It's time for the review of the year. (N.B. The wargames are right at the bottom for those who wish to skip the cultural bits.) One theme running through the year was Bradford 2025, City of Culture. I confess that I was somewhat sceptical before it started - I don't live in Bradford so was viewing it as an outsider - but I must say that I thought it was all very successful indeed. There were thousands of events, of which I went to a mere couple of dozen, albeit that they included most of the major ones, but had a good time when I did. 

Opera: I've seen 21 operas this year, one more than in 2024. For the second year running the best was a concert  performance of Simon Boccanegra, this time Opera North's contribution to Bradford 2025 at St George's Hall. Honourable mentions go to Owen Wingrave at the RNCM, Mozart's Impresario at the Buxton Festival and The Secret of the Black Spider by ON's youth company. The libretto for the last of those is a touch barking, which was also the case in various other productions seen this year. There was one in which one the characters was literally a turd, one in which someone fell in love with three oranges, one in which an AI powered robot took over the world (maybe because the Luddites had failed 200 years before, but then again maybe not), and one in which someone had to keep turning a handle to prevent the end of the world, but decided to take a bit of break instead.

Theatre: Seventeen plays this year, the best being The Railway Children, once again part of Bradford 2025. An honourable mention must go to Wise Children's North By Northwest, but other good stuff included Mary Poppins, Animal Farm and an odd but very enjoyable circus version of Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

Music: Only nine gigs this year, the best being Bywater Call. I am, as ever, contractually obliged to mention Martin Simpson and the same would be true for Fairport Convention except that shockingly I didn't see them. I do have a ticket for a gig in Harrogate in April, so normal service will be resumed this time next year.

Film: I saw 18 films this year, the most for many years. My favourite was the documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin, but the best non-documentary was probably Hamnet, which I saw at a festival although it doesn't officially come out in the UK until next week. I highly recommend it, but take some tissues. Other good stuff included The Ballad of Wallis Island, A Complete Unknown and Sunlight. The last of those is on very limited release, but catch it if you can. It was directed by Nina Conti, of whom more later. I also enjoyed The Choral which was of course not only filmed very locally to where I live, but also the screen play was by the very much still alive Alan Bennett.

Talks: Nine talks, the best of which was on William Morris and Islamic Art. It was a connection which is obvious when someone points it out but which I'm embarrassed to say had passed me by before.

Comedy: I went to sufficient comedy gigs to add a new category this year. The one I'm going to highlight is Nina Conti and, naturally, Monkey; very, very funny. The aforementioned film also features Monkey, but this time she's inside it. OK, I know she's inside the one in the picture below, but the film she's really inside it.

Exhibitions: I viewed a select number of exhibitions this year, i.e. not many at all. My favourite was certainly not the Turner Prize finalists show, which was inevitably terrible. I concur with those who say that the choice of the winner was nothing more than virtue-signalling. The best was probably We Will Sing at Salts Mill although next time I visit the top floor there I shall take the stairs more slowly. An honourable mention must go to Pigeobition in Keighley and that on gladiators at the Royal Armouries.

Books: I read 163 books in 2025, which is a good indication of how much of it was spent being ill. They include a large number of detective novels and thrillers from the past, perfect for not having to think very much. My favourite was a toss up between Passage of Arms by Eric Ambler or A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin. There were lots of the type of non-fiction books which are actually relevant to wargaming, but nothing leaps out as demanding recommendation. If I was forced to pick one it would be The Mexican Revolution: A Very Short Introduction by Alan Knight, but whether that is truly relevant to this particular blog is a moot point.

Boardgames: I logged 208 playings of 110 different games. I'll do a separate post on these, but my favourite game remains Dune Imperium and I continue to think that wargamers in general would like it.

Wargames: I managed 29 games in the year including half a dozen or so which I hosted in the annexe. Many of those were multi week games so all in all I spent quite a lot of time playing toy soldiers, which I have to say wasn't the way it felt at the time. Looking back I think the cowboys were what I enjoyed most; even more regression to childhood than usual.

Event of the Year: I lied, wargaming is not right at the bottom. I'm tempted to choose the carwash breaking down with car covered in lather with me inside. Having got out while the necessary fiddling with the controls was performed by the operative, I stayed outside until the wash completed. As I waited another car drew up behind me and the the look on the driver's face as I got back in and drove off was very amusing. He was obviously worried that he had been doing it wrong all his life. 

