I'm off to the seaside, which is a completely normal thing to do in late October in the UK, so just a quick post before I go. Fiasco has got its usual half-hearted response from bloggers, but personally I think they are missing the point. The consensus seems to be that it's not worth travelling a long distance for, and indeed it isn't; it's not that sort of show. But for those closer at hand it's a chance to see (and sometimes play) some games, chat to some people and buy some toys. All that, plus an excellent (and free) military museum in the same place. On the downside the lighting is crap and the parking is expensive; you can't have everything. Somewhere with better lighting and free parking is Recon, which actually takes place somewhat closer to the Casa Epictetus than Fiasco does. We don't put on anything there there because, amongst other things, it is mainly participation games, and that requires levels of imagination and interpersonal skills way beyond anything that we possess. The next one is December 7th.
James and Peter arrive at Fiasco
A trip to a wargames show involves certain rituals, one of which is that James will inevitably regale us with a story of some misadventure which befell him in the past, usually when he had been on the sauce. This time's tale seemed to be cat related - the details were a little vague - and involved him falling from an upper storey window, sliding down a sloping roof and thence to the ground. Thankfully he landed on his head and so no harm was done.
Let's finish with some Be Bop Deluxe. They were, of course, from Wakefield, so what better than 'Adventures in a Yorkshire Landscape':
So, to Fiasco. It seemed fairly well attended, especially during the morning and we fielded the usual large number of questions. Most of them were about either James' scratchbuilt buildings or the cloth. One or two people asked what rules we were using, but mention of Piquet didn't elicit any subsequent interest; trendsetters we aren't. We were putting on a fairly small game as James is being a bit dilatory on the Peninsular painting front. Anyway, it looked fine - not too crowded - and were able to play to a conclusion quite easily.
It was triumph for Wellington, but so it should have been. The scenario gave him a far better deck, command dice etc and my plan wasn't much more sophisticated than let's use our ability to move more often than the French to advance on a broad front and sweep all before us. The layout wasn't hugely different that that which we have played over over the last three weeks and the action ended up taking place on the same hill at one end of the table with, once again, a good proportion of each side's units not getting into action. It was a comfortable win and would have been even easier if I'd been paying attention; the French didn't perform too badly in the circumstances.
As for the rules:
It's hard to judge the skirmish rules because nobody really did anything with them; although, let's be honest, that probably means they're not working.
I liked the new rule that the first UI loss makes no difference to combat.
I still don't like the town fighting rules, but have no better suggestions.
The technique James has started using to encourage attacking (basically morale points for objectives, but with a twist) is excellent in principle, but the practical details don't seem to have been thought through.
Purchases were limited to what I had ordered in advance:
Slopes from Kallistra; even small hills and ridges seem to require shed loads of the things.
Gaullish chariots from Newline Designs; no explanation necessary.
Bases from Warbases; the laser cutter I have access to will only be economic for bespoke items.
I didn't take any photos, but there are a couple of our game here, both of which are somewhat spoiled by the sight of yours truly leaning heavily on the table as if I have lost the ability to stand up straight. Mr Ashton is right about the lighting.
Your bloggist likes a good talk/lecture. Apart from those that I've already written about I have fairly recently been to a number of others on subjects as diverse as Sir Walter Ralegh and Georgia O'Keefe. So I was a bit embarrassed and annoyed that I have only just discovered that The Royal Armouries runs a series of free lectures once or twice a month, especially as I lived literally next door to the place for a year. Now, if there is one type of talk that Epictetus likes above all others it's one for which he doesn't have to pay and so I took myself off to listen to the latest, given by Dr Alexander Shaw and entitled 'Band of Brothers'.
It was a comparison of the tactics employed by British rifle sections of the Second World War with those used by their German equivalents. This really isn't my area of expertise so I won't try to pass on his conclusions, beyond the general one that, for all the technological advances during it, victory in that war was still dependent on small groups of isolated men killing or being killed. It was a comprehensive run through explaining how things changed during the war and how, in the case of the British particularly, these tactics were adapted for the desert, the jungle and for urban warfare. It was fascinating stuff and I learned a lot, admittedly from a low base. Did you know that a 3" mortar could fire 60% more HE a minute than a 25pdr? Perhaps you did, but I didn't.
