To His Lost Lover

Now they are no longer

any trouble to each other

he can turn things over, get down to that list

of things that never happened, all of the lost

unfinishable business. 

For instance… 

for instance, how he never clipped and kept her hair, or drew a hairbrush 

through that style of hers, and never knew how not to blush

at the fall of her name in close company. 

How they never slept like buried cutlery 

two spoons or forks cupped perfectly together, 

or made the most of some heavy weather 

walked out into hard rain under sheet lightning, 

or did the gears while the other was driving. 

How he never raised his fingertips 

to stop the segments of her lips 

from breaking the news, 

or tasted the fruit 

or picked for himself the pear of her heart, 

or lifted her hand to where his own heart 

was a small, dark, terrified bird

in her grip. Where it hurt.

                   - Simon Armitage

Especially for you

“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it." - Voltaire

This report from the Guardian demonstrates once again the reach and power of this blog. No sooner does one of our readers demand something, than it happens. It goes without saying that it will, of course, never be as good as the first time round.

More Piquet/FoB hybrid in the Peninsular

Just a quick note to point out for anyone who hasn't seen it that the previously arid desert of James' blog has flowered once again. As well as the usual lovely photos there is in the comments section a concise summary of where the rules currently stand. But you should ignore the picture in which James claims to be able to detect frustration on my part. Despite spending all night with less troops, an inferior commander, a worse deck, hardly any initiative, and a rapidly diminishing pile of morale chips, I was still my normal cheerful self.

It is just possible, however, that I might be feeling that the macro elements of the game continue to conspire to prevent a successful refinement of the micro elements.

A food critic speaks

"I’m just saying if I narrowly decided to order fish at a restaurant that was known for chicken, but said it was happy to offer fish, and so far I’ve been waiting three hours, and two chefs who promised to cook the fish had quit, and the third one is promising to deliver the fish in the next five minutes whether it’s cooked or not, or indeed still alive, and all the waiting staff have spent the last few hours arguing amongst themselves about whether I wanted battered cod, grilled salmon, jellied eels or dolphin kebabs, and if large parts of the restaurant appeared to be on fire but no-one was paying attention to it because they were all arguing about fish, I would quite like, just once, to be asked if I definitely still wanted the fish."

A chap with a beard

So says Jay Rayner, restaurant reviewer for the Observer. I'm not sure what he's on about but it's the sort of zen parable from which, following prolonged meditation, relevance and meaning may emerge.

"And he nipped them in the bud, right at the end."

I've never met My Rayner, but I did once meet his late mother Claire, the agony aunt, at a charity quiz hosted by Bob 'Can I have a P please?' Holness. Has anyone else noticed how my claims to fame are getting smaller and smaller as time goes by?

WSS (not) revisited - not?

I can't keep up with what's going down in UK politics so I'm not even going to try, other than pointing to what I said in the comments on this post.

I am instead going to write about wargaming. Right back at the beginning of this blog there was a big focus on the War of the Spanish Succession. Then, during the great wanderings of 2012 and 2013, I managed to lose all the infantry that I had painted and vowed not to replace them. However, tempus fugit etc. etc. and Strelets are, it seems, about to launch a Marlburian range. Is six years sufficient time to have sulked?

Look at that, not only is the WSS back, but so are the rhetorical questions. It's deja vu all over again.

Pot87pouri(a)

Those of you in the UK may have noticed that all the newspapers are now suggesting that there is going to be a leadership election within the Labour Party. Obviously this blog has a lot of journalist followers.

I have now watched 'A Bridge Too Far' up to the point where Corporal Hancock gives Colonel Urquhart a cup of tea and the colonel, in a very polite and restrained manner, describes his plans as having been 'scuppered'. I can confirm both that it is the Jeeps that have gone missing rather than the folding motorbikes and also that I probably won't be watching any further. There is far too much jaunty music for my taste.

Pot87pouri

Before anyone else points it out, there have indeed been two Pot85pouris. The house rule is friendly ties and so this becomes number 87.

There's lots of stuff happening in Otley at the moment. This weekend for example is the Folk Festival, which means the streets are full of people who look like this:

I believe that the next lot are meant to be crows although why that means they have to whack each other with sticks I don't know.

This bunch are dancing with swords, although my photograph doesn't really show it very well; nice waistcoats though.

And then there were these ladies, who took it all very seriously indeed, but in fairness had a really slick entrance and exit routine.

Anyway, that's enough pot/kettle mockery of other people's strange hobbies so let's turn instead to the recent Vintage Transport show. There weren't many traction engines this year, which is a great shame, but there were a few military vehicles including this one which gave rise to a question in my mind.

