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!

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

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

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

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

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

Under way with metal and plastic extra recruits

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

Nearly done

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

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

Orcs!

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

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

2 Litre LC Supercharged Lagonda (1931)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Awk! Awk! Awk!

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

Unable to refrain from making comment about twin floats

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

Royal Canadian Air Force Vickers Viking IV

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

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

The only sight in Iceland I expected to see

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

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

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

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

Sleeping Beauty (1910)

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

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

Paint Table Saturday: Redcoats and what's been going on.

I haven't posted for over two months because I haven't managed any painting at all.  There were a number of reasons for this: some major work crises, a member of the Old Bat's family being very ill, some problems with my PC which meant I was on a laptop for two weeks (my poor eyes) and the extreme heat not being conducive to painting. However, last weekend I actually had some time on Saturday, so I set to for an hour (the maximum time I can manage, now).  I should be finishing my Byzantines (actually I did a bit on them yesterday) and my Carthaginian elephant crew but they all have shield transfers that need doing and I am putting that off until I feel braver.

Instead, I picked out a random box of part painted figures from my in-progress pile (now tidily sat on the shelf behind me) and this turned out to be some of Orinoco Miniatures British Legion for the Latin American Wars of Independence. This range coming out coincided with me having to travel to Colombia a lot and next year (August 7th) they are having a big celebration of 200 years since the key Battle of Boyacá, which saw the defeat of the Spanish and the subsequent creation of Gran Colombia. So far, the Orinoco Miniatures range isn't complete (they are lacking Spanish cavalry (although they have been sculpted) but at the speed I paint that doesn't really matter. The key thing was to find some figures with no shields!

Now, you may think, what are those armless plastics lurking in the background?  Not Napoleonics again?  The period I have said I was going to abandon at least half a dozen times. Well, it was like this.  I went up to London last Friday to meet someone who wanted some advice on something to do with work. I waited for the woman outside where we were supposed to meet, in the sun, in 30 degree heat and after half an hour I decided to forget it. As a man who I used to work with in Switzerland once said: "every minute you are late you are wasting one minute of the other person's life".  Turn up on time!  You're not Italian!  Sweltering and angry (I am increasingly angry about everything and I wasn't exactly Mr happiness and light before) I realised that I wasn't that far from Orc's Nest so thought I could pick up August's wargames magazines.  They had them and I went upstairs to see what plastic figures they had (less and less every time I go).   I wondered what would cheer me up (it's like my friend Sophie and shoes - you don't need 147 pairs of shoes (yes, really) but if buying them makes you happy...).  Well, I thought, my overheated brain operating on dehydrated logic (fuzzy logic), as I am painting British infantry from 1819 if I get British Napoleonic Infantry they will use the same colours.  Congratulating myself on my brilliance, I happily skipped off back to Waterloo Station (ironically) with that warm feeling you get from knowing that you have a box of Perry Miniatures in your bag. It's not quite as good a feeling as knowing that you have a bottle of Cloudy Bay in your bag or Miss Vietnam waiting for you in your hotel room but it still cheered me up a lot, especially as I hadn't had to talk for two hours about developments in infrastructure finance in Latin America to some ungrateful and disorganised, sponging bint.

Mostly armless

Back home, of course, reality dawned and I wondered what on earth happened to cause this state of affairs; like that time at the infrastructure conference in Dublin when, after a night drinking Bushmills with some insurance brokers and going to some Irish musical evening I woke up the next day to find a naked lady journalist in my bath.  How did that happen?

The first question,with this set, of course, is whether to do Waterloo or the Peninsula. Now much of my early wargaming was Waterloo, with hundreds of Airfix plastics and scratchbuilt models of Hougomont (not by me, by my clever friend Bean Kid from some instructions in Military Modelling - I paid him £5, I think and a copy of Penthouse) and La Belle Alliance to go with my Airfix La Haye Sainte.  But, as Mr Mike Siggins pointed out on my Facebook page this week, in doing Waterloo "you are digging a hole for yourself".  Not so much a hole as the Grand Canyon.  So, as you can see by the hats (I've always thought the Belgic shako was a bit silly, anyway) I have decided to go for the Peninsula.  Now the eagle eyed among you will notice that my close up of the paint table figures does not match the one further up the page.  Where, you almost certainly are not asking, is the British Legion; the spark that provoked the Napoleonic purchase in the first place?  The answer is, that they are back in the 'in progress' box. This is because I have started on the British and have decided to drop everything else and concentrate.  Hollow laugh.

