The Little World

If you’re a fan of Facebook or any other general social media site you’ll have seen the memes that encourage you to imagine things. Many of them will have mountain scenes or unicorns and rainbows. I came from Alberta and used to live in the Crows Nest Pass, so I can testify to the accuracy of the images; those unicorns are real. Alberta Unicorns are one of the province’s basic natural resources. Forget oil or wheat. Unicorns…

Not quite so real as the picture books that appear on the shelves of the club library. I’ve taken any number of the more colourful ones home to read and enjoyed them immensely – but I suspect that the colour schemes they show the aircraft and tanks decked out in owe more to Windsor and Newton than they do to reality.

I delight in this, as I also take home the club’s old magazines that show the best efforts of modellers to weather and distress everything that comes out of the box. I have seen any number of figurines and statues of Her majesty Queen Elizabeth II offered for sale and I dread the day when one of the weathering fiends decides to take to it with the oil wash and the chipping fluid.

Give me the clean scene, and the slightly colourful liveries. I baulk at the squadron commemoratives and assembly ships that seem to have clipped a paint factory on take-off, but short of that I am happy. I would like to see more light aircraft modelled as they can be attractive too.

Will I ever bring myself to build an egg plane or a toon tank? I regard these as the fast food of models and prefer more sedate things myself. I find it quite sufficient to model the Ruritanian aircraft as they were in the last century.

One thing I must do, when I get around to it, is stop myself from constructing elaborate stories to justify painting aircraft in improbable colours. And also stop myself from endorsing artistic licence when the fee for it has never been paid. Originating a lie makes you a knave, spreading it unbeknownst makes you a fool, and perpetrating it deliberately qualifies you for a parliamentary pension.