979

Within three days we were inseparable and, as we later discovered, the source of much amusement amongst the second and third year law students, who delighted in telling half the college that two of the new freshers were already 'at it'. We had not realised that one of the second year lawyers had the room next to mine and C was a very vocal girl. We also got caught coming down from the only decent bathroom in college, on Heberden Staircase, with wet hair, having had a companionable bath as, unfortunately, the bottom of the stairs was right by the entrance to the law library.  Who would have expected people to still be in there at gone midnight (after a week and our first reading list, we soon realised why!)

Brasenose Hall

Anyway, the endless background behind my brunch today continues in that in our first week (October 1979) C and I sat down to Formal Hall (the second sitting where you had to wear gowns which I didn't like because I only had a commoner's gown but C had a scholars gown as she was a swot) and were presented with, instead of pudding (Pear Conde was the worst), a savoury.  We later found that we would get this quite often and it was quite popular at dinners in Oxford.   C and I were sat opposite S, from Liverpool, who had an accent that sounded like she had escaped from an episode of The Liver Birds.  There were a lot of northerners at our college and I had never met any before.  Fascinating. 

"What the fucking hell is this?" she exclaimed, poking the rather rubbery scrambled egg in front of her (I apologise for the language but it is an exact quote).  What it was, was 'Scotch Woodcock' which is, basically toast spread with anchovy paste and topped with scrambled egg.  It is, a curious thing to have after dinner but makes a very good brunch.  Given I had just read about this in my letter home to my mother, had bought a big box of eggs this week and had a tin of anchovies rattling around in our cupboard (I am not allowed to open anchovies if any of the rest of the family are in the house) I thought it would be just the thing for my post Warfare brunch.  You can read the recipe on my food blog, inevitably.  

Serving suggestion

Well, C and I developed a taste for it and in our second year we had rooms in the modern college annex next to the Oxford Union which had kitchens.  We could cook (except C couldn't) and Scotch Woodcock became our favourite Sunday brunch.  She would lay on my floor (she was always horizontal) and read the Sunday Times while I had to do all the work in the kitchen.  To be fair she did do the washing up, which is no joke when you have cooked scrambled eggs.  I haven't made Scotch Woodcock for more than thirty years but it certainly was a taste of the past.  "Tastes like C!" I actually said to myself (actually she tasted like prawn cocktail) as I enjoyed it with more Lifeboat Tea and a flick through my new book on Sweden's finest painter, Anders Zorn.

Summer on the Beach (circa 1900)

Anders Zorn was famous for his paintings of naked ladies (and US presidents) who he scattered throughout the Stockholm archipelago from his yacht, like delicious ripe fruit.  No doubt one of his pictures will be inspirational wallpaper another week but today's is by another Scandinavian artist, Denmark's Paul Gustave Fischer (1860-1934).  Around the end of the nineteenth century, while previously best known for his paintings of grey scenes of Copenhagen, he painted a series of pictures of naked ladies sunbathing amongst the dunes of the Baltic.  He wasn't as good a painter as Zorn but these pictures give a welcome feel of warmth and light on what has been a cold day.

Talking to Eric the Shed about the new Star Wars film on the way back from Warfare, we both agreed that we were more Star Trek than Star Wars people.  Speaking of science fiction, Warlord had the new Dr Who sets for sale at Warfare but didn't have any figures on display so I couldn't see what size they are.  C and I always went to watch Dr Who every week at College in the JCR.  So, while I was writing this I listened to my new Star Trek Soundtrack Collection Volume 2.  These have the original soundtracks by Fred Steiner (1923-2011) from four series one episodes.  This really is the sound of Star Trek as I remember it, with Steiner's atmospheric, mainly minor key, compositions for these episodes being reused again and again for later shows.  

The best laid plans... plus...Banzai and Colours!

The galley so far

Things have not gone very well on the hobby front in the last week or so.  I was making slow but steady progress on my Roman Galley for the Thapsus game at Colours this weekend but work crises got in the way and ate into all my evenings.  I was hoping to have most of Saturday last weekend before taking Charlotte to Edinburgh but various pre-trip issues saw to that.  I had to admit to Big Red Bat that my galley was not going to be ready, about which I feel very guilty.  I sort of lost heart when I realised that one steering oar was missing and the other was broken with a missing bit too.  Fortunately Dave at Grand Manner has promised to sort this out for me.  I am determined to finish it soon!

The Legatus takes the healthy option by having scrambled eggs

Despite booking the tickets back in May I could only get an evening flight to Edinburgh and then the plane was two hours late!  Charlotte and I were very tired when we arrived at the Crowne Plaza at 12.10am only to be told that they had let our room go as we arrived after midnight and they didn't have any others.  Edinburgh was full because something like 15,000 new students at the city's four universities were all arriving that weekend.  The man at the desk said he would try and get us something outside the city.  Now, the Legatus is (on the whole) a placid sort of person who prefers to avoid conflict and tension.  On this occasion, however, I had had enough.  I firmly pointed out that I was an Inter-Continental Hotels group platinum cardholder and nothing like this had ever happened to me in any of the sixty two countries I have visited.  Ever!  The man disappeared into the back and the acting manager appeared within about two minutes.  Within another ten minutes they had got us a room at the Sheraton (a much better hotel) which was only about 200 yards away.  Even better they told me I wouldn't have to pay the bill which, considering the outrageous £220 a night the Crowne Plaza was going to charge, was the least they could do.  Even better than that, when we checked out the next day they didn't charge me for breakfast either so my total bill was £4 for the two diet cokes we had when we arrived.  Actually £2.00 for a coke from a hotel minibar is pretty good.  I think I will stay at the Sheraton again.  The breakfast, complete with haggis and black pudding restored my equanimity somewhat.  Just as well considering the amount of shopping I had to do for Charlotte that day. 