I looked at the Peninsula folder on my computer and, in the May when Charlotte was born (1995) I had looked for a small battle in the Peninsular war to paint plastic figures for. I had settled on the Battle of Barossa, in 1811; this being, of course, the battle where Sergeant Patrick Masterson, of the 87th, captured Britain's first Eagle, from the French 8th Ligne.  Sorry, Sharpie. I even had an order of battle against which I had marked how many figures I had completed.  Now, given I don't like fictitious battles, this looks quite achievable in a decade or so.  At 1:33 (which is the ratio I had chosen for my plastics) you would need 133 figures on the British side; mostly infantry with only a few cavalry (10 figures) and two guns.  Oh and no Highlanders! So, time to start!

I am notorious for painting figures and not units, which may well be one of the issues in me rarely finishing a unit. When I do set out to paint a unit it usually goes better (tries to ignore his ACW project from last year).  So what I needed was a British infantry unit to paint for the battle of Barossa. The biggest British unit at Barossa was the 87th Foot, The Prince of Wales Irish, with some 820 men which, at 1:33 equates to 25 figures. Not at all impossible. So the 87th it is and I even ordered the Victrix ensign for them, which arrived today. There were also 750 men of the 95th Rifles at Barossa too, so the four figures in the box will need boosting, so I sent off an order for Perry Miniatures for some metal Rifles reinforcements and some mounted Colonels too.   I'm not even going to think about the French yet, as I am going to need 213 infantry but only 12 cavalry (dragoons - hooray!). Warlord (the Sky Team of wargaming) have an offer on their Early French foot at the moment but I don't know if their figures are any good as I have never bought any of their Napoleonics.  I have read some iffy reviews of some of them.

I have made progress this week, basing and undercoating the whole unit (apart from waiting for the Colonel (actually Lt Colonel Hugh Gough, later Field Marshal, Sir Hugh, Viscount Gough) from Perry Miniatures). I am not able to paint at the speed of the peerless Eric the Shed but while eschewing the dip I have decided to go for a wargames standard and will take some shortcuts on these. I have started by (grits teeth) deciding not to paint the figures' eyes and also leaving the arms off, initially, so as to be better able to get at the straps. I will also paint the packs separately.  Victrix do transfers for packs and canteens but I won't be getting those either (well maybe for the 28th as they had a plate on the back of their shakos).  So by this afternoon I had got the faces painted and shaded and the first shade on the jackets (remembering to do the officers and sergeant in scarlet).

Barossa (or Chiclana as the French call it) 5th March 1811 

This painting of the battle is by Louis-François Lejeune (1775-1848), who was a soldier (eventually becoming a général de brigade and Davout's chief-of-staff) and took his paints on campaign with him.  Although this painting wasn't done until 1824 he was on active service in the Peninsular and made many sketches while on campaign, giving his depiction of troops an authenticity other artists lacked.  He does not, for example, like a lot of contemporary artists, have the British in Belgic shakos. He left the army in 1813 after sustaining a number of wounds in battle and devoted his life to painting, also becoming the mayor of Toulouse in 1841.

So what else have I been up to since my previous post on May 19th? Not that you care but I am going to tell you anyway.  Well, I spent valuable painting time washing up as our dishawasher packed up and despite three vists from the Dishwasher Doctor he couldn't save the machine (it was nine years old and sometimes we run it two or three times a day if the children are home, as we all eat completely different meals). It took two weeks before a new one arrived which was very character building for the Old Bat.  Charlotte refused to help by washing the numerous pots and pans she gets dirty when making vegetarian sausage chilli.  "You're the housewife," she said to the Old Bat. "I'm on holiday!  What else do you do all day?"  This did not go down too well.  Now washing up by hand to the standards of the Old Bat is not a simple matter.  You can't just swill them around in a washing up bowl of soapy water (I have only just learned that the UK's use of washing up bowls inside their kitchen sinks is unusual - you must get lots of broken crockery, Johnny Foreigner) and then rinse.  Oh no.  You have to use boiling water (and super industrial washing up gloves as a result) which needs constantly changing.  Before we had the dishwasher the Old Bat would spend an hour and half every evening washing up but that was before she discovered Love Island (really?).

Back at home, the following week, I had a phone call early one morning.  The Old Bat picked it up and said: "It's Gerry Embleton for you."  Well, I was a bit shocked.  I had ordered this picture (from an Osprey) from the Illustration Art Gallery a few weeks before and they said it would be delayed because it was in Switzerland. I wasn't expecting the artist to ring me up but it turns out he lives there.  He was very apologetic and said that, unfortunately, he couldn't find the painting anywhere and he suspected someone had stolen it from one of his exhibitions.  We had a long chat about painting, wargaming, painting military figures (which he used to do as well) and working for Osprey (which he no longer does).  I actually didn't mind about the painting being lost (I did get a refund) as I had the opportunity to talk to one of my favourite illustrators, whose work I had appreciated since the pictures he did for Look & Learn back in the sixties and seventies.  It quite made my day.

