Pot60pouri

The 1757 Bohemian Blitzkrieg campaign seems to have run out of steam around turn 11 - the penultimate - because there doesn't appear to be much that anyone could do on turn 12 to force a win. I will post a retrospective in due course as hopefully will James. I think that useful lessons were learned, some rule tweaks were already applied and no doubt further ones will be in due course. James has megalomaniacal plans for an even more complicated affair which will use all his Seven Years War figures.

I ought to say some more about Verona. In fact if I was any sort of proper wargaming blogger I would be posting an illustrated report on all the military and naval related things I'd seen. However, what I actually did was go to an exhibition at the opera museum about Maria Callas. This was curated by someone who had a far from healthy obsession with la divina and it both bordered on the creepy and contained too many frocks for my taste. The displays gave an insight into her charisma and her vulnerability - Aristotle Onassis came in for a bit of a kicking from whoever wrote the words - but rightfully it was mostly about the voice.

I also naturally went to see Juliet's balcony. I came to mock, discovered that this was actually the house that the Capulets lived in in ye olden days and so ceased mocking, and then discovered that the balcony was only added in the 1940s and so went back to mocking again. There is a bronze statue of the young lady, the cupping of the right breast of which is supposed to bring luck. The only member of our travelling party who did so was a retired Anglican bishop; make of that what you will.

I have made another of my occasional futile day trips, this time to Wilmslow. I normally say at this point that the highlight was a Greggs sausage roll, but in a place as posh as that I went instead for a chicken kebab wrap from an chi-chi independent restaurant, which was indeed the best thing about the journey. But for the record Wilmslow does, somewhat to my surprise, have a branch of Greggs.