A Salute Troop Transporter was roped in to help get all her stuff up to Edinburgh

Charlotte, cunning as ever, used the fact that I hadn't had to pay for the hotel to extract extras from me which were not on the John Lewis shopping list my wife had prepared.  "Daddy, I don't like the scratchy duvet cover they have given me!"  "Daddy, I think I need a rug!"  "Daddy, I need a clutch handbag to go with my Ted Baker dress for the fresher's James Bond party tonight and here is a Ted Baker bag that is perfect!"  Good job we get 25% discount in John Lewis.  The £220 saved was disappearing very quickly!

Returning to London I had to employ some fancy footwork to avoid being sent to run a training course in Colombia and Brazil the week after next.  Fortunately, I managed to find someone else to do it.  I need a break from long distance travel for a bit.

Really love these!

As I mentioned in a previous post I picked up some of the new Bolt Action plastic Japanese from Warlord Games.  These were not really the Japanese I had intended getting, to be honest, I was expecting to get going with some samurai for Ronin.  While watching the Tour of Spain on TV over the last couple of nights I put together five of them.  Scott, from Middle Earth, commented that he couldn't really be doing with all this plastic assembly nonsense and I have some sympathy for this view.  I reckon it took me well over an hour to put together five figures (I've since done another seven). 

There are five identical sprues of six figures which includes one kneeling and one prone one.  Unlike some people I don't mind prone or kneeling figures, especially for conflicts of the last 100 years and, in fact, I would actually prefer more prone figures for, for example, the British BEF for 1914.  Oddly, although 25mm plastic bases are provided for the standing figures there are no bases for the prone ones.  I don't usually use the supplied bases for plastic sets but am rationing myself on my usual 20mm washers which I use for skirmish figures.  Also, these are the first plastic figures I have bought where the figures don't have the usual base moulded on.  You have to stick the sole of the boot directly onto the bases.  As three figures per sprue have one foot off the ground I decided to use the plastic bases and bond them to the figures with polystyrene cement, which I also rarely use. for strength.  

Arms are separate but fit very well for plastics and there are nine head variants per sprue.  There are various bags, water bottles and such like that can be added and, again, I found these went on easily without looking at all awkward.  Usefully, the instructions identify each piece (Victrix take note) so you know the difference between the mortar bomb bag and the sub-machine gun magazine bag.  I had to have a sword waving figure amongst my first set as a nod to my Airfix armies.  I will do a bugler and a standard bearer too! The poses are rather more active than, perhaps, I would have liked but they work really well for the Japanese and their frightening charges.

My only issue is that I'm really not sure what colour to paint them.  I have ordered the Osprey but it is one of those which they print to order so it will take some time to arrive.  My trusty Blandford has the Japanese in quite a dark green which was certainly the colour I painted my 1/32 Airfix figures.  However I painted my 1/72 figures in a kahki drill.  Books I have seen seem to have them in all sorts of shades. 

Rooting through my DVD pile I found that I had bought the HBO miniseries The Pacific and put the first episode on late one night.  Big mistake, as several hours later I had watched three episodes!  It really was a tremendously well done series and the military aspect of it had obviously been meticulously researched; with the changes in the Marines uniform over time, for example, being accurately reflected.  Now, however, I am getting stressed as to whether the plastic Warlord marines will include early uncovered helmeted heads (for Guadalcanal) or will they all be the later covered helmets.  I wish I could relax about these things and just contemplate games which aren't recreations of actual battles!

My command at Thapsus

Speaking of which I managed to have an afternoon off and took part in a game of Big Red Bat's magnificent Thapsus recreation at Colours today.  I usually go to Colours on a Sunday, the second day, but it seemed particularly quiet today.  I spoke to Mike of Black Hat Miniatures and he said it had been much busier yesterday.  Maybe it will shrink to a day but, it seems, they need the second day to handle the wargames tournament games.  I did buy a a couple of steampunk things for In Her Majesty's Name from Mike which will fit very well with my planned set-up.  Disappointingly, I couldn't find any of the 4Ground Victorian buildings and apart from the IHMN scenic items all I bought were two of the factions for Ronin.  It must be my smallest wargames show haul for years.  Partly this is because I was hunting through my boxes to locate my Boot Hill Mexicans, as I have just bought an interesting, revisionist book on the Alamo.  I couldn't find them anywhere and all the exercise did was make me realise that I have far too many figures for too many periods. No more periods!  As the menopausal actress said to the Bishop.

