The Little World

And I’m heading straight for my second adolescence. More money to spend, I get to stay up later, and there’ll be girls.

Well, girls for later. For now I get to spend some of my allowance on better model kits. And there’ll be increased privileges and responsibilities. I am going to be allowed to have a modelling knife and paint airplanes on the kitchen table.

This is no small thing; now to select something to start with. I think I will go to the hobby shop and look over their starter sets. You know the sort: Airfix, Revell, and Italeri make sets with paints, brushes, and a tiny tube of cement. The subjects they present are varied – you can see planes, ships, cars, and army tanks in the on-line catalogues.

The fun will be to keep the project to the adolescent parameters: use only what is in the kit, restrict the tool box to the supplied brushes and paint, plus the model knife, a small pair of scissors, and a small sheet of sandpaper. I have to resist the temptation to buy authentic paints ( I’ll need to mix colours from the water-based acrylics supplied with the kit. ) or to use the airbrush. I will be allowed to use a small bottle of floor polish as a varnish, as this was also permitted at home. Also school mucilage glue, if that is needed. Our house had a lot of good tools and materials but I wasn’t allowed to use them.

Airfix have actually got a challenge site for this sort of thing – to encourage starters and the nostalgics amongst us. I suspect the models they’ve chosen for the sets are half-way between what’s popular and what’s unsaleable by any other means. Whichever, I am not put off by it at all – this would be a good opportunity to tackle a scale or genre that I don’t normally do. Literally a bit of fun as recreation from the more serious builds.

If I am successful I’ll go out and look for girls. Wife and daughter’ll be a bit startled, but there you are. Adolescence.