In the film 'A Bridge Too Far' (and I am specifically talking about the film rather than reality) Sean Connery complains at one point that something hasn't arrived and is consoled in traditional British fashion with a cup of tea. The question I am asking myself is whether the thing that has gone missing was a jeep itself or a specially designed airborne motorbike such as is strapped to the front of this one. It's bugging me more than it should and I may have to watch the film again. Inevitably it will be a hugely disappointing experience and another fond memory of my youth will be spoiled.

Finally, I expect that you are all waiting eagerly for my insider's view on the latest shenanigans within the Labour Party. In particular you want to know what prompted the aborted attempt to abolish the position of Deputy Leader, an attempt which seemed to come from nowhere and catch everyone, especially the incumbent Deputy Leader himself, by surprise. My view is that we should interpret it to mean that Jezza is intending to stand down fairly soon and the manoeuvre was driven by the wish for Tom Watson not to be in interim charge while a new leader is elected. You will recall that the pair have very different views on the big issue of the day. You heard it here first.

Trial and mostly error

There are many interesting and important things happening, both in the world at large and in the Casa Epictetus. I am however going to write about wargaming. We have spent a couple of Wednesdays on a playtest game of the latest version of the hybrid Piquet/FoB rules for the Peninsular War. Sadly, it turned out to be of fairly limited use in determining the current state of things because of a legacy element from each of the predecessor sets.

As I've mentioned before classic Piquet occasionally throws up completely one-sided runs of initiative. We put up with it because we rather like the less dramatic, but still significant, fluctuation that one normally gets. Unfortunately in this game one side didn't get to shoot for an entire evening while the other marched up and assaulted them, making it hard to determine how the ranged fire attack and defence factors were working out. In the latest edition of the newer rules there is a nice pre-game phase, which once again we rather like. This time around there was good and bad news for the Allies. On the one hand they were able to deploy across an area more than twice as large than that usually allowed; on the other hand 60% of their force was late to arrive, leaving only a small number of units to take advantage of this set up flexibility. The part which was left was itself half comprised of cavalry, hardly a balanced force. The rest of the army did eventually turn up, just in time to do nothing.

Where does that leave us? Well, I think we all agreed that the present skirmish rules were better in theory than they are in practice and there was once again much discussion as to why most other rules writers don't really bother with them. I think there is a consensus that we would like some Napoleonic chrome, but firstly not at the cost of unplayability and secondly not the sort of chrome that has more to do with wargaming urban myth than with what happened historically. On top of that, judging from James' parting comments, our hybrid is going to look very much like classic Piquet anyway.

This bit is really an aide memoire for me, but if I were to be asked which bits from FoB 2 that I would like to keep they would be:

• Different defence dice based on quality
• No difference between Cavalry and Infantry move cards (although I'd be happy to see Type III/IV cards)
• Melees fought to conclusion
• Ability to halt units with opportunity fire
• Lull cards rather than Dress the Lines/Command Indecision
• No Major Moral test until zero morale chips
• The pre-game set-up (but I would prefer to see the return of the chance to gain extra cards in the deck)

Things in the hybrid from FoB 2 that I would be prefer to see go:

• Losing morale for stand losses
• Rallying back the first stand loss
• Army Morale cards affecting the phasing player
• Moving and manoeuvring on the same card 
• Always having to remember if one rolled odd or even

The things that seem to have wandered in from elsewhere that I like:

• Perpendicular beaten zone for infantry
• Charging from a flank requiring the centre of the front of the charging unit to be behind the front of the charged unit (plus similar rule for charging the rear)
• The firing from the flank definition, which I can't quite articulate at the moment, but is essentially the one from Lasalle.

Things I'm agnostic about:

• Morale challenges
• Superior numbers in melee (I think the FoB 2 system may work when we work out what tactics to use)
• Rallying - initiative pip or morale chip

Bo-Jo no-show

"Your wife and your wheelbarrow — lend them to no one." - Traditional Luxembourg proverb

I have been closely studying the photographs of the protesters that added to to Boris Johnson's humiliation in Luxembourg yesterday, because let's be clear that most of his problems were self-inflicted. Anyway, I have been unable to spot this blog's Luxembourg correspondent among them. It could be that something in his contract as a European bureaucrat precludes him from leaving his golden throne to take part, although I am sure he's the sort of chap who would find a way round that. In fact, now I think about it, there was something familiar about the grey-haired lady in the striped dress.

