Back To The Blog

With the arrival of 2021 after the long dark night of 2020 I looked at the blog and realised I hadn’t posted since March of last year and asked myself the question why?

The most obvious answer was “well there was a lockdown dummy!” and still is of course, with the obvious result of there being no shows to talk about, no games to post pictures of and no projects to bore everyone about – well not quite but that’ll be another post 🙂 But actually I think it was a bit more than that, partly depression – what’s the point and all that, partly lack of will – who am I going to play with, but mostly the lack of the creative spark engendered by being around others. Personally the death of a close family member early in the pandemic was a blow which was probably not properly dealt with and the ‘sadmin’ took a lot longer to deal with than normal and the clearing of the deceased belongings and property is still with us as a family and as anyone who has been through this it does grind you down.

For us as a Group the initial lockdown stopped us stone dead, we squeezed in Hammerhead (well me and Dave) which was a slightly surreal experience, but as most of the gang are in the vulnerable age group they went into isolation and I haven’t seen them since. That left Dave and I to make the best of the various versions of the rules to meet occasionally in the usual venue socially distanced and with the windows open and when that became untenable create a version of meeting outside where we gamed in Dave’s shed (it’s a big shed!) with the door and windows open but then of course it became too bloody cold and that was the end of that.

Wargaming in the shed did manage to keep us reasonably sane and gave Dave a chance to fully utilise the large playing surface (10 foot x 6 foot) with big set piece battles using a lot of our collections – “bang ’em all on!” No skirmish games here! Just like in the usual venue we could leave the game up and subject to Dave’s shift patterns we meandered our way though several of our big periods (Renaissance, ACW, Carlist & Sikh Wars) allocating 2 or 3 days per battle – what else were we going to do!

The problem with just two of you of course is that you do get a bit comfortable, there isn’t the variable of someone else saying “hold on, what about……” and the banter/argument is two dimensional. On the plus side we did have the time to sit in the garden and just chat, mainly about the hobby, but life under lockdown generally and made some plans for a future we had no idea of when it would arrive. The big decision was us deciding to go full on for Successors in 28mm, no skirmish gaming, no few element bases pretending to be an army but full on; completely mad but that’s what a pandemic lockdown does to you! Original plan was to be well on the way by now but the prolonged pandemic has meant we haven’t been able to get together to really plan it out but I’ll save the full story for the next blog post.

The big decision for me personally was to get a Syrian city scape done to further utilise the 4 foot square road intersections I did for the Sicario games. This was something I’d wanted to do for some time to further enhance our Spectre games so I contracted the job out and was over the moon at the result; this too will be a follow up blog.

That’s enough I think for a getting back to the blog mind set. More to follow – what else am I going to do?