As the heatwave continued I found myself locked in my study working on a series of big reports and proposals in the gloom I have to experience when the sun is out, as I have to have a blackout blind drawn down and the desk light on or I can't see my computer screen.  We had a whole series of deadlines to hit which made 12 hour days, seven days a week for over a month.  I basically didn't leave the house, so when I did I was sort of shocked by how hot it had become in the heat of the day. The thermometer in my study was reading 32 degrees first thing in the morning.

I realised how hot it had got when we all went to the Goodwood Festival of Speed, which was part of Guy's 21st birthday present, held over from March.  It was just baking and I started to feel quite odd, despite guzzling bottle after bottle of water. Guy has no patience with older people and so I wasn't allowed to sit down and have lunch at any of the appealing looking pop up restaurants. The Old Bat does not approve of eating out, which she thinks is a terrible waste of money.  I am not a petrol head, have never owned a car and don't enjoy driving but I appreciate cars from an aesthetic standpoint, particularly the older ones.  There were a lot of cars there and while I wasn't that impressed by all the supercars, as living where I do you see them all the time anyway, but I enjoyed seeing the historic cars, including one of the three Mustangs which they used to film the chase in Bullitt (1968).

Best thing about the day was Jet Pack man, though, especially when he flew under the bridge over the track. I really want one of these to get to the station!  The old style Bell rocket pack they used in Thunderball (1965) and at the opening of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics could only run for about thirty seconds but this one can go for up to eight minutes. Invented by someone from Britain it is now being funded by the US Military.

I first came across the Napier-Railton in my Brooke Bond tea cards History of the Motor Car in the late sixties.  I loved all the pipes and stiff emerging from its body. It's certainly like a Pulp vehicle; it looks like it should have Doc Savage at the wheel.  The original car is in the Brooklands Museum, which is about seven miles from where we live and my Uncle Wally had a lot to do with setting up. 

"They're going to be running it in the hill climb!" exclaimed Guy as we looked at the Goodwood programme.  A replica surely? But no, more than eighty years after it was built, it was able to hammer up the hill in fine, gleaming, mid-thirties style,  Not just a dusty museum exhibit, this.

The following weekend Guy and I went to the Brooklands Trust Classics day (we both joined as members which means we can get in for free and use the members bar, restaurant and verandah). We went to have another look at the Napier-Railton, now safely returned from Goodwood.

This is the Daily Herald trophy, awarded for the fastest lap of Brooklands (the world's first purpose built motor racing track) which is now held, in perpetuity (as the track has been chopped up to make way for shops and offices) by the Napier-Railton, driven by John Cobb at 144 mph in October 1935

This is a great shot of Cobb setting the record on 7th October 1935, all four wheels of the Napier-Railton off the ground on Brooklands famous banking.

 Morris

Singer

There is still some of the banking left at Brooklands and they had some of the British classics parked up on it. The bridge in the background of the colour shot above is the same one as in the black and white picture.  I was excited to see a Singer Gazelle and a Morris Oxford; two of my family's childhood cars.  The condition of most of these cars was amazing.  I don't think ours ever looked this good, even when they were new!

There was a large auto jumble at the event, where you could pick up bits of car, if you were so minded but having no interest in bits of cars I bought a naked girly statue instead, given I didn't think they would let me take the Daily Herald Trophy.  Guy though that this was typical.

Next it was music, rather than vehicles and a trip up to the Guildhall School of Music where my niece had an opera performed.  She has written a chamber opera before but this was the first one which has been staged with sets and costumes.  Called A Risk of Lobsters the story is far too convoluted to explain but was set in outer space, under the sea and in the court of a ferret prince.  She has now been taken on by the Guildhall as a fellow for next year and has done an interview and had her music played three times on Radio Three now.

Today's wallpaper is an appropriately Napoleonic period painting: Jean Auguste Dominic Ingres; La Grande Odalisque, which dates from 1814.  It was commissioned by Joachim Murat's wife Caroline, Napoleon's younger sister.  It was not well received at the time, with its deliberately distorted anatomy, but when I first saw it in the Louvre at the age of twelve I had to buy a print of it, along with a Renoir nude and Théodore Géricault's officer of the Chasseurs of the Guard. Soldiers and naked ladies being my two favourite things, even then.

Today's music also has a Napoleonic link (or perhaps an anti-Napoleonic link) in that it is my favourite Beethoven symphony; the 3rd, With Dvorak's New World this was the first classical record I owned when my aunt gave me her copy (as it was a duplicate) when she got married in 1968. I never get tired of it (unlike the 5th and 6th) and used to play it when setting up my Airfix Napoleonic wargames back in the early seventies so still resonates when painting British infantry (not that I ever painted any of my Airfix figures, except the British Hussars). This was the 1957 stereo recording produced by Walter Legge and it is still my favourite. My CD version has the advantage of no break part way through the second movement, either, like the LP did. I will be away for a bit shortly, so my painting will stop for a few days but will hopefully resume soon.