A statesman doesn't turn up

Virtually every report that I have read about the event states that the Grand Duchy is the EU's smallest country - which it isn't - and neglects to mention that it has the highest GDP per capita - which it does by some way. Who'd have thought the British press could be so ill informed about our European neighbours?

Wise Children

And so to the theatre. I have been rather remiss so far this year in posting theatre reviews. Amongst those I have overlooked was what was the best thing I have seen for years. Emma Wilson, following her abrupt departure from The Globe (she directed amongst others 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' and 'Twelfth Night') set up her own company. Their first production was an adaptation of Angela Carter's last novel 'Wise Children' and she also chose that name for the company. 'Wise Children', the play, was a simply wonderful mixture of music, dance and drama, spanning several decades in the life of twin chorus girls with they and other characters being played by multiple artists (of both genders) - and indeed puppets - as they aged.

I therefore jumped at the chance to see the next production of Wise Children,the company, despite it being an otherwise unattractive sounding adaptation of 'Malory Towers', a series of Enid Blyton books for children about a girl's boarding school.

And I'm glad that I did, because it once again turned out to be an absolute treat, this time with cartoon-like animations adding an extra dimension to the singing and energetic movement of the cast. I've never read the books, so can't comment on fidelity to the original. Here it was done as a sort of fluffier version of 'Lord of the Flies', with a group of children (all the actors obviously being adults) left alone but in this case choosing kindness and harmony rather than the opposite.

It was a summer of adaptations of children's books from the mid twentieth century, because I had a couple of months ago seen 'Swallows and Amazons', also recreated by adult actors. Arthur Ransome is more to my taste as an author than Blyton and not just because he married Trotsky's secretary. In fact I have quite recently read 'Great Northern?', the last of the books in the Swallows and Amazons series, which I had unaccountably never managed to read as a child. This play was also very well done, with the representation on stage of the sailing of small dinghies across a large lake being simple but very effective. As with the novels the best part went to Nancy Blackett; one can see why Ransome named his own boat after her.

The Human Bee

I became a human bee at twelve.

when they gave me my small wand,

my flask of pollen,

and I walked with the other bees

out to the orchards.

I worked first in apples,

climbed the ladder

into the childless arms of a tree

and busied myself, dipping and

tickling,

duping and tackling, tracing

the petal’s guidelines

down to the stigma.

Human, humming,

I knew my lessons by heart:

The ovary would become the fruit,

the ovule the seed,

fertilised by my golden touch,

my Midas dust.

I moved to pears,

head and shoulders

lost in blossom; dawn till dusk,

my delicate blessing.

All must be docile, kind. unfraught

for one fruit –

pomegranate, peach

nectarine, plum, the rhymeless

orange

And if an opening bud

was out of range,

I’d jump from my ladder onto a

branch

and reach.

So that was my working life as a bee,

till my eyesight blurred,

my hand was a trembling bird

in the leaves,

the bones of my fingers thinner than

wands.

And when they retired me,

I had my wine from the silent vines,

and I’d known love,

and I’d saved some money  –

but I could not fly and I made no

honey.

           - Carol Ann Duffy

The Arrival of the Bee Box

I ordered this, clean wood box
Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the coffin of a midget
Or a square baby
Were there not such a din in it.

The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight
And I can’t keep away from it.
There are no windows, so I can’t see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit.

I put my eye to the grid.
It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering.

How can I let them out?

It is the noise that appalls me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!

I lay my ear to furious Latin.

I am not a Caesar.
I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.
They can be sent back.
They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.

I wonder how hungry they are.
I wonder if they would forget me
If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.
There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,
And the petticoats of the cherry.

They might ignore me immediately
In my moon suit and funeral veil.
I am no source of honey
So why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.

The box is only temporary.

                   - Sylvia Plath

O Ubi Campi!

"O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint
Agricolas, quibus ipsa, procul discordibus armis,
Fundit humo facilem victum justissima tellus!"

                       Virgil, The Georgics, Book II

I had a brief conversation with the Poet Laureate last night, which is not a boast that one often sees in wargames blogs. Simon Armitage was reading from and discussing his latest book 'Still: A Poetic Response to Photographs of the Somme Battlefield'.  His 'poetic response' to the Somme was in fact a reworking of Virgil's Georgics, a poem first published in 29 BC on the theme of farming and animal husbandry. I will freely confess that his explanation of why he chose to do that and what it all means went completely over my head. Maybe it had something to do with the Roman road between Albert and Bapaume, maybe it was that Virgil's poem was really a celebration of the peace under the Emperor Augustus following years of civil war. You will get no enlightenment here.

