Procopius Posted January 27 Posted January 27 "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? 35 4
Stew Dapple Posted January 27 Posted January 27 How lovely to see you back mate, I am seriously chuffed, you have been missed Hard to believe a child so angelic in appearance could be on her way to becoming an ace already (Mis)fortunes notwithstanding, it's great to see you back at the bench and I wish you a satisfying and successful redemptive build... Cheers, Stew 1 2
Trumpton_Orbital Posted January 27 Posted January 27 Hello, I'm new here, but have been reading Britmodeller for many years and have always enjoyed your builds! I'm really looking forward to seeing how the Spitfire shapes up - good luck! Kind regards, Paul. 2 1
Bedders Posted January 27 Posted January 27 Good to have you back PC. And a Spitfire too. Some things are going right with the world. JB 1 1 2
Hook Posted January 27 Posted January 27 Good to hear from you again, good sir! Consider another chair pulled up an beverage drawn. Cheers, Andre 1
SaminCam Posted January 27 Posted January 27 It'd be nigh on impossible to pick the best modeller on this site, but many, many of us would agree that you, without doubt, are the best writer. Great to have you back, looking forward to this! 4 1 2
PattheCat Posted January 28 Posted January 28 Glad to see you back. No better medicine than putting a Spitfire on the bench. Good luck with your build. Pat.
Procopius Posted January 28 Author Posted January 28 On 1/27/2025 at 12:51 AM, Stew Dapple said: How lovely to see you back mate, I am seriously chuffed, you have been missed 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. 22 hours ago, Trumpton_Orbital said: Hello, I'm new here, but have been reading Britmodeller for many years and have always enjoyed your builds! I'm really looking forward to seeing how the Spitfire shapes up - good luck! 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. 18 hours ago, Bedders said: Good to have you back PC. And a Spitfire too. Some things are going right with the world. 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. 18 hours ago, Hook said: Good to hear from you again, good sir! 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?"† 18 hours ago, SaminCam said: It'd be nigh on impossible to pick the best modeller on this site, but many, many of us would agree that you, without doubt, are the best writer. Great to have you back, looking forward to this! 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. 5 hours ago, PattheCat said: Glad to see you back. No better medicine than putting a Spitfire on the bench. 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. 17 1
perdu Posted January 28 Posted January 28 18 minutes ago, Procopius said: But I digress. You digress, we swoon in fascinated anticipation. Good to see ya Edmondo 3
Procopius Posted January 28 Author Posted January 28 3 minutes ago, perdu said: You digress, we swoon in fascinated anticipation. Good to see ya Edmondo Bill! So good to see you about as well. 1
perdu Posted January 28 Posted January 28 Have I met your little friend before Eddie baby, definite airs of 'Save This Hedgehog' about him/her
Procopius Posted January 28 Author Posted January 28 2 hours ago, perdu said: Have I met your little friend before Eddie baby, definite airs of 'Save This Hedgehog' about him/her 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. 15
Steve Coombs Posted January 28 Posted January 28 Glad to see you're back on the horse, as it were. Soothe the fevered brow with a Spitfire. Fondle the plastic and admire R. J. Mitchell's magnum opus. I wonder if the French authorities of the day had Ganelon in mind when having Damiens pulled apart by horses? Tempting as it may be, it might not be a good idea to have a ready stock of sulfur, molten wax, molten tar, molten lead, and boiling oil to hand where the offspring could get their hands on it all. Hang on in there.
