The Little World

Do you remember Andy Capp? For years he and Tony Hancock were my sole mental picture of the English…albeit of different parts of the country. Then I went to the UK and discovered other, stranger creatures.

Well, Andy always wore a flat cap…much as I do in the winter here in Australia. I’ve two – the posh tweed one and the cheap and nasty round-the-house one. I must confess that after years of wear the posh one looks manky and the manky one looks indescribable. It will have to do until we are allowed to travel to the eastern states again and I can visit either the hatters under Flinders St. railway station or Strand Hatters in the Strand Arcade in Sydney.

But there are three more caps I need to explain – the friction-fit ones that close the colour cups on my airbrushes.

They are all good chromed fittings and can be tamped firmly into place once the cup is loaded…if one is diligent enough to do it. Diligent and wise.

I watched the Flory Models show one day when Phil was demonstrating an airbrush technique with an open cup. He managed to upset the contents onto his cutting mat and then apologised for not bothering to put the cap on. It’s a self-punishing sin.

I’ve been guilty of it myself, trying to save a bit of time at the cleanup stage by not having a cap to rinse off. False economy – think how much trouble I made for myself when the lacquer contents of the cup slopped over onto the model I was painting. I only had to do this twice to convince myself to put the cap on always.

Basic logic: if the cap gets coated with paint inside it needs cleaning, but the reason it got coated was that paint was going to slop over out of the cup. If it goes through the job with no paint on the inside you don’t need to clean it anyway.

Actually I wish the cap was on a hinge or had a screw thread to prevent it popping off.