The Little World

Or ” How I learned to cut throats on a green plastic mat “.

As scale model builders we mess with the ideas of popular culture all the time. The vast majority of the population who have never built anything smaller than an IKEA bookshelf have no idea what closely focusing on a fresh kit can do to a person. We are a species on our own.

For instance, we’ve all heard the expression that says something is as boring as watching paint dry. This may be so in the big world, but in our universe there is nothing more worrisome, thrilling, rewarding, disappointing, or tragic as watching paint dry. We start out fearful, then gain hope, then go all critical, then sad. And that’s just with the undercoat from a can. The airbrushers have it worse. Every new spray is the launch of the Space Shuttle through a thunderstorm with the door open.

It is a tribute to the nerves to watch a model builder paint something.

Then there is the matter of time. Most people measure it in hours, minutes, or seconds. This is fine if all you are dealing with is life and death. If you are considering scale model building in any form – from snap kits to full scratch-build – the period of actual building is the sliver of time between saying ” What do I do now? ” and then saying ” What have I done now? “. If you have sandwiched a scale modelling magazine and two episodes of Flory’s daily vlog in there you are doing well.

How about the business of money. Most people think of it in terms of a number. So many Pounds or so many Dollars buys so much wheat or iron or depravity. The market goes up and down – or in the case of depravity, in and out and in and out  – but hardly anyone thinks in the same terms as the scale modeller. I have literally found myself pricing new clothes in terms of Airfix kits. The kits won. I look like a scarecrow but the model air museum is burgeoning.

Scale modellers see more than others, and far less. We go on holidays to places that have vast arrays of culture, or experience, or landscape, or beauty. Places with temples and markets and palaces…and we spend a day at a museum full of dead airplanes. Everyone else looks at the Mona Lisa and we look at paint chips from 1944. One advantage – no-one has to line up to look at Air Ministry paint chips. And there are no international criminal rings trying to steal them. The only people who want to steal them are scale modellers…

I just love how the modellers I know share information so freely. Not a week goes by when someone doesn’t say ” You Idiot. You’ve got it all wrong! “. I hear it all the time, and frequently the voice is mine.