I also won £25 on the Premium Bonds, which is never to be sniffed at. However I'm going for the day I spent visiting the Andy Goldsworthy Hanging Stones in Rosedale, which now I think about it I could have included under the Exhibitions heading. Access is limited and the location is a bit remote, but it's a great combination of art and a walk in the Yorkshire countryside.. 

 Well, another month nearly finished and not many posts, but let's see if we can squeeze one more in before September starts. In any event I continue to attract thousands of views a day without bothering to write anything. The blog's stats page tells me that the most popular article yesterday was that from a few weeks ago complaining about the constant trawling by AI. Coincidence? I think not; these LLMs seem to be as vain as one of the blog's previous, and much missed, followers, who had a strict policy of only reading posts in which she featured.

And speaking of coincidences... I have been in Northumberland for a few days and finding myself in Alnwick I obviously popped in to Barter Books. I didn't stay long as it was hot and crowded, but I did buy a book almost at random just to show willing: "The Adventures of Speedfall" by John Fuller, which I didn't enjoy and don't recommend. I would describe it as a mediocre mashup between P.G. Wodehouse's Mr Mulliner and Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue and, having put it to one side, I found the latter of those on my Kobo (*) and started to re-read it. I quickly came on a passage in which one character, as part of a diatribe against the feckless working class, mentions a painting that he once saw in which a wife served her husband a spur on a plate rather than the dinner which he was expecting. That struck a chord with me because I had myself seen that very painting - it's by William Bell Scott - the day before at Wallington. Also seen there, and of somewhat more relevance to the blog, were these:

As well as the Napoleonic figures there were what looked to be some units from the Risorgimento. Unfortunately the hand written labels seen in the first photo were all the information displayed, so I don't know how old they are. In terms of scale I would judge that they were in height a small 20mm, think Irregular or Tumbling Dice, but they were very slender. Let's end with a photo of Dunstanburgh Castle as approached from Craster:

No kippers were harmed in the taking of this picture.

* I have, not before time, kicked Amazon into touch.

 No sooner had I posted yesterday's boardgames review, in which I stated categorically that Let's Go! To Japan was essentially an abstract game, than it appeared on someone's internet list of top ten most heavily themed games of the year. You pays your money and you takes your choice. 

Less contentious I think was my assertion that the Netherlands is quite flat. I offer the above painting by Cuyp as proof. In any case a moment's reflection would tell us that even if there were valleys that's not where one would put the windmills.

In the sadly misnamed game Windmill Valley, the tulip with the highest value is the dark purple, so dark it's almost black. I am therefore reading 'The Black Tulip' by Alexandre Dumas to see if I can pick up any tips. The only lesson learned from the first few chapters is don't cross the future King William III or it won't end well.

 “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.” -  Søren Kierkegaard

I have been away walking. The photo is of me climbing up the Long Mynd, or to be precise of me taking one of quite a few breaks as I climbed up the Long Mynd. I should perhaps have done some practice climbs up Otley Chevin before I went.

Sine my return I've only had time to catch up with the absolutely essential stuff: listening to the cricket, going to the opera, reading Private Eye etc. In the Rotten Boroughs section of the last one I was interested to see a reference to Magister Militum. The specific target of their criticism (you'll have to buy a copy if you want to find out the details) is the Tory leader of Wiltshire council, who it transpires is the owner of what the magazine describe as the toy soldier supplier. I'm normally very happy to use the term 'toy soldiers' in these pages and elsewhere, but I wouldn't give 15mm figures to real children, as opposed to overgrown children.

 “Barry, you're over thirty years old. You owe it to your mum and dad not to sing in a group called Sonic Death Monkey.” - Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

I rather enjoyed 'High Fidelity' the novel, not least because it was located in a time and place of which I had direct personal experience (*). I didn't care for the film version because, in a classic case of cultural appropriation, the producers relocated it somewhere else so that they could make more money. Perhaps enough time has passed for it to be worth re-reading and/or re-watching. From memory alone therefore, the Barry character (**) wants to be in a band, but in the end only gets to be in one because those who invite him have decided that all the members have to be called Barry (***).

