Have a Kit Kat

Some of you might remember the old Cadburys advert…Have a break, have a Kit Kat? 

Can’t get hold of a Kit Kat over here…but I can take a break…which is exactly what I’m going to do for the next few months.

We’ve got the builders in shortly, knocking a way through from the cottage to the barn, and that means precious little hobby money for the balance of the year. Hey ho. First world problems to have and all that. Truth is, the wife is finding it increasingly difficult to use the upper floors these days and with more spinal surgery on the horizon that’s not going to get any easier. What used to be the gîte will now become a downstairs living room (our main one is upstairs to take advantage of the view) and a downstairs bedroom she can use if her condition worsens

On the hobby front, the first batch of blue moon ECW lads finally turned up as you can see below and as usual the conundrum  becomes one of basing. My old 15mm collection from PP was based on 8cm stands, but here I’m experimenting with 4cm bases so I can put them in column on my hexon roads. There’s 60 figures to a battalia here which hopefully gives an impression of “heft,” or at least it should do when I add the pikes to the pile block. Lol. The steel watchamacallit miniatures samples arrived several days before the blue moon stuff and crikey they’re tiny. Beautifully sculpted. But like I say ruddy tiny. They actually put me more in mind of my 10mm Pemdraken AWI collection than anything. I’ll consider that a bullet dodged.

Here’s the boys in column. Don’t judge me on the state of the desk.

And here they are in line. Note they’re only stuck down with blue tack at this point. 

I was so chuffed with my previous AI portrait in East India Company uniform that I asked for another as an ECW officer. In the interests of authenticity I gave chat GPT a more up to date photo in which the old barnet has gone the way of all things.

Declare Sirrah! Be ye for King or Parliament? I consider this proof, if proof were needed, that the internet can be usefully explored for other things than porn or cats. 

Testing of my Mutiny rules continues as you can see from the picture below. So far there hasn’t been any significant revision work required - which is encouraging, or worrying depending on your viewpoint. 

Company lads from the 64th storming a sepoy position.

I plan to come back to the blog in late September when I’ve got something hobby wise to actually write about, so in the interim I hope you all have a belting summer and get to kick back yourselves at some point.

Toodleooh.

P.S. Since I won’t be about to remind you, don’t forget to put the sprouts on to boil in July. 

A bridge too far - Game 4 of 4 & The law of unintended consequences

Soz to all whose blogs I’ve failed to comment on in the past two weeks, but that orange buffoon in Washington persuaded me it was time to go on another internet detox. Having finally girded my loins and summoned sufficient courage to come out from under the duvet, here’s another post.

The final game in my four game VBCW mini campaign beckons.

Situation fluff.

The BUF’s attempt to seize control of the vital Brompton industrial area has failed and Action Group Leader Hartwell and his merry band of blackshirts have fled the field.

“The Major,” Brompton Town’s military supremo, receives alarming news from a trusted fellow Rotarian in the Whatgoesup Aero Club that elements of the King’s Severn Valley army has left its barracks in Worcester and is heading east on the A21 towards them. 

Birmingham promises to send reinforcements to the town but the Major knows the only way he can delay the government force is to blow up the bridge across the  nearby river Stour. With no time to waste he creates an adhoc flying column and heads off with all the TNT the Public Works Department can provide.

Meanwhile, crossing the very same bridge on their way back to the safety of Worcester, the remains of Hartwell’s disheveled BUF Action Group are intercepted by a motorcycle outrider who brings exciting news. Lead elements of the 1st RTR are only an hour away, the spear point of a powerful force intent on crossing the Stour at the very bridge they’re currently standing on.

Hartwell reasons that if he can make a big show of “holding the bridge” for the regulars, he might offset some of the recently acquired damage to his military reputation. Hurriedly he orders his men to take defensive positions around the bridgehead.

The Brompton force has eight victory points from the previous games and the BUF have seven. The dice decided that for both sides this missions importance is high so there’s 5 points to be gained from the game and victory in the campaign itself to the side that wins this one.

The bridge over the river Stour. A bridge too far? I’ve resorted to my hexon tiles to create the none urban landscape needed for this scenario. The hex divisions will play no part in determining movement etc, just the general lie of the land.

