Ramblings

On the whole I tend to be a bit of an upbeat chap. A lot of stupid things annoy me (IT helpdesks, tele-marketers, people who don’t read instructions and idiot drivers to quickly name a few), but not too much really gets me down. However, the state of our world at present I am finding very unsettling. What with political ructions in the USA and Britain (both of which have a direct impact on me because they cause fluctuations in the value of our Pacific Peso that affects my toy soldier buying power), the issues in the Persian Gulf and along the Turkish/Syrian border, the burning of the rain forests, the unending noise about Global Warming and the rising noise about plastics. It’s enough to drive a man to drink.

Now I know that there is nothing I can do to seriously influence most of this, especially when it comes to the political stuff, but these things bother me at the moment. My only consolation is that I have a hobby that allows me to turn off the TV news or the internet and to paint away leaving our problem stacked world behind for a few hours every day. I am not burying my head in the sand, you understand, it is just that some times there is a need to silence the chatter.

So after all of that, onto the toys. Three items have come off the basing tray in the last week.

The final two limbers for the Russian Napoleonics were first off the tray. Technically these should a horse artillery, but no one makes horse artillery limber drivers and I didn’t fancy buying horse artillery crew and swapping heads – more correctly my frugal mind would not let write off the cost of the gun crew to get the correct heads on horse artillery limber drivers.

Second off the tray were two more Crimean generals. Like the recent version of general Scarlett, the chap with the bicorne is a conversion of a base Great War Miniatures figure. He was the staff officer from the Cathcart set – as was Scarlett. His head was replaced with a suitable Victorian-like bearded head from one of the Gripping Beast Dark Ages sets, on which I fitted the bicorn from the original Great War figure’s right arm. The new right arm also came from a Gripping Beast set while the hand pointing came from the Perry Plastics French infantry set. The other figure here is as manufactured.

The last item is the third battalion of six from the AWI British collection.