I'm afraid it didn't stimulate any long suppressed desire to wargame it. It's all a bit too close to home for me, a bit too recent. And let's be honest, re-fighting Sidi Rezegh one hundred and thirty seven times did nothing to endear the period to me. Nor am I really interested in small scale actions. But, I hear you say, what about gaming WWI with Through the Mud and the Blood? Well, interesting as the few games we had were, I don't sense any appetite from any of us to play it any more. And it is actually, despite one figure representing one man, at a somewhat higher level than what was discussed here. One of Dr Shaw's points was to illustrate the changes in British tactics between the wars, with the specialist sections of the Great War (rifle, Lewis gun, rifle grenades and bombers) being replaced by four homogeneous rifle sections each with a Bren gun.
James and I finished the game which had been delayed last week by the sudden appearance of the mad cat and the mad cat woman. I checked their location early on the day and they were apparently just outside Haworth (*), so it seemed that my kitchen was unthreatened. Just to be on the safe side I turned all the lights out mid-afternoon and sat quietly in the dark until it was time to go out. Anyway, the game continued to be most enjoyable and ended in a fairly comprehensive victory for the British despite them having lost the entire brigade in their centre. At one point they held all four town sections of Momio Cochinello, but by the end not only had all four battalions fled the table, but they had lost their commander killed in action and his replacement killed before he got anywhere near the action. No battle honours for them. Other than long range and ineffective artillery fire there was no fighting at all on the British right, so totes kudos goes to the left flank. I, possibly for the first time in my entire wargaming career, held my cavalry in reserve until the auspicious moment, moved them to the appropriate place, charged them at the correct target at precisely the right time and won the day. I can promise that it won't happen again. But what of the rules, you ask? They are still a work in progress of course. One problem seems to be that poor units are really, really poor and run away very easily. Part of the issue is that many of the rules are ported from the Seven Years War and in that units get a benefit from being in a linear formation. Napoleonic units didn't fight in that way or therefore get those benefits. Probably the simplest thing is to give them better morale to start with; after all one assumes that's why they were able to move on from fighting in long lines. As for the skirmish rules, I'm frankly not sure we were playing what was written down anyway. And there is still something not right about the town fighting rules. In other wargaming news:
I have been doing some painting. You will recall that I have bought some Roman Auxiliary reinforcements and so you will not be surprised that what is on the painting table is a unit of Napoleonic Prussian infantry.
I have acquired some Hexon rough ground on eBay. Second hand Hexon is usually too expensive to be worth buying once you take postage into account, but this was a reasonable price and I wanted some more for use with Square Bashing.
I have gained access to a laser cutter, been fully accredited to use it, and am going to attempt to make, initially at least, some town walls to my specific design. It will be ten days or so before I am able to have my first stab - I am going on a cultural excursion to a secret and exotic location next week - but I shall report back.
It's the Fiasco show at the Royal Armouries in Leeds this Sunday. We shall be putting on a game with James' Peninsular figures and our 'make it up as you go along' rules. If you're there please stop by and speak to Peter or James about what's going on and maybe exchange a polite, but silent, nod with me.
* "I can say with sincerity that I like cats... A cat is an animal which has more human feelings than almost any other." - Emily Brontë
“Shakespeare is a drunken savage, whose plays please only those in London and Canada.” - Voltaire
I have finally caught up with a screening of the NT Live (or, in my case, not particularly live) broadcast of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' from the Bridge Theatre. It was excellent, well worth the five star reviews it got, and I say that as someone completely over whose head sailed various pop cultural references as diverse as television talent shows and Game of Thrones. Among the things that critics raved over were the fairies portrayed by gymnasts dangling from ropes, and the fact that in a reversal of gender roles it was Oberon who was duped into falling in love with an ass. Last year at the pop-up Shakespeare's Rose Theatre in York they put on a production of the piece in which one of the fairies was a gymnast swinging about on ropes (and incidentally very impressively performing the plank on the balustrade of a balcony) while Oberon was played by a woman and Titania by a man. Like all four shows there that summer it got few reviews and those that it did receive weren't very good. Are the press biased towards the capital? [That's not a rhetorical question; it's one with a bloody obvious answer] Or perhaps it's because the Rose was quite openly a profit-making venture rather than being part of the subsidised sector. I have to tell you that the Rose have had the last laugh regarding that latter point: they have lost so much money on their second season that they have gone bust.