I’m giving the 5 men in Normandy rules a run out here, because they were the original set I chose for the VBCW project and though I eventually sidelined them for the FFOL ones, I’m still keen to see how they work out.

The Forces.

The BUF have ten men a tank and an armored car from 1st RTR that’ll enter the board over the bridge on the BUF’s turn 6. The BUF infantry start in hiding at two of six locations, their position automatically revealed when the Brompton force comes within 6 inches of them. 

The Brompton force includes an armoured car 10 men and a lorry loaded with TNT. Either side will concede the mission if four or more men are lost.

The law of unintended consequences.

I had occasion to root around in the barn last week, (looking for an angle grinder as it happens), when I stumbled across a box within a box that hasn’t seen the light of day in about 6 or 7 years. A quick inspection revealed a 15mm Peter Pig pikeman with no head and a bundle of warning orders from when I was re enacting with Sir William Pennyman’s Regiment of Foote. Said pikeman, headless or not, is the last survivor of the great 15mm twin army chuck away, plucked from the ranks for a head swap that clearly never came to fruition. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that his colleagues were all mistakenly despatched to landfill, but have since consoled myself that without a head he couldn’t have heard me anyway. Phew. Also in the box were these…

Dear old “4 ground” - we hardly knew ye. Driven, somewhat ironically, into the ground this last 4 years…apparently. Must have stuffed them into my “never to be opened again” box a long time back. They look neat don’t they. Shame they’ll never be used, what with being ECW and 15mm.

Anyway where was I, oh yes, unintended consequences. Regular readers will recall that I purchased two Silkie hens last summer, one of which actually turned out to be a cockerel. As a bit of an experiment the wife and I took up a friends offer to use their incubator this spring and thanks to Eddie the cockerels unstinting and untiring efforts to fertilise everything vaguely chicken shaped (and even a few things that aren’t chicken shaped) we’ve ended up with these two.

Taa daaaaa… May I present Daphne and Gladys (or Dave and Gary depending on how they develop).  Since Eddie the cockerel has been “boffing” both Brenda the Pekin and Elsie the Silkie the odds are that these two are going to be Pilkie’s, but we’ll see.

But Broom I hear you cry aren’t you going to cunningly segue way back to the headless pikeman and the unintended consequences header using your skill with DJT’s “the weave” . 

Why yes ;-) 

Yes I am.

A prime reason to go back on the internet was to look up a YouTuber who I recalled had Silkie Pekin cross chicks themselves and while browsing I began to realise I’ve been following loads of YouTube channels that I barely visit anymore. 

One I ummed and ahhhed about deleting was a figure painters site (with a delightful West Midlands accent) who’d been doing Empress Miniatures 28mm Indian Mutiny range and had inspired me to start that particular project last year. Wouldn’t hurt to see what he was up to these days would it?

Oh bugger.

Yeah,  beautiful 15mm ECW sculpts from a company I’d never heard of. In light of the headless pikeman and the potential terrain already in the bag was this the universe sending me a message…? 

The question is, am I finally over my 15mm ECW colleywobbles? « Gives the matter 3 seconds of deep thought » 

Erm. Yup.

Order placed yesterday for some test pieces. Could be the next project I reckon. 

A fine body of men.

Toodleooh for now mes amis.

Hors de combat (temporairement)

Bit of a filler post this week cos I’m out of commission thanks to first world problems. 

The end part of our house has some massive wooden shutters front and back which make it comfortably zombie apocalypse proof but which require a degree of maintenance to keep in tip top condition. 

The shutters of doom, 3m square (whatever that is in old money) and that’s just one set. 

Long story short I’ve been using an orbital sander intensively for days on end and now have hands like cows tits. All of my fingers on my right hand are numb, in a way that I’d welcome if it were my brain, and that has meant no typing or painting in my so called down time. Some folks have the gift of being ambidextrous but I’m firmly right handed and it’s that one that’s copped the worst of it. I’d say my left hand is useless but it’s not actually that good. Come to think of it, along with my left arm it’s done little but flap lazily in the wind for most of my life. Ruddy useless, though I suppose it does add a certain symmetry to my ((coughs)) Adonis like physique.

