Go for it. I've been enjoying this thread. I hope you'll start another when this is done.
I asked my friend Smithy whether he intended to follow up his Alert build log with another epic adventure within the near future. He glared at me momentarily with a haunted look, shook his head, and spoke softly but with great intensity as follows:
“I fear that the drift of my thoughts has been so erratic of late that you are not alone in finding my intentions rather incomprehensible. Perhaps I should attempt to state the case (of which I’m certain) more clearly.
It all began in the winter of 20__. I was dining at the club because Mrs Hudson was visiting her daughter and son-in-law for the Christmas holidays. I had intended to spend the evening alone ruminating upon the delicate problem of the precise shade of the camouflage paint to be applied to the undersides of my latest plastic aircraft model, a Superhawk Musterbolt from Tamifix.
Suddenly, in a flash of insight that almost made me reach for the 7% solution, I realised that I no longer gave a tuppenny damm about the paintwork. Indeed, it struck me forcibly that I could never build another aircraft as long as I lived! The shock was disabling and I wandered back to Baker Street alone and dispirited.
From that night, aeroplanes were dead to me. What was I to do? I was not long in deducing my way forward. Tanks, Watson. Tanks and figures and dioramas. I would throw the whole weight of my intellect into advancing my knowledge and practice of military modelling; the art of the soldier would supplant the art of the aviator.
And so it was for several years to come. I was happy for a time, Watson. It was a whole new world to explore. The manufacturer of tracks. The simulation of vegetation. The painting of human faces. These all presented challenges which kept me at the bench until late, so late in the nights.
And then the feeling that had hit me so brutally in the club that Christmas night began to return. What was the point of it all? Why was I not enjoying my hobby? Why was I finishing so a few of the models that I began? The military Mojo had evaporated slowly and insidiously over a period of years. And now what?
In desperation, I turned to ships. At first in plastic and then in utter despair I became addicted to wood, and string. I retooled my workshop, replaced my library and learned a new and exotic skills such as planking.
Three years passed before the malaise struck again. And now my narrative takes on the present tense. I have not completed a model to my satisfaction in years. I have lost all interest in the builds of others. I seem to have spent most of my life labouring at a fruitless task. Model making seems to be no more than joyless and overcomplicated way of filling up what little time remains.
I can pursue this hobby no longer. I will finish Alert because I have already promised to do so, but after that, I shall cease to be a model maker. All of my equipment, my paints, my tools have already been packed away leaving only my rigging tool kit for this final stage. After the deadly task of stringing together this last cutter, it is over. I shall build no more. I shall write no more.
My God, Smithy, I said, how will you fill your time?
I have the consolations, he replied, of music, literature and a small furry friend. I shall rest my modelling soul for a full year and if by that time I have not managed to rediscover the will to build, I will sell my equipment, dispose of my remaining kits and devote to my life to travel. There are many places that I have not yet seen even as close as Europe. I am particularly drawn to ….
The Reichenbach Falls!