The chap singing the music in yesterday's video was Barry Booth. He had quite a career and worked with some very well known names, many of whom are listed on his website, the biography section of which is quite amusing (****). Whilst he sadly never seems to have worked with Gibb, White or Manilow, he has collaborated with a couple of aptly named non-musicians, Barry Cryer (appearing not for the first time here) and Barry Fantoni, which whom he wrote a musical.

A week or so ago I went to see Barry Rutter, another figure to have featured in this blog before, speaking about "Shakespeare's Royals". In between giving the full-throttle, chewing the scenery, performances for which he is known and loved, he told several anecdotes. I was personally very interested in the background to a production I saw some years ago, but perhaps the most amusing concerned a backstage encounter he had in New York once with both Dizzy Gillespie and Rudolf Nureyev. Many years after that, Gillespie and Nureyev both died on the same day. Rutter quoted to us the 'In Memoriam' poem composed for the occasion by E.J Thribb, aged 17 and a half.

 Some scepticism has been expressed as to my reading of Piazzolla's opera 'Maria de Buenos Aries' as being a metaphor for the rise, fall and rise again of tango. Indeed there was one suggestion that I may have spent too long outside without a hat in the unseasonal sunny weather we are experiencing (*).

"What do we want? The free creation of silver money alongside gold! When do we want it? Now!"

In my defence can I point to another example of the use of artistic metaphor. L. Frank Baum's 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' was written as a satire on the presidential campaigns of William Jennings Bryan on a Free Silver platform. The Wicked Witches are the East and West Coast bankers, the Scarecrow represents the farmers who were too stupid to avoid getting into debt, the Tin Man is the industrial workers who didn't have the heart to take action in support of the farmers, and the Cowardly Lion is politicians who were too afraid to intervene. Given that we're speaking of bimetallism the Yellow Brick Road and Silver Shoes need no explanation (**), nor does it need pointing out that Oz is the abbreviation for ounce. I am less persuaded of the idea that Dorothy was meant to be Theodore Roosevelt, which seems to have been put forward on the somewhat tenuous grounds that their names are nearly anagrams (***)

* For those who don't me I am, although it is barely visible to the naked eye, starting to go a bit thin on top. 

** I know they were Ruby Slippers in the film, but they were Silver Shoes in the book. The change was made, I believe, to look better in Technicolor.

*** It does, however, allow me to include something tangentially related to wargaming.

 Still catching up with what you all missed while my broadband wasn't working. I attended the Bradford Literature Festival's inevitable, and welcome, J.B. Priestley event, which this year addressed 'English Journey'. Commissioned by the prominent left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz this is an account of the great man's travels around England at the height of the depression. A precursor to, and an inspiration for, Orwell's 'Road to Wigan Pier' it shares that book's unwillingness to look away from the effect of poverty on society and, in particular, on children. Not so, of course, the members of the governing party in the U.K. Against the background of a report showing that the cohort of children born during the period of austerity brought in by Cameron and Osborne are shorter both than their predecessors and than children of the equivalent age elsewhere in Europe, these two smug poshos turned up at the Covid enquiry to deny that the same austerity had anything to do with the country's unpreparedness for the pandemic. 

A more recent example of self inflicted economic and social damage has also been in the news concerning the seventh anniversary of the referendum on leaving the EU, a referendum that, by no coincidence, took place whilst the same two deadbeats were in charge. I gave my views here at the time - and indeed here at the time as well - and haven't changed them at all. Professor John Curtice (for the benefit of overseas readers let me point out that when it comes to psephology in the UK the Prof is 'the man') says that the reason the polls currently show a majority thinking that leaving the UK was a mistake isn't so much that people have changed their minds as that a significant number of those who voted Leave have subsequently died. Good.

 "A disease known is half cured." - Irish proverb

I have had Covid. I wasn't particularly acutely ill, but it's left me very washed out, and with a sort of persistent brain fog. So no gaming - board or war - and not much of anything else really. My recent purchases of Irish kern have arrived, but haven't got any further than a heap on the dining table. Also in the pile are various flags which I ordered in to help fill the strange gaps in my complement of Wars of the Roses commanders. Of course, if I have the strength to write a blog post can painting and modelling be far behind?