I digress. The last game of the Brompton Campaign is sort of set up…but picking up toy soldiers and moving them around is a bit like operating one of those coin op amusement arcade claw machines, only the crane bit’s made out of ham. For my models sake I’m going to leave it a couple of days until I’ve walked this off. 

I think I’ll just move my Indian mutiny collection with all their delicate bayonets what could possibly go wrong?

Anywhoo. Seeing as typing this is a ruddy nightmare, what with sausage fingers and auto correct, here’s a bit of a post I’d prepared previously to pad things out against a dry blogging month, culled it must be said from correspondence intended for my granddaughter who hopes to live out here one day.

Soz if it’s jarringly out of context for a wargaming hobby blog but needs must when the devil vomits on your eiderdown n’est ce pas?

French Lessons #101

Everything you learned at school or in language classes about speaking French is wrong, and I do mean EVERYTHING. Don’t forget that the main use of the French language is to root out foreigners and only after that to transmit information. Subtleties and nuances in its usage abound, dotted around like linguistic land mines to catch out even those who’ve done 2000 consecutive days on Duolingo. (Bitter…moi…Non!)

Talking is of course essential and should be done through the nose at all times. But what to say? And how do you say it? You’ve assembled all the words for “things” in your intended sentence, remembered what their sex is so you can join them together with correct gender joining words, conjugated a Byzantine series of verbs and then altered the whole sentence structure so that adjectives describing ONLY beauty, age, goodness and size go before the noun (“le chat blanc” - the cat white in English, for example, versus “une belle robe”, a beautiful dress)… and after that, assuming you’ve managed it in the usual two second thought to mouth window, you’re good to go. Great you’ve managed grammatical perfection. 

Sadly, despite this mini triumph no one will understand you because you will have pronounced ONE of the words incorrectly and no one uses grammatically perfect french anyway… other than foreigners. Job done. You’ve been busted you filthy barbarian. 

(French people don’t say “oui” (wee) they say “oui” (way). Nous (we) is only written, in spoken French they say “on” and they never say the “ne” bit in “je ne sais pas” (I don’t know). Anything pronounced slightly off (even if the meaning is obvious) becomes entirely incomprehensible and must be immediately dismissed from the average mind Français.

Level two of language being used for rooting out étranger is the use of “Verlan”, the French version of Cockney rhyming slang.  How it should be used and when it is socially acceptable to use it is still a closed book to me but essentially it is taking a standard word like “fou” (crazy) and switching the letters around so it’s pronounced “ouf” (oof). I think it’s meant to imply that you possess subtle inner city wit or some such, but don’t quote me on that. It used to be pretty niche, but it’s even on tv now.

Last in this cautionary tale of vernacular mayhem are the words borrowed from elsewhere that don’t mean anything much but are just thrown into a sentence at random to indicate you are generally “hip”. Witness the new word… “wesh” which may or may not mean anything (it hasn’t yet made it to La Creuse where we live) and can be interposed between any words in a sentence with no apparent problem. I’m told it comes from North Africa if that’s any help.

French Lessons #102

Table manners. Essential knowledge. Never leave your baguette upside down on the table, it’s bad luck (it’s the one left out by the baker for the towns hangman, apparently). Never slice your baguette with a knife (what are you some kind of animal?) it should be torn into chunks, with your hands. I’m told it was because back in the day cutlery was considered insanitary, but to be fair, I’ve never seen a Frenchman actually wash his hands…

Cheese. There are officially 246 different varieties of cheese in France and apart from the blue and the Comte they all taste the ruddy same. If you are tired of life you might like to make this observation at a dinner party. On the other hand if you wish to curry favour, mutter that it has subtle notes of hawthorn or camomile. Never EVER take more of some you’ve taken a liking to. Another piece of cheese would be “seconds” and “seconds” implies the host did not feed you well enough in the main course (either that or you’re a glutton and should be socially shunned). Don’t forget to look askance at the host if the cheese board has an even number of cheese selections on it. For reference 5 varieties is considered the perfect number, anything more is just vulgar and showing off.

Cutting cheese (not a euphemism) is a science and again an opportunity to sort the social wheat from the chaff. Pie shaped cheeses should be cut into wedges (#obvs), log shaped ones should be cut into cylinders and triangular slabs of Bree are a bloody etiquette nightmare. Basically it seems you have to keep cutting pieces off at an angle till you are mid-way then you can cut perpendicular to the rind so that everyone gets a bit of the rind.  This way no one is left with just a firm piece of rind at the end. There you go. Crystal. Oh yeah, never claim to have had a nice cheese from Brittany. There is no such thing. They’re only good at salted butter up there.

