Grumpy Old Modeller

Ramblings

..New Year Irresolutions

When I were a lad. one of the rites of passage was the transition from short to long trousers, a sort of secular if scholasitc bar mitzvah. This was also the era of Keeping Diaries, but however earnest the intent the entries quickly grew shorter, and then abbreviated, and by the middle of February - except for those determined few who had been capitivated by Samuel Pepys - dwindled in to abandonment. This more or less paralleled the rather sad existence of the average new year resolutions; started with equally good intent but fading; to adapt my older son's occasional reminder, a Plan is what doesn't survive first contact with reality.

All this - originally nocturnal - navel-gazing is largely because the start of of 2010 coincides to some extent with what Our Elected Representatives would call an internal review of GOM.com, in the full knowledge that any "decisions", bearing in mind that I still treasure the Les Barker Captain Indecisive T-shirt, are likely to fade in and out of reality; and as one of the primary purposes of this site, apart from providing me with cheap therapy, is to record my Adventures In Plastic Modelling what I hope to do on or around my workbench is an integral part of any Good Intentions. Whereas in my time with SAM the main thread behind my modelling was the provision of reviews for the magazine, it's become now my correction of all those bad, or at least wrong, procurement equipment decisions during my protracted adolescence combined with what I think would look good, or at least entertaining, in this section of cyberspace.

During my short-trousered period my grandmother was part of our household - she'd been bombed out of Finchley toward the end of 1940 - and a regular grandmaternal admonishment was that my "eyes were bigger than my belly", leading to more food on my plate, even in the days of austerity, than I actually ate. Sadly, this is still fairly obviously evident in my kit-buying habits, though I still try to maintain that I don't buy any kit that I don't intend to make. As an example, it was perhaps mistaken buying three Airfix Nimrods when the kit first appeared, though my regular defence for this type of behaviour is that I still suffer from residual "Profile Syndrome", which affected many of us at the time when that excellent, and still consulted, series of booklets came to a sudden stop. While it's not quite panic buying - or at least not always - it does at least in part account for the "buy one, lay one down" habit that I got in to, and perhaps for the number of TSR.2s and Revell Hunter 6s and 9s that share a shelf in my garage. It now appears to be official - well, it's on the Hannants future releases list - that we can expect a Valiant from Airfix in the coming year, and I shall try really hard to restrain myself to two (that's one for a potential B.2 conversion, please Mr.Cammett). I may well order only one Anigrand Sperrin though I am thinking of a possible second scheme; how about one for the Kipper fleet? At least with 1:144th resins the boxes, like the models, take up less space, and the price can be something of a deterrent.

The other legacy from my days in short trousers, and one which I think I share with more modellers than care to admit it, is a desperate attraction to the !*NEW*! At this time of year I did enjoy compiling the lists of expected releases for the coming twelve months, though for the last five or six years there have been growing levels of doubt about when, or even whether, some of those promised might actually reach the shelves of our friendly local model shops, and the level of belief required for some of them would have kept Tinkerbell alive for years. Some of the productions have of course replaced some kits that we've had in a dusty corner or two for half a lifetime - well my lifetime, at least - and I've frequently thought that some of the manufacturers, especially those in the Czech Republic and China, have been assiduously working their way through old Frog catalogues; there are still quite a few of the original Margate boxings on the shelves, begging the question of what should happen to them when a more modern equivalent arrives.

Every so often I venture, with due care, in to the deeper and dustier recesses of my garage which is where I've laid up most of my kits-in-waiting - they wouldn't like to be called surplus - and try to steel myself for a cull, and I'm about to embark on another of these expeditions in to the interior. There are two possible opportunities for disposals before Spring, the first at the IPMS ModelKraft show at the beginning of February and the second at the Luton Air Enthusiasts Fair a month later. The situation, and the potential purchasers, are different; at Bletchley the items will need to be in a box peeking out from under the table of the What If?, or pehaps the 144 SIG, and I would expect those who might be interested to be convinced modellers, with a probable leaning towards on or other of those two niches. At Luton on the other hand I expect - perhaps unfairly - a rather wider audience; given its proximity to the airport it's not surprising that there's a strong leaning to civil, and particularly airline, aviation; I usually try to include a few of the more basic kits here in the hope of attracting some younger/less experienced modellers, though I'm sure IPMS MK will hope to attract some of this level as well, especially if there's still a persistent effect from the James May "Airfix" Spitfire.

So - and this is where the story really starts - it's time to don the Captain Indecisive T-shirt once more, and try to overcome its insidious effects. I cannot bring myself to get rid of the Hasegawa EKA-3B or ES-2A, the latter especially, though I think it's highly unlikely that I get back to making US Navy; and we waited such a long time for the Skywarrior that it seems somehow ungrateful to let it go. The original Airfix Vulcan, though, may well find it's way to Luton; at least there will be a table to put it on rather than under, but while I haven't done much in the way of "Luftwaffe '46" for a while I'm reluctant to part with my Messerschmitt Me 264. And if I do, will I sell the book as well? Books are a whole other, if parallel, area of indecision, and of course heavier to transport in bulk, and while I have two months to earmark possible Luton disposals I suspect that my long-burnished tendecy to management by procrastination will mean that I'll be making a few hasty and last-minute choices on the evening of 5 March (my diary tells me that this is National Doodle Day, which seems somehow appropriate!).

I've rambled on rather longer than I'd intended, which is probably a fair reflection of my entry in to the new year, but for once, knowing that any resolutions would fade like the currently fashionable freezing fog, I'll hope that some of my irresolutions will evaporate as easily. After all, I've made two successful decisions today already; the first was to get up and the second to bring this rambling to a conclusion, however irresolute.

The One-Piece Bikini Question

One of the influences of my formative years was the Saturday Evening Post (this was before I discovered the literary content of Playboy, you understand). One of my aunts married, around the end of the Second Great Unpleasantness, a US Army Captain, and it was through him that the Satevepost came in to our house and that its articles, stories and in particular its cartoons became an integral part of my reading, to which vice you know surely that I am still addicted. It's one of the cartoons that lingers forever in my memory, and which bobs to the surface these days with increasing frequency. there's this sweet young thing in a bikini - the term had been newly coined, at least for swimwear - and facing her presumably disapproving parent asking "But Mother, if you wore a one-piece bathing costume which piece did you leave off?"