Illness requires lighter reading material than my normal diet of Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Proust so I picked up 'Winter Pilgrims', which had been passed on to me by Peter. I think the appropriate word for the main plot line is 'implausible', but the descriptive set pieces of various battles are both entertaining and give food for thought. As I have often observed here, no one knows what happened which means that fictional imaginings are as valid as anything else really. I thought that the passage about the attack on Sandwich was the strongest, perhaps because of the relatively small scale of the affair. By the time of Towton, the author had rather lost me; too many tea breaks in his interpretation for my taste.

The book covers Mortimer's Cross, so the kern put in a brief appearance. I trust that, once painted, my figures will put up a better show.

It's time for the review of the year. It was a terrible year for the world in many ways of course. In addition for me there were bereavements and funerals, but I'm afraid that is inevitable as one ages. On the plus side, the year did contain much to amuse those of us with an interest in UK politics; indeed my most read post of the year was this one. While the pandemic now seems a long time ago I found that my caution about crowded places was slow to abate. I may now be back at full flâneur level, but at the start of the year my diary wasn't so full. In any event, what did get done may be appearing here for the first time as I have been remiss in writing about culture in the blog, or indeed writing about much at all.

Opera: I saw eighteen operas this year, which is getting back close to normal levels. Top marks has to go to 'Orpheus Reimagined'. In the words of Opera North this 'melds the music of Monteverdi’s 1607 opera 'Orfeo' with brand new music by composer and virtuoso sitar player Jasdeep Singh Degun. Together, he and early music specialist Laurence Cummings lead a cast starring some of the best Indian classical and European baroque musicians in the UK'. I thought it was sensational. Also well worth a mention was Krenek's 'Der Diktator', both very timely in its subject matter and accompanied by a fascinating post-performance discussion about the nature of authoritarian leaders.

Music: I went to sixteen gigs, a big improvement on 2021's four. However the best was once again Martin Simpson, so that didn't change. The best excluding the maestro was probably Errol Linton. It goes without saying that to see Connie Kreitmeier in the flesh was a highlight as well.

Talks: I attended twenty seven talks this year, the best of which was on the subject of J.B. Priestley's time in Hollywood. Apparently his regular drinking partners whilst there were Groucho Marx and Charlie Chaplin, which would have been a pub crawl worth tagging along with I think.

Books: I have read 101 books, which is fewer than the previous year, but then again I went out more. The best fiction was Mikhail Bulgakov's 'The White Guard' with an honourable mention for  'Minty Alley', by C.L.R James. I fully appreciate that neither of those is terribly modern. Best non-fiction was 'Wagner and Philosophy' by Bryan Magee. Best non-fiction that was in any way related to the ostensible purpose of this blog was John Buckley's highly entertaining 'The Armchair General'.

Boardgames: I played 57 different games 157 times, so that's a healthy increase. I've reported on them elsewhere so I'll say no more here.

Wargames: By my reckoning I played around thirty games, many of which spread over two or three evenings. My favourite was 'Flashing Blades' at the Lard Workshop, which as I said at the time was a cracking little game. I am happy to have a go at any rules or period really and enjoyed a number of new ones this year. I found 'DBN' rather entertaining, and while I never really warmed to 'Soldiers of Napoleon' they did include some nice ideas; what they are not is a multi-player game. Probably the most disappointing new-to-me set was 'Rommel', which just didn't seem to grab any of us; perhaps it would have been better if we had used them to refight Sidi Rezegh. The rules/period which I personally would most like to revisit in 2023 is 'Jump or Burn'. Back in March James told us all to think of names for our pilots as we were just about to start a campaign, following which the planes were never seen again.

Exhibitions: The first new award category for a few years. I'm think the highlight was Walter Sickert retrospective at Tate Britain, with a special mention for the British Museum's fine exploration of the history and context of Stonehenge. 

Event of the Year: There were a few contenders. Clearly returning home to find the house full of smoke and my spare bedroom in flames must be one possibility, as was the failure of International Pigeon Rescue to mobilise their Otley branch following an emergency call by one of my occasional companions after she found an injured bird in my back garden. However, I am going for the rather tasty old-school fight on the X84 bus, which transported me momentarily back to my youth, when such things were commonplace.

For 2023 I wish us all, more than ever, love in a peaceful world.

