It lowers people’s expectations and allows me to wear comfortable clothes. No-one asks me to pay for the next round of drinks and I can say pretty nearly anything I like. Occasionally the canvas waistcoat chafes at the back, but.
I am a little dismayed when it overlaps into my hobby time – when folly makes me buy or do something that I regret. See if you an recognise any of these little sketches:
a. I go to the hobby shop for a No.123 bottle of paint – RLM 83 Dark Green. I return with No.132 – Earth Green. A simple slip of the memory and transposition of numbers. That’s not the folly.
The folly is putting it into the airbrush, spraying it, and then wondering why the Luftwaffe used Japanese tank colours on their planes.
Note: the paint layer will spray flawlessly – quite the best job I’ve ever done. And it all has to come off…
b. The place where the liquid cement has to go is minute – and the brush is enormous. But if I just touch it…I will flood the entire patch of the model and face the prospect of two days drying and another one sanding things flat again.
c. Getting it out of sequence. I should recognise the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, etc as a sequence – having seen them marching round the wall of my kindergarten in 1952. But I do step 4 before step 2 and then 8 before 5 . Then I have to prise apart the set bits to enclose the cockpit or landing gear or doughnut maker that is the centre-point of the model.
At least the language I use is more advanced than that of 1952.
d. Doing the same thing with the posts in this weblog column.
I have inserted this filler piece to get the sequencing correct again for this column as it is shared with my model building club.
e. Getting excited about a new model that is due to be released and then seeing that the magazine in which it is announced was printed in 1987…
The Little World 
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