The Little World

Funny that – the business of selling anger management courses…It’s all the rage these days in the Big World, though perhaps the word ‘ rage ‘ is a bad choice. Still, everywhere you look people are being urged to bottle up, calm down, chill out, and back down – at the same time that the slogans ” Let it All Hang Out “, ” Maintain The Rage “, ” Get Hot “, and ” Stand Up And Be Counted ” are being pushed. It’s enough to make you really, really mad.

For the Little World citizen – the modeller, collector, painter, dioramacist – anger is more of a risk than a resource. You can only make use of a little of it – to get a stubborn top off a bottle of paint, for instance – and dare not let it develop in your regular work. If you look around your workshop and notice that there are model-shaped dents on all the walls where you have thrown the unsuccessful projects, you may need to throttle it back.

It’s not good, even in smaller doses. Anger gets your blood pressure up and that makes you sick – it also makes you shaky, and this will be reflected in your model painting. Angry people don’t see well, either.

It’s hard to avoid anger with many Little World events – the spilled paint, the dropped part, the cut finger. The part missing from the box that you waited 6 months for. The glue fingerprint in the middle of the clear canopy.

And when the Big World intersects with the Little one – the phone rings while you are painting, the dog leaps on the modelling table, dinner is called in the middle of rigging a biplane – you are also prone to go off somewhat. The language cannon is wheeled up and fired off. Tempers are frayed and then rarely wrapped up or glued. Relations are strained ( make sure you chop up your relations very finely or they will not go through the strainer…). These are the times when the anger management is needed.

However you do it – mentally envisaging a calm blue ocean and the sight of your enemies being held under the surface – counting to ten, or ten thousand – or whistling a happy tune from The Exorcist – you must make an effort to return your yin to your yang and to centre your cosmic embodiment. Then pick up the Xacto knife and throw it at whoever has pissed you off.

It’s still anger, but it’s managed anger, and the model has not been harmed.