I had a good look at the Warlord Pegasus Bridge model (which is huge!)  but  didn't photograph anything else except the Thapsus game where I was pitted against a trio of boys aged between about eight and fourteen (I would guess) who were making mincemeat of my command.  They picked up the rules far quicker than I did (needless to say).  Mr Bat's rules, which we were using, were card driven ,which made for quite a dynamic game where units could make a number of successive actions in one turn if the cards fell right.   My cards, needless to say, didn't fall right and I was reminded of the time I played strip poker with three girls from one of the women's college's rowing squads.  Hopefully, I will do better at the next attempt!  I might have had a chance to read the rules by then too!

Fortunately, I had to escape to pick up my wife from work so avoided being present at yet another tragic defeat.  Big Red Bat's armies looked magnificent and defined, for me, what a proper wargame should look like. His recreation of the Mediterranean Sea sorely lacked a galley, of course, but I have a few weeks reprieve to get it done before SELWG, which I haven't attended for more than ten years.    

More thoughts on World War 2...in the Pacific

I have, on occasion on this blog, pondered about doing some World War 2 gaming.  Now that Bolt Action is out there might even be the chance of a game at Guildford.  Apart from my misgivings about gaming such a recent conflict the question has already been which theatre to do.  Most rules and figure ranges seem to go for France 1944 and this was certainly what we played when I wargamed WW2 at school with 20mm Airfix plastics.  We also did North Africa, which has extra resonance for the Legatus as that was where my father fought.

I have had a go at starting the period a number of times in 28mm.  Six years ago, I bought some Artizan Airborne and Germans for Arnhem, where my Uncle Keith fought (the one who left me his whole cellar of claret in his will).  I painted one Airborne soldier but found the camouflage rather tiring!

My BEF figures

I then bought some nice Mike Owen sculpted British figures from BEF Miniatures and thought about doing Norway, France 1940 and Crete.  I had even started painting them when the figures were bought by Warlord Games who, annoyingly, retired them in favour of some new figures which I didn't like nearly so much.  I'd just about given up on the idea of early war when last week an American firm, Gorgon Studios, announced some Owen sculpted British specifically for Norway (they already have some German Gebirgsjäger and Norwegians). Unfortunately, they don't seem to have a distributor in the UK which means massive postal and probably customs charges as well (plus the Post Office's £6 handling charge) but I may just have to get some.

My Eighth Army Artizans

I also bought some of the Artizan North Africa figures and although these are chunkier than I usually like the two I painted were really nice to work on.  However, when I heard about the new Perry plastics I thought that I would prefer these to the Artizans so I didn't buy any more.  I have now heard that the Perry figures are very small, which given my eyesight is not what I want, so am thinking about painting some more Artizan figures again, especially as I bought a lot of second hand ones on eBay a year or so ago.

Recently, however, I have taken a punt on the theatre I played the most when I was at school:  the Pacific. My interest in this came. largely, from the number of World War 2 films that played in the afternoons at the weekend.  Many of them were set in the Pacific and a number of them starred John Wayne (which is why my mother watched them, I suspect - although he always died in his war films, unlike his westerns) such as The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and The Fighting SeeBees (1944).  I also watched The Halls of Montezuma (1950) and Guadalcanal Diary (1943) plus many others.  When the TV series The Pacific was first shown on TV here one reviewer said that it was "a neglected theatre for screen adaptions".  Well ,the reviewer must have been about twenty one and obviously never saw all the films I did on Sunday afternoons.

I had hundreds of the Airfix plastics, the cover art of the boxes for which were some of the most evocative that they did. Most of my Pacific games were without formal rules and were conducted outside on our rockery which, conveniently overlooked our pond.  The Marines could come across the pond land on the beach and then would spend days or weeks (over the summer holidays) fighting the Japanese back and forth across the rockery.  Just as in the War itself my mother would unearth lost Airfix Japanese soldiers decades later, as she did the weeding.  About fifteen years ago I painted a lot of these Airfix figures with the idea of doing Guadalcanal in 20mm but shortly afterwards I gave up on plastics and started painting 28m metal Darkest Africa and Vikings.  The plastics were forgotten.

The recent release of the Warlord Games plastic Japanese and the preview of their plastic US Marines has got me all nostalgic again, as they really have a great Airfix vibe about them, so I picked up the Bolt Action Armies of Imperial Japan book and bought a box of the infantry in Orc's Nest today.  I'll review them properly when I have more time but they are very small for 28mm figures. However, the average height of a Japanese infantryman was 5'4" I seem to recall.  I haven't got any other Bolt Action figures so don't know if they are all on the small size.  I am wary of different scales in Warlord ranges as we have seen in their Roman figures. The figures, which will need a lot of assembling (something to do during Strictly Come Dancing!) are a bit cartoony in pose, which is my main criticism of Warlord's WW2 figures, but I think I just want them for Airfix style skirmishes with the marines, when they come out.  Also the rather excessive animation works for the Japanese I think.  The key thing is that I will need no tanks and no buildings (which is the problem for the other theatres) but I will need an awful lot of palm trees! Maybe I can pick up some plastic ones at Colours (unless everyone else has had the same idea!).