 The actor Daniel Craig featured in the previous post. Twenty years ago he played Guy Crouchback in Channel 4's adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's 'Sword of Honour' trilogy. The book documents Crouchback's war, which paralleled Waugh's own in many respects, and has a large cast who I've always assumed were modelled on, or amalgams of, real people. Indeed I have already written about one probable source for Brigadier Ritchie Hook. I have just come across another example.

I have been reading the second volume of the diaries of Henry 'Chips' Channon. Now, don't judge me. Channon was clearly an appalling human being: shallow, snobbish, hypocritical, anti-semitic, a Tory MP - I could go on. (By the way the child in the picture is Paul Channon, who went on to become a cabinet minister under Thatcher). However, I got the book very cheaply, and that's not to be sniffed at. And the years covered are 1938 to 1943, so I thought it would be interesting to see how the events of those years were viewed at the time. As with Charles Repington's diaries from the Great War which I read earlier this year it becomes clear that many of them aren't viewed as being worth mentioning. Repington never writes about the Easter Rising or the Russian Revolution and Channon doesn't regard the battle of Stalingrad as being worth even alluding to in passing. The main amusement in Channon's case is just how wrong he was about so many things. Not merely that he was an arch-appeaser (*), but that his tips for high political office - including himself - inevitably get sacked shortly afterwards, never to rise again. At one point he predicts the imminent restoration of the monarchy in Germany, which even without the benefit of hindsight does seem as if he's been smoking something.

Waugh's novel contains a character called Lieutenant Padfield, the 'Loot', an American social phenomenon who is everywhere and knows everyone. Channon's diaries feature the 'Sarge', one Stuart Preston, who is attached to Eisenhower's HQ in some unspecified capacity, knows everyone and is at every social function. The real Preston, who went on to be art critic of the New York Times, is now understood to have been working in counter-intelligence, with the task of infiltrating high society to identify sources of indiscreet gossip; if Channon is to be believed he did so in a very hands on manner. Waugh's 'Loot' turns out to be spying one of the major characters on behalf of a firm of US lawyers, so perhaps Waugh (**), and therefore presumably everyone else as well, was fully aware of what the 'Sarge' was up to.

* After the Germans occupy the whole of Czechoslovakia in contravention of the Munich agreement, he observes that Hitler doesn't make life easy for his friends.

** Who also appears in Channon's diaries; Chips is not a fan.

 As will have been long apparent, my preferred approach to this blog is to write any old rubbish and then forget it, on the basis that no one reads it anyway. Occasionally this backfires, such as in the case of my recent post about dominos as a means of determining initiative in Piquet. I have been asked if I can justify my assertion that the result follows a normal distribution. In particular, the question was asked as to what specifically I was referring: the winner's initiative, the loser's initiative or the difference between the two? A reasonable question.

Well, the results of drawing a single domino and adding the pips follow a normal distribution. If both sides did the same then subtracting one from the other would be the difference between two independent normal distributions, which would also be a normal distribution. So far so good. But apart from the initial drawing of the dominos that's not actually how we allocate initiative. Even more importantly, what we do with the results of the draw renders the probabilities of the winner's and loser's respective initiatives non-independent. So, the answer to the question is: no, I can't justify it.

The author Michael Green wrote a series of books called 'The Art of Coarse Acting', 'The Art of Coarse Rugby' etc. He never got round to 'The Art of Coarse Mathematics' for some reason (*), but had he done so then I'm sure that he would have drawn the attention of readers to two cop-out phrases beloved of mathematicians who either can't or don't want to work everything out in detail: 'by inspection' and 'result follows'. Therefore, by inspection I'm going to assert that, under our methodology, both initiatives have a right-skewed distribution with the mean being higher than the mode. As for the net initiative - who knows?

This correspondence is now closed.

* I should point out that in geometry and topology 'coarseness' is a real and important concept

 Just over a year ago I reviewed Dr Tom Lewis's 'Medieval Military Combat' and so too, albeit in a more dismissive fashion, did Graham Evans over at 'Wargaming for Grown-ups'. In Volume XXXII of The Ricardian, journal of the Richard III Society and hot off the presses, is another review. This one is by Peter Hammond, Research Officer of the society, and author of many books on the period himself. 