What you will get from me, I suspect, is a series of poems about bees, starting for now with this translation of Book IV of the Georgics by Peter McDonald. My own interpretation of this is that it's a metaphor for how collective cooperation is the best way to run society, providing the most security for us all. Maybe I'm just seeing what I want to see. Bear in mind when you read it that, for reasons I have never understood, the Romans apparently believed that swarms of bees spontaneously generated from the carcasses of sacrificed cattle. 

The Bees 

1
When the last of the sunlight goes, and shadows stretching from the shade of trees and bushes, long hedgerows, join up together to invade wild grasses and the flat pasture, turning from shadow into night, then the bees, scattered far and near, take notice, and start on their flight back to those walls and roofs they know, beehives where their small bodies rest between dark and dawn; they go over the threshold, noisy, fast, massing in hundreds at the doors, and pour past into their close cells, cramming chambers and corridors while the last of the daylight fails: sleep silences the working hive and leaves it quiet as the grave.

2
For bees put no trust in the sky when storms come up with an east wind, and seldom venture far away from their stations when downpours impend: instead, they draw the water off and stick close to their city walls where any flights they take are brief; as the wind blows and the rain falls they steady themselves through turbulence by taking with them little stones (as frail boats, faced with violence of gales and tides, take ballast on), and hold their given course along the clouds, balanced, and balancing.

3
A wonder, how they reproduce: without courtship, or lovemaking, without letting their hearts unloose nerves and sinews like so much string, without the agony of birth, they gather offspring from the leaves and softer herbs, draw with each breath pollen and children for the hives, providing themselves with a fresh ruler, and tiny citizens, to take the place of some who crash against the earth, onto hard stones, brought level by their single love for flowers and honey-vintages (the glorious legacy they leave behind them, in trust for the ages), although the time that waits for them is short enough, and not beyond a seventh summer; yet the same nation and race will soldier on, deathless in spite of time’s attacks, in cells and palaces of wax.

4
All of these things have given pause to the bees’ watchers and guardians whenever they ascribe the cause to some influx, some influence over and above the natural, an exhalation from beyond or an element more ethereal than air itself - maybe the mind of God, that strengthens as it runs in earth and sky, or turns in deep acres of churning oceans, in herds of cattle, flocks of sheep, the wild beasts and the harmless beasts, in life that feels along a thread from its first movement to the last, finishing where it all started, and never reaching a true end; this keeps the bees away from death when, at the last, they all ascend into the skies they lived beneath,to fly between undarkened spheres in heaven, and the many stars.

1 part PVA: 4 parts water

"You know, if they didn't have the model train, they wouldn't have gotten the idea for the big trains." 

- from 'A Mighty Wind'

And so to the theatre. I have been to see LipService ("The Laurel and Hardy of literary deconstruction" according to the Guardian) perform their new show 'Strangers on a Train Set'. This piece spoofs a whole series of train related films, although - presumably deliberately - not Hitchock's 'Stangers on a Train'. The parodies were framed by the concept of model railway enthusiasts demonstrating their layout, with the small figures that they placed on the table acting out the scenes and even in the end developing a level of self-awareness. And speaking of self-awareness, it was, shall we say, interesting to sit in an audience which was laughing at the idea of sad middle-aged men who seek to escape real life by recreating a world in miniature and by engaging in debates about the accuracy and authenticity of their models. I consider myself fortunate that I don't know anyone like that.

Peter and James realise the infantry's buttons are the wrong type of brass

It was all very funny, with non-anorak targets including 'The 4:50 from Paddington', 'Brief Encounter', knitting and the blue colour of energy drinks (apparently the secret ingredient is woad). I did wonder if one or two of the jokes weren't perhaps too niche for a general audience. There is a scene in which a character who has been bashed about by a rooftop chase along the train is removed for running repairs and then finds himself clutching a paintbrush much larger than himself and complaining that he mysteriously smells of varnish, which I found very amusing, but seemed to baffle my companion for the evening. Even more arcane perhaps was their take on 'The Railway Children'. According to them the landslip which causes Jenny Agutter to wave her underwear about was caused by the modeller using the wrong ratio of PVA glue to water and the cat litter therefore not sticking to the side of the hill properly. We've all been there.

York Army Museum

The UK government has, for its own low motives, adopted the language of war when discussing the subject of relations with our closest neighbours and most significant trading partners (there was a thought-provoking opinion piece on the subject by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian yesterday); it's all enough to make one wish that one wasn't interested in military history. However, I am indeed interested in the subject and so have been to York Army Museum, in particular to see their current D-Day exhibition before it closes.

