The Little World

If someone looks at your newly-completed scale model and asks you that question, you can give a good, cogent answer. If you ask the question of yourself, you are in trouble. If you cannot come up with an answer…you’re sunk.

Or are you?

There are some things that you cannot see clearly – some things you cannot quantify – some decisions you cannot justify. Yet they may be attended with the strongest motives of all. And you may have to work very hard to eventually deal with them.

I build model airplanes – in some cases toy airplanes. I’m not that fussed with the dividing line between the two categories but that’s another tale for another time. Let’s just confine ourselves to the model aircraft right now.  Why do I choose to build one kit and to leave another on the shelf?

a. Some kits are of aircraft that had horrible associations. I will resist a long time and need a lot of persuasion to build a Junkers Ju 87. When I do it will be in the special markings of a captured example on the Western desert. I don’t apologise for the delicacy with which I approach this nor the selective nature of the solution to the problem.

b. Some kits are of aircraft with historical significance to me. I would dearly love a kit of a CF 100 Canuck all-weather fighter of he 1950’s. Short of finding an old Minicraft kit or a short run repeat of the subject, I never expect to see it.

c. Some kits have a special link to my family. I should never have built the very good Airfix model of a Nakajima Kate if my Uncle Jack had not shot holes through one at Pearl Harbour – to no effect, I hasten to add.

d. Some kits are a link to my childhood. I built a Special Hobby Lockheed Lodestar because I rode in one as a small child. I would build another Revell Convair Tradewind if the kit ever turned up in front of me to lay the ghost of a bad experience in the late 50’s with the original kit. I’d build any number of old kits that I’d done then…just to pretend to be 10 years old again…but I won’t build them at eBay prices.

e. Some kits are prefect. You can see that they will be so as soon as you look at the sprue trees. These are terribly stressful affairs as you dread making the inevitable blunder that spoils that perfection.

f. Some kits – ones that will forever be avoided – are pale copies of childhood successes. If you attempt them again, they will erase the joys of the past.

g. Some kits are fulfilment of childhood dreams. Be careful – fulfilling a dream kills it.

h. Some kits are too damned expensive. The Czechs, Poles, and Russians cannot compel me to provide a styrene Marshall Plan…