Cheese do’s and dont’s.

Don’t say: “I reckon you can’t beat a nice bit of cheddar.”

Do say: “Have you tried the Ol Sciur with its fragrant blend of raw goat milk cheese, hibiscus, berries and rose petals?” (It is of course Italian, but you’ll be demonstrating your sophisticated European cheese palate to an approving audience).

There you go a wall of text, totally out of context with the blogs raison d’être. Blogging suicide according to those in the know. I must have a death wish.  

Righto I’ll be off now, but be warned, if you’re naughty I’ll know, and I’ll post another few snippets of this crap. lol.  

Heck, who knows, it may even prove useful should you ever find yourself on La Continente.

Leave us a comment if you can be arsed.

À la prochaine mes amis.

Help!

I was at an indoor market in Bellac today when I chanced upon these chaps for sale. The figures may be pewter and the individual soldiers are about 8cm tall - so I’m not sure what scale that equates to. I’ve no idea of manufacturer / age / period / nationality represented but they’re 85 euro for 12 as far as I can see which seems reasonable.

If anybody is able to shine a light on this I’d be grateful for any info.

They’ve been glued to several crappy wooden bases and all of the figures appear to be individual. 

Again, any info the hive mind can provide will be gratefully received.

A plus mes amis. 

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me….

Come on now, sing along !

“An armored car and a Hotchkiss MMG…”

Just about works I reckon, lol.

An Austin armoured car for my non fascist forces. Just look at all them lovely rivets. You can keep yer King Tigers chum, Multiple turrets and tissue paper armour are where it’s at. 

I made a right old balls up of my Footsore Vickers MG so this is an Empress SCW Hotchkiss team which’ll work fine for the BUF, with some head swaps if necessary. 

Anywhoo, the sprouts are nearly ready (they’ve been boiling away since June) so I’ll keep this post short. 

2025 saw me move away from smaller scales and effectively start from scratch in 28mm. I’ve unexpectedly enjoyed painting in this scale and as a result I’ve now created opposing armies for the Indian Mutiny, The 100 Years War, and the alt history British Civil War. 

I suspect that 2026 will see me adding units to all three, though at a less frenetic (and bloody expensive) pace. I’ve still not entirely settled on rules for any of these periods but I’m resolved not to go about writing my own for them, since this is a rabbit hole I’ve fallen down too many times in the past, with largely unsatisfactory results. 

Talking of rabbit holes, I’ve now been 62 days without purchasing anything “shiny” or random, so, go me! Seems like the hypnotherapy tapes and counselling are beginning to work.

Right enough with the waffle! Here’s hoping you have a great Christmas and that all your battles in 2026 are toy soldier ones.

Mrs Broom’s been at it again with the deckies!

Toodleooh. 

See you on the flip side, if the God’s spare us!

I for one welcome our new AI overlords

Just thought I’d get that blog title on record as a sort of insurance policy for the future. Truth be told, despite Keith’s impressive and creative use of AI (over at his Bydand blog) my own output has so far been less than stellar. 

My upcoming VBCW project has a fair amount of background fluff, so I thought that rather than writing  a wall of text to boggle the reader I’d present the backstory in a couple of neat faux newspaper front pages from the period. 

Being me, nothing ever goes to plan of course, so I thought I’d share my “creative experience” in the hopes that more compétant people can point out what I’m doing wrong,

First off I was trying to create a copy of the Daily Mail, infamous for its real world headline “hurrah for the blackshirts”. Given that it looked like I was trying to create something promoting fascism with prompts like… 

“Generate front page of Daily Mail May 3rd 1937. Headline «GOOD RIDDANCE » Picture of worried 1930s women and children under guard. Text around the picture Northampton has now been cleansed of communist agitators. Oxford, Cambridge and Leicester have also seen the back of these troublesome malcontents. New paragraph, WE BACK THE BOYS IN BLACK. Insert text in a border at the bottom of the page in the style of a period advert Farrington’s Bile Beans. The Perfect Restorative 2d.” 