The photo above explains the remit of the museum and they cover it in great detail. The regiments involved have antecedents dating back to the troops raised by James II to counter the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion in 1685 and in the subsequent three centuries been involved in actions across the world. I like a museum to have plenty of historical artefacts and here there are more than I can probably list: a standard carried at Dettingen in 1743, the flag that was raised over Quebec in 1759 to signify its capture by the British, the helmet worn by General Sir James Scarlett during the Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava (complete with dents made by Russian sabres), many medals and decorations including several Victoria Crosses, and much else besides.

There's a captured Great War German Machine gun, which looks exactly as mine do in miniature:

There is also a British Vickers machine gun of the same period, which looks nothing like mine do in miniature and of which I have therefore not included a photo. Captured equipment comes from a variety of sources such as an Iraqi AK47 from the second Gulf War, back through German, Italian and Japanese arms of the second war, Russian items from the Crimea, French uniforms from the Peninsula and Waterloo and so on. There are also souvenirs of Britain's colonial wars including a Maori axe, making one feel that perhaps the conquest of New Zealand wasn't a fair fight, and sufficient Boer weaponry to make one feel that to make one feel that perhaps that wasn't a fair fight either. I found the following especially interesting:

I had a surrogate grandmother (after whom the younger Miss Epictetus is, in part, named) and I can remember her telling me about the street parties that were held in the East End to celebrate the relief of Ladysmith when she was a child; yes, I am that old.

Returning to my opening theme, the museum contains tributes to two members of predecessor units to the Royal Dragoon Guards who seem to me to personify why we should treat the posturings of Boorish Johnson with complete contempt. Firstly that old favourite of this blog Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart VC. It is worth remembering that this man who won Britain's highest medal for bravery and had various bits blown off serving the country in colonial wars and the First World War (and of course memorably pulled his own fingers off at one point) and spent two years as a prisoner of war in the Second World War, was in fact Belgian. Secondly, Captain Oates of Antarctic fame, a man whose quiet self-sacrifice of himself for others stands in stark contrast to our current Prime Minister's bombastic determination that everything and everyone should be subordinate to his own ego and ambition. 

Daniel Chapter 6 Verse 7

The Good Soldier Svjek (*) recently posted a comment on this blog to the effect that we really need Spitting Image at the moment. However, it seems to me that political life in Britain has transcended the ability of satire to mock it and so I am going to do something unexpected and write about wargaming.

Firstly an apology. I may have given the impression that I didn't think James would be able in the time allotted to come up with a hybrid of Classic Piquet and Field of Battle for use with his ever-growing Peninsular Napoleonic forces. Well he did, and they proved very playable. We are still in that phase of rule development where things change constantly (**), but to be fair the elements moving are either minor tweaks or are related to the bane of Napoleonic rules writers, namely skirmishers. It is period where, especially at a scale where each unit represents a battalion, one wants to be able to recreate all the different formations: line, attack column, square etc, an important element of most of which is clouds of skirmishers out in front. Nevertheless there is a very good reason why the designers of many sets of rules choose to abstract the skirmishers away, namely that it is all a bit difficult. Still, in our case one factor overrides them all: James has painted them and he is bloody well going to use them. Indications are that we'll end up with a compromise whereby they are physically present on the table, but more as a marker reflecting the state of their parent unit than anything else.

The game itself, played over two weeks, was a resounding British victory. One reason we wanted to move away from FoB was that we couldn't see how French columns could ever reach the British lines, let alone defeat them when they got there. Our first pass at the new improved rules seemed, to me at least, to suffer from the same issue, but hopefully it's more a question of fine tuning than anything fundamental. We shall try again next week with some refinements to the rally rule. The position of the French wasn't helped by my deciding to launch an impetuous cavalry charge in the belief that they could capture one of the objectives before British reinforcements arrived. They couldn't.

Going back to rules which don't bother with skirmishers, I have also had a game of C&C Napoleonics with Otley's other wargamer. We had intended to finish our game of the Möckern scenario which was still set up in the annexe, but it was so long since we played the first time that I simply reset it and we did it over again. It turned out very differently - always a good sign - but ended with the almost inevitable French victory. A good time was had by all, and now that Keith has started to get the hang of C&C the obvious thing to do is to move on to a completely different game. I think I shall reset the table for some To the Strongest!.




*  And I really hope that you have all been following the adventures of H.G Wells in Treboria on Tony's blog. That Miss Perkins is my sort of woman.

** Which of course we shall never leave.

Wahnschrank

"And do you think that unto such as you

A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew

God gave a secret, and denied it me?

Well, well—what matters it? Believe that, too!"

- Omar Khayyam

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