Audiences were significantly down year on year (as anyone who lives in the UK knows, the weather in 2018 was belting and in 2019 it wasn't), but one punter remained faithful and again saw all four plays performed throughout the summer. Actually make that two because the elder Miss Epictetus, having graduated with a 2:1, was able to join the ageing parent for 'Twelfth Night'. We both enjoyed it very much, with its fine female Malvolio, as is de rigueur these days. Hamlet (female Horatio obviously) and the Tempest were done straightish, and were all the better for that. The latter was directed by Philip Franks, a man who used to get paid to kiss Catherine Zeta Jones and whose career has, inevitably really, been on a downward spiral ever since. The play with the most obvious production twist was Henry V, which had the warrior king played by a woman. That worked fine, but the costume choices were a bit odd. Everyone was in modern dress except Maggie Bain in the title role. She started in medieval garb, moved on to be - apparently - dressed as Nelson before ending up in modern dress uniform. Presumably they were making some sort of point, but whatever it was ended up being undermined by the fact that she looked disturbingly like Michael Jackson.
Anyway, unless someone else picks up the idea and has a plan to draw in bigger crowds to an open air venue at the mercy of the Yorkshire weather, I'm afraid it's probably run its course; which I, and apparently only I, regard as a great shame.
"There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so" - Hamlet
One staple of wargames blogs is the story of how gaming has been disrupted by cats. My being bit of an ailurophobe has led to that sort of posting not featuring here - until now.... I had intended to post today about a rare double wargame Wednesday, with firstly Keith visiting the annexe for some To the Strongest!, followed by visiting the legendary wargames room to conclude the game that James and I had enjoyed so much the previous week. The first half of the plan worked fine, with Keith taking a liking to the rules, with which he was able to draw a number of parallels with the DBMM that he usually plays. I set up a simple Romans v Celts game on a featureless tabletop and suggested he played the latter as, while they would probably lose, they were were more interesting. He did so, but ignored my instructions to lose by routing the Romans in double quick time. The replacement morale rules in Ever Stronger can be very unkind to formations who stand in a couple of lines on the defensive against attackers arriving piecemeal depending on the vagaries of initiative. I think another game with more complex terrain is in order. The chariots are still crap. Events were then disrupted by the unexpected arrival of Coral Laroc - previously mentioned on this blog more than once, but whom I hadn't seen for about eighteen months - with her cat, demanding a shower (Coral not the cat). There is naturally an interesting and immensely complicated backstory as to why she arrived out of the blue after such a long gap, why she wanted to perform her ablutions at the Casa Epictetus, and why she brought the bloody cat with her. However, this blog is dedicated to, and focused on, wargaming and has no space for digressions such as that. The part that is germane to us is that when she came downstairs after her shower it transpired that the cat had disappeared. There followed a lot of finger wagging in my direction before she produced a cat-finding app on her phone, which rather led me to believe she (the cat not Coral) is a bit prone to sloping off when she feels like it. Anyway, said app identified that the cat was either behind or underneath one of the fitted cupboards in the kitchen. It was at that point that I decided to phone James and tell him not to expect me. So what we had was a cat that we could neither see not hear and which we didn't know whether was alive or dead. Now, some readers may be feeling the same sense of recognition about this scenario that I was. We were, it seemed, repeating Schrödinger's famous thought experiment about the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, in my kitchen. My main conclusion from the available evidence was that my own Verschränkung with Ms Laroc and Daizee was greater than I wished it to be. Sadly the distinguished physicist was not very specific about how one got the cat out of its box and so we were left very much to our own devices. The former Mrs Epictetus owns a Jack Russell and so my suggestion was that we commandeered that and set it to flush out the cat. However, I was persuaded of the dangers that we might end up in an 'old lady who swallowed a fly' situation with ever larger mammals needing to be introduced into the house in order to reach a conclusion. In the end therefore I reached for the toolbox and partially dismantled the kitchen, allowing cat and owner to be reunited. Instead of throttling the beast, as it deserved, Coral appropriated a tin of tuna from one of the cupboards still standing and fed it "to try to help it overcome its trauma". The world has gone mad.
The comment by nundanket (I have never been sure why there is no capital letter in that name) about Fry and Laurie being the definitive Jeeves and Wooster raises a couple of questions in my mind.