He is of much the same mind as me on Lewis's tome. His concluding paragraph reads:

"This book is an interesting mixture. As described it contains some interesting practical points which are not usually discussed. It is not well written, being badly organized but it is worth reading for the discussion of battle aspects not often covered. Unfortunately there are very few illustrations, all in black and white and very badly reproduced and the index is poor."

So, worth a read, but borrow don't buy.

 I find that I didn't say everything I wanted to yesterday. I think I was distracted by listening to Test Match Special and wondering if there was an alternative timeline in which England were any good. Jonathan Agnew reported that after the first day's play he had been asked by the ICC's anti-corruption team whether he thought there was anything suspicious about the loss of so many England wickets in such a short time. He had given the only possible answer: "Haven't you been watching for the last two years?".

Anyway, what I wanted to mention was that I don't mind alternative history fiction, because it's, you know, fiction. I'm not talking about about time-travelling fantasy where someone goes back to the middle ages with a machine gun, but simply a novel set somewhere sometime where things have turned out differently. Robert Harris's 'Fatherland' would an example probably known to many readers (*), and a Nazi victory in the Second World War has spawned many others. The only one of these currently on my to-read list is Philip K. Dick's 'The Man In The High Castle'. However, this blog's recommendation in the genre is 'The Alteration' by Kingsley Amis.

The two main alternative path taken in the book is no Protestant Reformation, and therefore no Enlightenment and so scientific progress has been slowed and restricted. The Roman Catholic church now dominates a totalitarian Europe through what is a cross between the Inquisition and the Gestapo. The novel is set in the 1970s and a number of people prominent in that decade pop up in different guises, as do many historical figures. There are many allusions to familiar cultural artefacts in this different context, but perhaps the one to highlight is an alternative history book within a book: 'The Man In The High Castle' by Philip K. Dick in which Henry VIII has had a son by Catherine of Aragon.

* If, of course, the blog had many readers in the first place.

 I am not particularly a fan of counterfactual history, but have been reading 'The Armchair General' by John Buckley.

The premise of the book is not so much what if things had happened differently, but more specifically what if allied commanders had made different decisions at various stages during the Second World War. The structure is that for each of eight scenarios the reader is presented with binary options, then for each of those routes there is another binary option and so on, leading to a small number of alternative situations. The author claims these to be 'plausible rather than fantastical' and that seems a reasonable description to me.

The reality is that readers will go back and take all the alternative paths anyway, so it ends up being not so much one counterfactual history as a group of possible outcomes collectively illustrating why and how choices were made. The areas covered are all of a strategic nature with Market Garden being the most operational.

I don't think there are any huge surprises in it, especially for the sort of person who reads wargaming blogs, but it's well put together and I found it an enjoyable read.

 There was some galley action last night, more than five years after they last hit the table, or possibly just since they last hit the table while I was both there and bothered to write about them.

Mine are the three ships marked with a 6. The one on the left has rammed and sunk the wreck; the one in the centre has rammed its target to no effect, has lost its ram (that's the pink bead) and is entangled; the one on the right tried to rake its target, failed and is entangled. Believe it or not, this was the absolute high point for the Carthaginians. No sooner had our other squadrons of ships entered the fight than they were either boarded or rammed, or occasionally both. The rules? Well, they possibly need some work. 

Having opened the book on Edward the Exile mentioned yesterday, I have inevitably been reading it. I'd forgotten how full it was of all sorts of interesting digressions - such as how the son of the Doge of Venice came to be King of Hungary - but it also has some sections which seem strangely relevant to the zeitgiest. For example:

"The democratic Kievan period upon which the Russians now look back with nostalgic yearning began with the coming of the Viking Varangians in the ninth century and ended in the holocaust of the Mongol invasion in the middle of the thirteenth century. Kiev's leading role was taken over by Moscow whose princes borrowed the tools of statecraft from the tyrannical Mongol system."

 Concerns have been raised about whether all this snow that I referred to yesterday actually ever existed. Well, firstly, there was indeed a lot of snow, although it disappeared quite quickly. And, secondly, it is possible that readers have mistaken this blog for some sort of accurate historical record of what's going down. I, on the other hand, have always seen myself as the equivalent of a medieval chronicler.

