The Little World

You’re lucky, Walter. You’re young, with good eyes, and small and healthy and can bend down without any of your joints hurting. Us old guys are not so fortunate. When we lean over a lot, it sometimes takes two other people to unfold us.

I mention this because I’ve been photographing the scale models in the display shelves at the modelling club this last week. It’s not a hard thing to do – I do it all the time in my own studio with my little airfields. But my airfields are at a good table height and I don’t have to bend over when I’m working with them. The club tables are lower and my back now knows it…

But fear not. Look at how well the first few shots came out – the opening one is quite a large model. My back may be creaking but the pictures look good.

The idea is to record all the display models in case they are ever lost – and to use the pictures for newsletters, social media, and magazine articles. It’s something we could never have done before the days of digital cameras and computer publishing.

As it is, Walter, you’ll be doing a lot more of this yourself as you grow up. Both scale model building ( we hope ) and communicating with pictures and words on the internet. Your country has a very good school system and they’ll make sure you get a chance to do amazing things with technology.

Take all the chances to do this that you can. Try to learn fun stuff as well as the regular subjects and don’t be surprised if a lot of what you learn starts to all tie together and make sense as you get older. Even us old guys read new things every week and we’re still experimenting with our hobby.

Last week I also experimented with cutting my fingers with the hobby knife. You can do it, all right, but I wouldn’t recommend it as fun…