The Little World

…Is generally time and experience. The more of these two you rack up the less you writhe on the rack. This applies to marriage and model building.

I’ll leave you to deal with the first set of memories, but consider your experiences with your first plastic model kits. You were keen, you were fussy, you were frightened. You had very little idea what to do but that did not stop you from pulling parts off sprue trees and smearing them with cement. Sometimes you stuck them to each other and sometimes you just stuck them to yourself. But you stuck to the hobby.

And here you are. Years, decades, aeons later. Shelves, rooms, houses full of scale models. More models than can be decently housed. Models that you under-built, over-built, and nearly built. Models that you lied to the wife about ( scale models, keep your love life to yourself …) and models that you lied to yourself about. Starters of collections that never finished. Boxes full of spare parts. Broken wrecks and fragments mulching down in plastic bags.

Dried cement tubes and dried paint jars. Things stuck together that were never meant to be and things in pieces that were never going to come apart.

Broken tools. New tools. Unidentified tools. Borrowed tools. Things pinched from the kitchen cabinet. Things pinched from the children.

You’ve seen it all and still have some of it in the stash. You dare not contemplate nor admit how much you’ve spent on the hobby over the years. You have a small trophy from a model show…pity they did not spell your name right on the award plate…

Are you blasé yet? Are you blasé enough? Would you be prepared to buy a 1:350th scale model of a HMS Blasé ? It comes with a WTF sticker…