The first is that as this list appears to be getting longer, do we have any rules as to what qualifications character and actor need in order to be on it. I would suggest the following:
The original character needs to have appeared in a book or books which have subsequently been adapted for radio, television or film.
Several different adaptations need to have been made featuring different actors in the role.
One actor needs to stand out from the others to such an extent that when one reads the original literary work it is that actor whom one sees in ones mind's eye.
So, even though he clearly qualifies for the last point no one would claim that Ian McKellen is the definitive Gandalf, because let's be honest he's the only Gandalf; ditto Daniel Radcliffe et al. Colin Firth might well make the list as Mr Darcy, as we all know there have been many adaptations even if we don't know who was in them, but I'm going to disallow Clark Gable as Rhett Butler. I also won't include any of the Bonds, James Bonds because even if one has a favourite (Sean Connery obviously) the books and films are so different that visualising actor from printed page isn't by any means automatic.
That issue - congruence between book and adaptation - was raised by David Suchet when he spoke about being offered the role of Poirot in the first place. After mentioning that his brother advised him not to touch it with a barge pole, he said that his own reaction was that although it had been interpreted many times before (and rather bizarrely Suchet once played Inspector Japp to Peter Ustinov's Poirot) no one had ever really portrayed the Belgian detective as Agatha Christie wrote him; and so that's what he set out to do. Indeed it was that which caused him to decline to appear in dramatisations of those Poirot novels commissioned in the last few years by Christie's estate and written by Sophie Hannah.
What Fry and Laurie's Jeeves and Wooster shares with Suchet's Poirot, Brett's Holmes etc is fidelity to the character even when the transfer to a different medium requires the plot to be messed about somewhat. So do I concur with nundanket's view that they are also definitive? No, and the reason is because I am so very old. I have fond memories of listening to the 1970's Radio 4 dramatisations featuring Richard Briars and Sir Michael Horden and so, despite Fry having been a much more appropriate age to have played Jeeves than Horden, it is Horden's voice I hear when I read P.G. Wodehouse.
And being as old as I am, the black and white television Wooster of my youth was Ian Carmichael (with Dennis Price as Jeeves), which reminds me of another entry for my list: Ian Carmichael is the definitive Lord Peter Wimsey.
I am afraid that this blog has done it again. My recent post about W.B. Yeats contained an allusion to a quote by Marvin the Paranoid Android from Douglas Adam's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe. No sooner had it been published than Stephen Moore, the voice of said Marvin on radio and television, sadly died. He was of course a most distinguished actor - I remember seeing him as Hector in the NT's touring production of 'The History Boys' - but I'm afraid he will forever live in an awful lot of memories as a depressed machine.
Speaking of distinguished actors I have been to see David Suchet speak about his life. Just as Jeremy Brett is the definitive Holmes, so surely there is no other Poirot (who, just like Marvin, had a brain the size of a planet) to rival Suchet's.
He either finds it very easy to slip in and out of character as the Belgian detective or, despite having played many other parts in his career, the boundaries between life and fiction are beginning to blur for him. In fact he told one story about one lady who encountering him in costume just off set on location expressed a fervent hope that there hadn't been a murder locally, and when being told by him in Poirot's accent that he was merely on holiday replied by thanking him for choosing her hometown in which to vacation. It was all very entertaining and it is always thought-provoking to note what a contribution migrants to the UK and their families have made to national life: as well, of course, as his broadcaster brother John, his father was one of Sir Alexander Fleming's assistants in the early days of penicillin and his grandfather was the Fleet Street photographer who took the first photograph of Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson.
"...those who in the skirmishing or in similar circumstances in which there is no need to engage in single combat, have voluntarily and by choice placed themselves in danger"
- Polybius
The search for a mechanic for dealing with Napoleonic skirmishers within the overall framework of Piquet, one which is elegant and simple, but which also gives the appropriate flavour to the game is over. We've given up. Instead we have decided to embrace the complexity and, wouldn't you just know it, seem to have straight away stumbled across something which is actually not that complicated, looks and feels sort of right, and appears to give quite a good game. I'm sure it will undergo refinement, but for now at least the core structure seems OK. That's more than can be said for the town fighting rules, but one thing at a time.