"So, there was the Rev Ian Paisley and there was a giraffe"

 The Plastic Soldier Review website currently says "..it seems almost disrespectful to talk about trivial thing such as plastic figures", and that is an entirely understandable reaction. I do, however, think that there is a psychological benefit in difficult circumstances from continuing to indulge in our hobby. I remember reading somewhere someone saying that men (*) like to model the world in miniature because that makes them think that they can control it. 

It also reminds me of something written by David Nobbs - best known for creating Reginald Perrin - in his novel, 'Second From Last in the Sack Race'. On September 3rd 1939 a group of small children are playing a literal and unsavoury game of Poohsticks:

"I don't think there was a single one of us, however small, however deplorably apolitical the home environment that helped to shape us, who was not aware that an event of cataclysmic importance was casting its shadow over our little world and over the great world beyond our little world. I remember we played some kind of game on that fateful morning. I forget the rules. They don't matter. What matters is that we felt a compulsion to play a game, a clean game, a game with rules, because we knew, with the untainted instincts of youth, that the world was embarking on an adventure which was definitely not a game, and that for many years to come there would be no rules."

* And, ironically given that I am posting this on International Women's Day, it really is men they were talking about.

 I have finished "Paddy Griffith's Game of War" and, as there was a question in the comments following my previous mention of it, I thought I'd do a review. Overall, it's an interesting enough read. I bought it on a whim and had no particular expectations. Anyone in the hobby of a similar age to me would surely be as diverted as I was by Griffith's recollections of well-known people whom he met, played against and fell out with. This wasn't originally written as a book, rather being a collection of various things, some intended for publication whilst others are private letters or merely working notes. It has all been curated by John Curry, who provides notes on the context where appropriate. It contains things like rules for games run by Griffith in a variety of places and of various sizes. I suppose it's nice that they are included, but they are actually rather dull to read. Perhaps the most telling section is the letter which he wrote following the recording of the refight of Waterloo done in 1997 for the television programme which gives the book its name. He clearly took it all very, very seriously. I do wonder what the programme makers thought when they read it.

I've embedded the video to save keen readers from having to search for it. I haven't watched it myself because the rules printed in the book turn out not to have been the one's used on the day, because judging by what he himself wrote Griffith made a pig's ear of umpiring the game, and because life is short and getting shorter.

Paddy Griffith moved away from games with figures and many of the games described in the book are more at the free kriegspiel end of the spectrum. I've never played any of those so can't comment really. He apparently tried and failed to get wargaming accepted by his employers at Sandhurst, where he lectured, as a valid learning experience. I've never been a soldier, I was a businessman (*). As such I attended, and received a postgraduate degree from, a business school. We played a business game, which sounds very similar to the sort of thing which Griffiths proposed: students in teams playing out a scenario, staff acting as umpires making decisions about outcomes supported by computer moderation. It was bloody useless and I learned nothing. 

Having at some point decided that everyone else was wargaming the wrong way, he seemingly didn't hold back in telling them so (**). For example, there's one piece included here in which he comprehensively slags off competitive wargaming. I've never done that either, but I've known people who have and have very much enjoyed it. I'm really not sure what skin off Griffith's nose it is that they do so. Which I suppose brings me on to his polemic against gaming with figures. His argument goes: your ambition is to achieve a realistic simulation of war, and you can't do that with toy soldiers, especially if they are aesthetically pleasing to the eye. I may have missed out one or two steps in his logic, but that's the gist of it. My counterargument would be: my ambition is to play a fun game with nice looking toy soldiers in pleasant company, with any superficial resemblance to military history being the icing on the cake. 

The best quote in the book doesn't come from Griffith himself, but from one of the other attendees at the conference at which Wargames Development was founded: "Most wargamers are stamp collectors playing at being postmen". I don't just acknowledge that description, I embrace it.

*   OK, I was an accountant.

** He comes across as the sort of chap of whom a little would go a long way

 I am currently reading "Paddy Griffith's Game of War", a volume in John Curry's History of Wargaming Project.

It is an interesting read, although very little of it speaks to the sort of wargaming that I have ever done in practice. I did come across this suggestion though: "...use an active umpire, or in other words a man who is either knowledgeable in the rules, or who invents them as he goes along...". Spooky or what?