…I got a lot of “this image generation request did not follow our content policy” responses, which was actually quite heartening to be honest. 

Being sly, and a lot less specific I pressed on and gradually worked my way through dozens of iterations where either the text was okay but the pictures were ridiculous or the pictures were okay and the text utter nonsense.

Unable to get the bugger to do what I really wanted I made a collage of the bits that were okay and created a Frankenstein version of the Daily Mail using cut and paste. 

The problem with the cut and paste was that it looked like…well… a cut and paste. Uploading my image to the AI I asked it to make it look more homogenous (ie make the background a uniform colour) which as you can see it did. The trouble is that in the process of doing that it corrupted the text, turning it into utter garbage and rendering my attempt at story telling useless. 

As you can see from the original cut and paste variant (below), it covered the deportation of communist agitators from Coventry (obviously just women and children) and Prime Minister Mosley visiting King Edward the VIII who’d been injured in a bomb attack at his coronation. 

I guess it’s reassuring to know that if AI ever becomes sentient and takes over the world it’ll probably make as big a balls up of it as we’ve done. 

Okay, frustrated semi rant over. 

Here’s a picture of a train and the new Brompton Carpets warehouse to placate those hoping for some proper wargaming content. lol.  

My new choo choo. Not bad for cardboard and mdf. Just gotta sort out the rails now.

Brompton Carpets three story factory / warehouse, where I’m told you can pick up some excellent end of roll bargains.

I’m pretty sure I’ll sneak another post in pre new year, but if not I hope you all manage to kick back and have a good one. 

Toodleooh

Wasted

This was going to be a post about my ongoing painting progress, but I’m feeling a little worse for wear and to be honest you’ve seen it all before anyway. We’ve had a succession of post school holiday visitors during September which put a dent in my hobby time and culminated in my brother in law beating me 4 wargames in a row. Jerk. He has a serious heart condition, so I told the wife I let him win in case he snuffed it. 

Desperate to catch a break from this continual drubbing I seized on the opportunity to help my neighbour Marie Theresa with her problematic ride on lawnmower. The machine in question is kept in her barn of mystery, into which étranger such as I are not normally allowed. Marie Theresa by the way is either seventy eight, eighty five or eighty seven - depending on the current phase of the moon. She remains married to the infamous Pradeix strangler (who she hates with a passion only a French women can muster) and who I was about to say is as mad as a box of frogs, which would of course be racially insensitive, so I won’t.

I actually never made it as far as the tondeuse auto portée because my access was blocked by an old hot water tank with a coil of copper pipe poking out of the top. My suspicions were quickly confirmed by the rows of bottles under an adjacent tarp. Seems my geriatric neighbour makes her own booze. Who knew? Well apparently not the gendarmerie. Perhaps in a bid to secure my silence I woke up this morning to several bottles of something disturbingly clear on the back doorstep. It smelled like drain cleaner. Hell it could be drain cleaner for all I know… but I’m always game for a laugh so when she came around at lunch time I shared a glass with her. 

An hour later I still can’t feel my lower jaw which is totally numb…and I have a splitting headache. Instead of the planned post you’ll have to make do with a series of loosely connected photos and some brief captions. Soz. Had a piccy of us raising a glass together but it’s on my phone and I’m buggered if I can port it across to my iPad. Not in this state anyway. 

Oh look it appeared anyway!

Cheers. 

Temu scatter terrain for 28mm urban VBCW battles. Hat tip to Keith for the heads up on this one.

Part of my birthday haul. Some lovely urban / factory type buildings for VBCW

Yet more urban gaming stuff from Sarissa 

How the hell did that get in here? Me getting my perm done. Confucius he say never post under the affluence of inkerhol.

This shouldn’t be here either. lol. Saw this 1948 Sonora 302 when I was getting my perm done. Decided to collect old French radios. Like you do. Ain’t she a beauty! This piccy is off the interweb - cos I was trying to identify it.

Ahh….back on track. 2 sections of VBCW anti fascists primed and ready for painting

Two HYW command stands - part finished. There’s another three knights to go on each of them to fill in the gaps.

Right, I think that’ll have to do me hearties. I’m going for a lie down. 

Toodleooh.