In other wargaming news I have got off my backside and set up a game in the annexe. My new local opponent has just about got the hang of C&C, so it is therefore time to move on to different rules before he starts beating me. I have consequently set up a simple Roman vs Celts game of To the Strongest!. Doing so has made me realise that I don't have that many Roman auxiliaries. I can make up sufficient units, but they are all a bit on the numerically small side. I have therefore ordered a couple of boxes, plus the appropriate movement trays to beef them up to a more robust and aesthetically pleasing state. Looking at the table the crapness of the chariots - well known to regular readers - is also apparent and so I have ordered some of those as well. Have no fear, I won't actually get rid of any, I shall just field more and more and more.
"Throughout the whole absurd life I’ve lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind levelled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living." - Albert Camus
W.B. Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? - W.B. Yeats News of Ciaran Carson's death came on the same day that I attended a discussion to mark the centenary of Yeats' poem, held by Irish poets and academics John MacAuliffe, Martina Evans, Alan Gillis and Colette Bryce. To mark his passing they read from his work, with the final poem of the evening being 'Fear', whose opening two lines I have always rather liked: I fear the vast dimensions of eternity. I fear the gap between the platform and the train. What Carson is saying is that the human mind, being either incapable or unwilling to face up to the infinity and emptiness of time and space and our own insignificance in it as mere pawns of fate, chooses instead to focus on those smaller, more immediate risks which we think we can control. For me there is also an element of this in Yeats' much quoted (and much more quoted since June 2016) poem. The reason for the concept of a second coming (or its equivalent in other religions) is precisely to put some sort of end point on our current situation. But the poet is also saying that when the apocalypse comes - and it will come because it always has before - it won't be in one big bang, but rather in a series of mundane problems of the type we face every day anyway: the falcon will not hear the falconer for example. In other words, we may not recognise it when we see it; indeed, we may have already failed to recognise it. The panellists wisely steered away from Yeats' peculiar love life, his spiritualism and his anti-democratic political views and focused on his craftsmanship. Whilst arising from the context of the end of the Great War, the struggle for Irish independence, the Bolshevik revolution etc, the poem is timeless and relevant to any age that fears and foresees an impending calamity; which, of course, has been the case for all civilisations throughout history and will continue to be so until man finally annihilates himself completely. I won't attempt to summarise the wide-ranging discussion but it covered areas as diverse as the Riddles of the Sphinx (I didn't previously know that there were two), Brueghel's painting of Icarus (reproduced in this blog post about Auden's poem), and the band Uriah Heep (unlikely ever to be mentioned further in this blog unless I get round to writing a post about how I spent my 8,000th day alive), to the effect of becoming a father on middle-aged men (if you ask me the first ten years are the most difficult, and the subsequent ten years are the most difficult as well).
Uriah Heep
Let's finish with another Irish poet, again writing about a specific event, but with universal applicability: Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now He galloped his thunder cart and his horses
Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth And the clogged underearth, the River Styx, The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself. Anything can happen, the tallest towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted, Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one, Setting it down bleeding on the next.
Ground gives. The heaven's weight Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid. Capstones shift, nothing resettles right. Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away. - Seamus Heaney
The Irish poet Ciaran Carson has died. Much of his work was about the Troubles, and so will perhaps gain a grim new relevance soon. I have read recently that one of the ironies about the Irish border being so central to the debate about leaving the EU is that it coincides with the rest of the UK becoming divided into two mutually uncomprehending and hostile camps in the same way that Northern Ireland always has been; so perhaps that relevance is already there. Note the closing stanza of this poem (which also incidentally has a wargamer friendly title):
Jacta Est Alea
It was one of those puzzling necks of the woods
Where the South was in the North, the way
The double cross in a jigsaw loops into its matrix,
like the border was a clef
With arbitrary teeth indented in it. Here, it cut clean across the plastic
Lounge of 'The Half-Way House"; My heart lay in the Republic
While my head was in the Six, or so I was inclined.
You know that drinker's
Angle, elbow-propped, knuckled to his brow like one
Of the Great Thinkers?
He's staring at my neck in the Power's mirror,
Debating whether
He should open up a lexicon with me: the price of
Beer, of steers, the weather.
At last we talk in code. We stumble on the border.
He is pro. I am con.
We are arm in arm; inextricably, we wade into the
Rubicon
The next poem has rather more personal connotations:
The Fetch
I woke. You were lying beside me in the double bed,
prone, your long dark hair fanned out over the downy pillow.
