Procopius

...and then silence. Sorry for the lapse, they keep happening. My employer is heavily funded by grants from the federal government, particularly the State Department; we use the money for civil society programs in other countries (e.g. sending young women to law school in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; anticorruption workshops for the judiciary in the Caribbean; and helping former Soviet bloc countries establish judicial codes based on the rule of law), operating on the theory that for the global hegemon, a more just and stable world is a net benefit. Obviously, if you follow the news, there are people in the USA who disagree right now, and the organization I work for one is one of several currently suing the federal government for the release of monies already allocated to us by congress. As I run our social media channels, this has obviously taken a lot of my time. I'm sure reasonable men might differ about the need for such things, but right now I feel far from reasonable on the subject. As such I've been under a certain amount of stress between rushing stuff out the door and moderating social media comments, and haven't had the fine motor skills necessary for modelling. Additionally, I've found myself roped into becoming the event runner for a large game of Battletech's Alpha Strike in the indeterminate near term and have to paint a lot of little metal robots, which mercifully do not require much small motor work, but do need a lot of bench space. Right now the words of the German anti-Nazi and monarchist diarist Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen are much in my mind: “But now it begins to appear that a number of things which were supposed to have been finished are coming to life again, as such things do, on occasion: good and evil, the gods and the evil spirits of greed and bestiality. I do not know if the end of the world is at hand, as Dostoyevsky said. But this I do know, that these are years of a turning in human affairs…” I've felt for a while that the 2020s are my generation's 1970s, full of uncertainty, turmoil, fear, and the slow and disruptive changing over of the old order. British and American political life both were never the same again after them, and I wonder how this will play out. I have to remind myself that every decade births the world anew, and that what is certain and settled now will not always be so, inshallah. But I'm old, and tired. I just want to raise my children and do my job and eke out some joy from my life without interference from people intent on destroying everything and promising to rebuild the world anew and better but only fulfilling the first half of their promises, as is invariably the case.

So I managed to sneak some work in here and there over the weekend. Of course, as soon as the kids got in the tub for an early bath and Mrs P was off to watch them, and I really had a chance to get a head of steam going, my sister, who's finally moved out of my parents' house at 38, stopped by for a visit. I would be more annoyed, but she brought Key Lime pie with her. It was exquisite, and tart enough to cut glass. Mrs P, who's a bit of an ascetic, liked it so much she had another slice for breakfast. Now, I had meant to do a leisurely, methodical job on the cockpit, but in some (most, some might uncharitably say) ways, I still suffer from the problems of a teenaged boy, and with a fumble and an abrupt spasm, I assembled the cockpit tub. It does not benefit from close inspection. Very, very stupidly, I had waited until then to try to do the harness straps, only to realize I was out of photoetch ones, and that I had forgotten, if I even knew, how to use those little gummy Eduard ones. Eventually, after destroying the main harness for both of my last two, I resorted to a mixture of the lap belts from Eduard and the ABS plastic Fine Molds harnesses, which really, really benefit from being glued to the seat before it's painted. It also meant I never applied a wash or did any other cool things that would result in sexy cockpit photos. I console myself with the knowledge that barely anything can be seen when it's closed up. It really is extraordinary. Winston is currently banned from my grotto, because every time he enters it, he's told to not touch anything, especially if he doesn't know what it does. Unfortunately, he's apparently an experiential learner, because I not that long ago turned around to find him using my little razor saw to cut a groove into the concrete floor, which not incidentally removed every tooth on that side of the blade. Or I'll be working and suddenly hear a crash, as a precariously balanced pile of likely-never-to-be-painted 3d prints crashes to the floor. It just keeps happening. Or the dreaded "I wish I had that," as he points to one kit or another. I did buy him a 1/48 Trumpeter Wyvern a while ago, because he was obsessed with the working contraprops on my 1/72 one (which he loved to death as a smaller boy) and wanted my replacement kit. Once he built the props, he was saddened to discover that yet again, his imagination outpaced reality, for there was no way to motorise them (that I was willing to entertain), and it lies, incomplete, in the craft supplies closet.

Go on then, what did you get before she twigged?

Okay! I've been busy this week being exhausted by my bestial children, revising one piece of paid writing (and being invited to add 200 words to it, a whole twelve extra dollars!), finishing up the first draft of another (which, because the universe seeks to balance itself, I can't seem to get above 200 words below word count; no gain without a loss), forgetting to run the dishwasher multiple nights in a row, and sitting in the living room after the boys go to bed so I can periodically charge upstairs and tell them that their baby sister is sleeping, and could they maybe fight over a colored pencil with slightly less ardor than the Spartans at Thermopylae? Sometimes I even turn on the TV, only to find the grinning jackals I've fathered creeping downstairs, their highly selective children's hearing-- which cannot detect someone begging them to just put their god damned socks on so we can go PLEASE at two hundred decibels and two paces-- having picked up the faint whine of roused electrons as they flit across the screen. "We need some water." "I need to find a book." No you don't, you don't even drink the water, you just lob the thermos behind your bed. (Mrs P used to insist on sending them off to bed with a thermos of it each, but finally desisted after I found eight(!!!) of them under the bunk bed, each breeding exciting new forms of life that couldn't have been more insensate to reason than the boys.) However, over this week, I did get some work done: The cannon bay panels are about as sanded down and blended as I care to make them before the next round of priming inevitably shows my hideous failures on that front. The wheel wells and multiple other areas were also sprayed interior grey green. Predictably, though the wheel wells were probably just the underside colour by this time, I forgot to spray several parts of the model that should be grey green, the curse of modelling only after you've gotten everyone in bed and washed all the dishes and swept up the seeds from the bloody bird which refuses to die. Mrs P was THIS CLOSE to buying a cat for the kids for Christmas, but then remembered that cats eat birds. I hadn't forgotten, but was opting to keep schtum, as a thought experiment. It fell to me to break it to the kids. ("I feel like everyone's against me on this," she complained to me. "They are!" I cheerfully replied.) "Kids," I said, "I'm sorry. We were going to get a cat, but mom was worried it could hurt her bird." General exclamations of dismay, etc, followed by Winston asking "How long do birds live?" "Great question! In the wild, doves live three or four years," --because god hates them as much as I do-- "but in captivity, they can live ten, or even twenty. Beck's nine now, so it might not be for another ten years." Grant and Win wobbled a little unsteadily, like men with the taste of ashes in their mouths. "You'd be in college, Win, and Grant, you'd be seventeen, almost there," I helpfully informed them, in a manner that suggested that whatever happened to the bird, it couldn't come back to me. But so far he is still with us. I'll be 57 when Madeleine goes off to college, assuming we aren't all foraging for rats in the irradiated rubble of our home by then, of course, and every day I think to myself that I am far, far too old to be doing this. I don't think I could survive being a stay at home dad (I mean, I am in a technical sense, but only because I work from home); on Thursdays, Mrs P has a late meeting, so I have to driver her and the kids to school in our sole car, drive home (invariably starting work late because as soon as my children get ready to leave after hounding them for what feels like a geological era in the mornings, Mrs P retreats to the bathroom to have herself a little phone time and everything falls apart again), and then leave work early to get them at 1530 and watch them until Mrs P gets home around 1830, by which time I'm exhausted. Unfortunately Mrs P has a curious wasting disease that strikes at times like these, where nobody can be more tired or feeling worse than her, so she usually then has me make her dinner and retreats to the shower, leaving me with our children once more, the youngest of whom is not yet weaned (because Mrs P believes children should be weaned only after they're old enough to write a book about how traumatic it was for them, apparently) and regards the return and subsequent departure of Mommy as a catastrophe on par with an eschatological event. As Madeleine is the size (and density) of a truly spectacular Christmas ham, this can get quite painful for daddy if she decides to careen angrily into him. That's why there's pictures, to distract from the words, old bean. Mrs P has proven to be in the past less than amused by my writing about our domestic idyll; Mrs P has what is generally an excellent sense of humour, except where she herself is concerned, as Winston learned last year, when he attempted to imitate her in an obnoxious manner while she (who like Grant is also dyslexic) was reading to Grant. Much like Obi-Wan sensing the destruction of Alderaan, I heard a voice cry out in terror, then go suddenly silent.

Since I've managed to get two whole steps into a model, it was clearly time to buy more. From the Hornby US 50% off sale, I ordered a 1/72 Meteor F.8 and a Wellington II, and from elsewhere, a 1/72 Buccaneer S.2B Desert Storm boxing. Also a 1/72 Eduard Spitfire Vc mask, only to then discover I already had one, so let's just forget about that, shall we?

Steven! How dare you demonstrate superior knowledge to me, and in my own thread! I had to look that up. Could be! Heaven knows that I have enough problems with play-doh becoming embedded in the carpet as it is.

Oh, it's just a Byzantine-style tile portrait of a hedgehog, trying to fancify myself. I used my lunch break to do some more work on the model. Many people seem to think that those of us who work from home do nothing but have fun all day and are lazy excess baggage. Needless to say, anyone who thinks this should be put to death. As it happens, I find I work far more at home, both because I have no commute, and because I'm not routinely distracted by all the wonders of an open-plan office, a benefit of in-person employment of which our leaders do not partake, no doubt due to their own personal senses of ascetism. However, my lunch, though infrequently taken, is my own, and I got out the ol' Gunze Mr Primer Surfacer and primed the cannon blisters to see where we were on them. I had to crank the brightness down to make it more viewable on my elderly monitor, so if the photo seems like it was taken in a cavern somewhere, now you know why. I reckon some further filling will be needed (hence the tape, to shield my precious panel lines from undue violence). I also primed the inside bits, but was too lazy to take a picture, so you'll simply have to take my word for it.

Most impressive work as always, and to think your drawings were used to design the kit! My own artistic abilities are as limited as my modelling skills:

Bring 'em on. I have two full sets each of the DK Spitfire I/II and Spitfire V aces sheets, and I'm not afraid to use them. OK, I'm a little afraid, but that's why I have duplicates.

Bill! So good to see you about as well.

It's difficult to put into words (and would be terribly un-British of me, the thing I aspire to least in this life, to try) how much I miss all of you whenever I'm not posting here, and my only excuse, really, is that I've been so tired it's hard to write posts as I once did, or model even at the very low level I've been previously capable of. Something Ced told me the first time I met him and which I did not, in the folly of youth, fully appreciate, was the importance of finding one's tribe. I can function in most spaces when needed, but find it very exhausting when I do. Here, perhaps sad to say, is the closest I come to revealing my horrid, grubby little true self. That's very kind of you to say! I trust the ones where the picture links have broken were the best, as one could imagine them like the horses the Chorus talks about in Henry V, rather than having to see the awful truth of them. We've got to get this stupid planet back on track. I appreciate very much that IBG has chipped in by promising an entire new family of single-stage Merlin Spitfires; I would have (vastly) preferred my beloved Arma Hobby were behind them, but this will still do. It really has been far too long, hasn't it? I keep being told that as my children get older, I'll have more time to myself, but here's what usually happens: Madeleine goes down for her nap after stories and the traditional singing of the Steeleye Span version (very, very roughly approximated by yr. correspondent) of "Johnny Was a Shoemaker". (Interestingly, her brothers used to go to bed accompanied by my rendition of their version of King Henry. The soporific power of folk rock is not to be pooh-poohed). I sit downstairs aimlessly looking on my phone for any quick hits of dopamine while the boys quietly play with legos or read (in Winston's case; Grant is dyslexic like Mrs P and has instead pushed forward the frontiers of adenoidal whining). Lulled into a sense of false security, I retreat into my grotto or open an actual physical book. Within five minutes of getting situated, I hear, pounding across the hundred year old floorboards directly above my head, the sound of the world's ending, as the boys, both of whom are profoundly asthmatic, begin sprinting the length of the house and colliding with the furniture, which we cannot afford to replace. (We lucked into a free dining room table two years ago, in beautiful condition, and Mrs P put a bottle of superglue and a broken mug on it, with intent to fix them later. Bad idea. Winston found them and now the head of the table is littered with moon-like craters of ossified cyanoacrylate.) If I wait long enough, I inevitably hear screams and/or a sound not unlike meat being tenderized, which is exactly what happens. Grant is very good with words, and likes to egg Winston on. Winston is also good with words, very good, but he prefers to let his fists do the talking if the situation seems like it might call for any thoughts taking tedious eons of time, like over a half-second. Then I have the pleasure of sprinting upstairs, to be greeted usually with a crying Grant, who has finished the FAing part of things and is well into the FOing phase, and Winston, with the blank expression of Damien, from the Omen, or even worse, trembling fear of me, as if I might kill him or subject him to the punishment of the failed regicide Robert-François Damiens in 1757. Usually I just yell a bit, but sometimes I show the true depths of my unfeeling cruelty, and force him to talk to me about what he did. To a child with ADHD, this might as well be life in prison. End result: A mere blip in their lives has once again deranged what little free time I have and reduced me to uttering things like "But why did you think jumping down from the counter holding a glass was a good idea? And why didn't you think it was important to tell me about it shattering into a trillion pieces, turning our kitchen into the Siegfried line sans fixed defenses? Why did you think your brother's penis was an appropriate handhold? What possessed you to think that we wanted you to open and eat every bag of Little Bites(tm), when a box costs as much as a filet mignon and contains but enough baglets of them to last you through the week?"† Swoon! I would say, purely from the ranks of more skilled modellers than myself, that, off the top of my head, Stew, Navy Bird, His Baronfulness Tony, Cookie, the late Nigel, and Ced, just to name a few, are all better writers and modellers than me. But it's very kind to say. It's so nice to belong somewhere where people think you have to offer; fortysomething suburban dads rarely experience it personally or professionally. Too true! No progress last night, because Grant, who presumably derives no nourishment from free health care, refused to let the school nurse look at the finger that Winston had left in a Heisenbergian state of uncertainty, necessitating an X-Ray at 6 PM, which is of course not free under our incredible system of putting, I am assured, the country first, and any recognizable positive human feeling presumably last. The cause of this? Two nights before, the boys were playing the world's dumbest game, "kick-fight", a game so stupid it could only have been invented by them. I've repeatedly, repeatedly told them this was a terrible idea and not to do it, but the more moronic the notion, the stronger its pull is. So Win, who is significantly larger and stronger, and for reasons surely unconnected is inevitably miraculously the "winner" of this so-called game, kicked Grant's pinky and bent it back 135 degrees. It was, of course, not broken, so we're on the hook for god knows how much to have a nurse practitioner apply a splint and tape that any fool could obtain and do for themselves for a fraction of the cost. Mrs P and are in agreement that it's coming out of their allowances 50/50. As you might imagine, I was left with very little energy after that and retired to my chambers to read a truly awful novel‡. †It goes without saying that while the phrasing is not identical, with many redundant utterances of "for christ's sake" or "Jesus Christ Winston" omitted, all of these have really happened. More than once. ‡ Swords of Eveningstar by Ed Greenwood, who as a fellow Ed (please don't call me Ed) is I feel rather letting the side down. Why am I doing this to myself? Well, because I'm having my mid-life crisis, and I'm not much of a car guy, and Mrs P is already substantially more attractive than me and will, if pressed, feign some vague level of fondness me for free, however grudgingly, and so I settled upon "dungeonmastering" a game of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition, which was popular in my teens but which I had never played or owned before the end of this year, when my mom shared some truly horrible family history with me and in lieu of therapy I, in the words of Don Delillo, "traded money for goods. The more money I spent, the less important it seemed. I was bigger than these sums." Anyway, I have a lot of the stuff now, and so I've opted to run a game of it Monday nights over the internet (because I have no friends, remember). Having recruited all of the players from Reddit, the Mos Eisley cantina of the internet, I've so far been pleased to discover that my rough calculation of how many I would lose before the game actually started was bang on (I had ten candidates and five bowed out for one reason or another), and also that nobody so far seems to be an ardent Nazi or think that Lavrentiy Beria is an unsung hero of the working class, and so I reckon it will go on until they tire of my nonsense. The book is because Greenwood is the creator of the Forgotten Realms fantasy setting, which has forty years of accumulated history, and many huge foldable maps. I'm a sucker for big maps. Since he created the universe, I thought reading his books might give me a sense of how to describe it to people. Apparently, a major difference between a fantasy setting and our own middle ages, aside from some vague level of equality of the sexes, is that almost everyone is permanently in heat. I have three children, so obviously I've thought about sex once or twice in my day (with bitter regret, a lot of the time, these days), but this is the sort of thinking of it that left me surprised he was married for over forty years, because it feels like Eric Idle in the classic Python sketch: "You've...done it, wiv' a lady, right? ...What's it like?" Simmer down, fella. Also, far too many uses of compound neologisms for my taste. The English language is a potent palette to work from, it needs little aid from us. But I digress.

"There was a great game to be played, and I wanted to play my part in it...I was irritated particularly by Hitler's behaviour and the general conduct of the so-called master race." -- Group Captain Clive Caldwell, DSO, DFC* It's late and I have a ripping head cold that's laying me low, so I will be for once mercifully brief. Hello. I will be forty-two in two months. Life has been busy, and disappointing, which I believe is pretty standard for men with families in their forties, as they slowly recede into the backgrounds of their own lives. At least it is for me, anyway. I had two beautiful (to me) 1/72 Spitfire models on a high shelf in the dining room, and someone pulled them off and destroyed them. As much as I'd like to blame the wretched, awful boys (the elder of whom may have broken his brother's finger tonight doing something moronic that I've only told him not to do approximately ten thousand times), I regret to say it was likely my darling girl, my sweet pea, my dearest Madeleine, my only loyal child, who must have gotten them off the shelf while being held by Parent A, a nominally responsible adult who I suspect was hard at work reading Star Trek fanfiction on her phone at the time. fig. 1: the likely culprit: Just one more small defeat to add to the great mosaic of failure that is my middle age. I've not been building models lately, for all sorts of reasons: fear of screwing it up, exhaustion, lack of time, lots of freelance writing work for the tabletop gaming industry (most recently 16,000 words in BattleTech's ilKhan's Eyes Only, and then another 10,000 or so for another Battletech product that will come out some time before the heat death of the universe, with any luck), and the usual fleeting passions upon which I dissipate my energies. I decided that since once again everything has gone utterly to hell, it's clearly the case that I failed to propitiate heaven with a Spitfire model at any time in the recent or semi-recent past. I own my failure. All I can do now is strive to do better in the future. I'm building an Airfix Spitfire Vc as JL394/CR-C of then-Wing Commander Clive "Killer" (a nickname he detested) Caldwell, commanding the RAAF's No.1 (Fighter) Wing in Darwin, these being the first Spitfires to see action against the Japanese, a tale fully-recounted in Anthony Cooper's exquisite Darwin Spitfires, one of the best books about any aspect of the Second World War in the air that I've ever read. With only a handful of experienced pilots and plagued by technical difficulties with icing and their troublesome De Havilland Constant Speed Units, the Spitfires did not do as well against the Japanese as might have been hoped, but Caldwell himself claimed a number of victories. The aircraft I'm modelling was used to shoot down his last victory of the war, a Ki-46 Type 100 Command Reconaissance Plane, known to the allies as a DINAH, of 202 Sentai. As the Spitfires sent to Australia had narrow cannon bulges, and the Airfix kit...does not, I had to start with some cutting to insert the High Planes cannon blisters, which do not appear to have been precisely the same shape as the kit ones. I'm sure that all my accumulated rust and my generally limited faculty with cutting models to add bits won't end in catastrophic failure....right?

$1200 all told here, because we did the front ones first, and the rear ones second. Dreadful.

I ended up cancelling the order, sadly. We had to replace all four tires on the car recently (and two bike tires, Mrs P is really good at puncturing tires), and Mrs P has an operation on her wrist next week, and then all three of my children have birthdays between 14/9 and 2/10 (a testament to the fact that my wife suddenly remembers I exist about two weeks into her winter break), and it just seemed unwise.