Procopius Posted January 28 Author Posted January 28 3 minutes ago, Steve Coombs said: I wonder if the French authorities of the day had Ganelon in mind when having Damiens pulled apart by horses? Steven! How dare you demonstrate superior knowledge to me, and in my own thread! I had to look that up. Could be! 4 minutes ago, Steve Coombs said: Tempting as it may be, it might not be a good idea to have a ready stock of sulfur, molten wax, molten tar, molten lead, and boiling oil to hand where the offspring could get their hands on it all. Heaven knows that I have enough problems with play-doh becoming embedded in the carpet as it is. 6
Stew Dapple Posted January 29 Posted January 29 6 hours ago, Procopius said: play-doh becoming embedded in the carpet as it is. Smells nicer than sulphur, at least Glad you got some benchtime in mate, it's looking good, keep at it Cheers, Stew 1
Jay Gee Posted January 29 Posted January 29 Will be watching this with interest. And I may drag out my copy of Darwin Spitfires for another read, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Michael louey Posted January 29 Posted January 29 Nice to see you building this plane - I have a Norman Clifford print of this airframe shooting down the Dinah in my entry hall. https://auctions.leski.com.au/lot-details/index/catalog/570/lot/182803/IN-DEFENCE-OF-DARWIN-limited-edition-lithograph-394-500-by-NORMAN-CLIFFORD-signed-in-the-lower-margin-by-Norman-Clifford-and-Win?url=%2Fauctions%2Fcatalog%2Fid%2F570%3Fpage%3D1%26view%3Dlist%26cat%3D1070%2C55%26catm%3Dany%26order%3Dorder_num%26xclosed%3D0%26featured%3D0 By the way just to make a note for anyone else building RAAF Spitfires - they came with both wide and narrow cannon bulges - Somewhere I have a list from Magpie22 showing the breakdown. The narrow bulges are correct for JL394 ADF serials has a number of photos of these wide bulge airframes including A58-43 http://www.adf-gallery.com.au/picture.php?/Spitfire_A58_43_QY_A_Photo_via_Gordon_Birkett/category/spitfire-a58-43a Cheers Michael 1
Steve Coombs Posted January 29 Posted January 29 On 1/28/2025 at 9:32 PM, Procopius said: Heaven knows that I have enough problems with play-doh becoming embedded in the carpet as it is. Better than treading on LEGO or sprue nubbins, though?
noelh Posted January 29 Posted January 29 (edited) Very interesting start. I'll be following this build. Besides I like Spitfires. I can definitely relate to your domestic dramas. I too found myself receding into the background of my own life. Worse, because I became a stay at home Dad, my status dwindled as I became taken for granted. My life stopped being my own. Nevertheless I enjoyed it. Seeing them grow up was precious. I also have two boys, one dyslexic also. One is about to turn 18 and the 16. Somehow both survived more or less unscathed until now despite numerous incidents and narrow escapes. They always fought and even now there's sometimes a sudden outbreak of thunder and door banging upstairs. I know that's not very reassuring but it does get better. It has to, because I'm 65 and am no longer up to it. Yes I married late. But my modelling has picked up and I've begun to finish things again and I do like a Spitfire so will be watching keenly. Edited January 29 by noelh 1
The Spadgent Posted January 29 Posted January 29 Nice to have you back Edward. Who doesn’t like a Spitfire? I might build one myself one day. 😇 Ced is right. We are a tribe, and a jolly nice one too. 🙃 Johnny 2 1
ModelingEdmontonian Posted January 30 Posted January 30 You could publish the prose in your thread. I'm here to read you talk about suburban dad life, but the Spitfire is looking great. 2 1 1
Brandy Posted January 30 Posted January 30 Welcome back Edward! The "Scribe extrordinaire" of BM! I'm looking forward to seeing the Spit come together, but slightly dreading the tales that may accompany it..... Ian 1 1
ToE1984 Posted January 30 Posted January 30 On 27/01/2025 at 06:41, Procopius said: 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? Oh my, just assembled my Airfix Vc, supposed to portrait A58-150 of RAAF 85 sqn. I was about to start the paintjob, but now that you have pointed out the issue of the cannon bulges, I cannot look away from it. Think it will have to wait for its NMF a litte longer until I got this fixed. Anyways, always happy to learn new things. Following this build with great interest! 1
Michael louey Posted January 30 Posted January 30 4 hours ago, ToE1984 said: Oh my, just assembled my Airfix Vc, supposed to portrait A58-150 of RAAF 85 sqn. I was about to start the paintjob, but now that you have pointed out the issue of the cannon bulges, I cannot look away from it. Think it will have to wait for its NMF a litte longer until I got this fixed. Anyways, always happy to learn new things. Following this build with great interest! Not all RAAF Spitfire Vc's had narrow bulges - note my post above. In the case of A58-150 though, it appears it does have narrow bulges - A quick google search only showed this photo but it does look like it has the narrow bulges. https://www.asisbiz.com/il2/Spitfire/RAAF/pages/Spitfire-RAAF-A58-150-forced-landing-Rockingham-Western-Australia-WA-August-1945-01.html Cheers Michael 2
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