I’d been dreaming we stood on a beach an ocean away
watching the waves purl into their troughs and tumble over.
Knit one, purl two, you said. Something in your voice made me think
of women knitting by the guillotine. Your eyes met mine.
The fetch of a wave is the distance it travels, you said,
from where it is born at sea to where it founders to shore.
I must go back to where it all began. You waded in
thigh-deep, waist-deep, breast-deep, head-deep, until you disappeared.
I lay there and thought how glad I was to find you again.
You stirred in the bed and moaned something. I heard a footfall
on the landing, the rasp of a man’s cough. He put his head
around the door. He had my face. I woke. You were not there.
“We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.”
- Rilke
I probably should have entitled this post 'Boardgames for One 3' because I have acquired another solo boardgame. As an indication of how often I play these, none at all have hit the table since I last posted on the subject. Still, when does noes not playing with things ever stop a wargamer buying more of them?
Maquis has, as the name would suggest, a WWII French resistance theme wherein the player tries to complete two missions in the face of random Milice patrols. These require a mix of scarce resources plus control of a path back to the safe house. Recruiting and deploying more resistance fighters will bring an increase in patrols, but you might need to because arrests are inevitable; or at least they have been while I have been running the show. You have fifteen days to complete both the missions, unless either all your fighters get captured first or your morale breaks.
"Listen very carefully, for I shall play this only once!"
It's one of those irritating games that gets under one's skin, because it seems that only one more go and you'll have it cracked, but the next pair of missions are always just too difficult (or, to be specific, the combination of the next two missions; I've just had one mission to shoot all the Milice coupled with one that says I can't shoot any of them until I've poisoned their dogs first). Whether it ever gets taken out and played again once I've put it away I don't know, but I'm certainly getting my money's worth for now.
Just a couple of weeks ago I featured in the 'currently listening to' widget the legendary Eddie and the Hot Rods Live at the Marquee EP, which I'm certain I have also included in a post before. Sadly it has now been announced that the band's front man, Barrie Masters, has died suddenly.
I am pretty confident that I have previously bored you with the story of how, in somewhat odd circumstances, I ended up as a bouncer at a Hot Rods concert in 77 or 78 - Squeeze were the support act - so with no further ado let's do what we want to do:
And breaking the blog's strict no repeat policy, let's get those chairs out of here:
Our morally reprehensible Prime Minister has returned to a martial frame of reference by choosing to describe the act of parliament that mandates his actions vis a vis the EU as the "Surrender Act". It seems like a fairly ineffective political ploy to me as all those who view the EU as an enemy are pretty much in his camp anyway. One question is why so significant a minority are prepared to see things in those terms.
Noel Coward's 1947 play 'Peace in our Time' is based in an alternative world where the Nazis, having achieved air superiority, have successfully invaded Britain at the end of 1940. In one scene there is a discussion about whether it would have been better if the Battle of Britain had been won.
Alma: It might have been better for America and the rest of the world, but it would not have been better for us.
Fred: Why not?
Alma: Because we should have got lazy again, and blown out with our own glory. We should have been bombed and blitzed and we should have stood up under it - an example to the whole civilised world - and that would have finished us.
Maybe unsurprisingly the play was not a success with audiences. In that 1947 run it featured Kenneth More (*), whose portrayal of Douglas Bader some years later was how the British public really wanted and expected to see themselves.
The Battle of Britain was pivotal for the world because it meant that victory over Hitler could come from the West as well as the East. But an important point lost in all the myths is not that it was a turning point for the UK, but that it wasn't. In fact it enabled things to carry on here much as they had done before despite massive changes in the rest of the world. Many of those who voted in the referendum were actually expressing a desire to live in the country they grew up in; one full of white people who had won the war. They, naturally enough, can't, and given that they are unlikely to change their minds, all the rest of us can do is wait for them to die; unfortunately they seem intent on taking us with them.
* It also featured Bernard Lee (who later on, as 'M', was part of a different fantasy in which the UK was still a significant player in world events), Dandi Nichols (who, as Else Garnett, had to put up with what that generation of British people have always actually been like) and Dora Bryan (whose wish for a Beatle for Christmas looks positively reasonable in hindsight). Let's finish with her, and at least have a smile:
