Return (slight happy returns)

 I've been away on a bit of a road trip, including to this place:

I haven't got anything much to report, I'm just trying to get back in the habit of posting. There's a game tomorrow; details over at James's blog.

I have had a little play around with the Peter Pig Mexican Revolution figures that I bought recently. Were I to buy any more - which of course I won't - I am leaning towards basing them singly and using sabot bases to allow the playing of different sets of rules (*). I bought 15mm figures because PP do a complete range, but wonder if they are a bit small to be based in that way. Here's where I am at the moment:

* And I do have rather a few sets which could be tried out, hypothetically.

Return

Return often and take me,

beloved sensation, return and take me -
when the memory of the body awakens,
and old desire runs again through the blood;
when the lips and the skin remember,
and the hands feel as if they touch again.

​Return often and take me at night,
when the lips and the skin remember...

                    - C. P Cavafy

​

Some Napoleonics - mainly

 It's been a while since wargaming featured here, but there has been a bit going on in the background. Mark and I had a run through of Friedland in the annexe using C&C, but came nowhere near finishing, which was a bit disconcerting as the ability to play a game in an evening has always been a big attraction to me. I don't think we were playing particularly slowly; just an effect of having lots of troops on the table perhaps. Before setting the game up I had a vague idea of the strategic significance of the battle, but couldn't have told you any of the tactical detail. Having read some background it reminded my why I started tweaking the victory conditions on official C&C scenarios. Historically the Russians were trying to evacuate across a river, but don't get any victory points for doing so, only for destroying enemy units.

Speaking of rivers, the next game I played in was a couple of weeks later in the legendary wargames room of James 'Olicanalad' Roach was set in the Peninsula and featured a British attempt to deny a bridge to an advancing French force. You can just see the bridge at the top of the photo. The French collapsed rather quickly, and in the after game debrief there some tentative suggestions that the scenario would have been better if they had a bit more morale. When we met again the following week for another peninsula game James admitted that he'd cocked the calculation up and the French should have had twice as much morale; proving I suppose that sometimes one's instincts are correct.

The new game, which took place over the last couple of weeks, proved to be the best of the three, despite me as the French losing to a tag team of British commanders in Peter the first week and Mark the second. If I could summarise James's intention in developing a Piquet variant specific to the Peninsula, it isn't especially to recreate history. You will recall that, by and large, British lines always beat French columns. Instead it is to make an enjoyable game in which the French, using columns, can sometimes close with and overwhelm British lines, but will sometimes be repelled by firepower. The rules have a lot of moving parts which all need to gel together, but if I was going to pick one change which occurred over the time we have been working on them, and which appears to have helped, it would be the handling of skirmishers. When we started we kept trying to make skirmishers do what they did - or what we thought they did - historically. Where we have ended up is using them in an essentially abstract way to make it easier for troops that have them to move up to charge range. It all comes back to whether one is striving for a historical simulation or an enjoyable game.

Lastly, you are all no doubt wondering how I am getting on painting the packs of Peter Pig Mexican Revolution figures I bought some weeks ago. Well, in the way these things always work out, such limited painting as I have been doing has been of some Kennington Grenadiers à Cheval.

Medieval Military Combat (slight return)

 Just over a year ago I reviewed Dr Tom Lewis's 'Medieval Military Combat' and so too, albeit in a more dismissive fashion, did Graham Evans over at 'Wargaming for Grown-ups'. In Volume XXXII of The Ricardian, journal of the Richard III Society and hot off the presses, is another review. This one is by Peter Hammond, Research Officer of the society, and author of many books on the period himself. 

He is of much the same mind as me on Lewis's tome. His concluding paragraph reads:

"This book is an interesting mixture. As described it contains some interesting practical points which are not usually discussed. It is not well written, being badly organized but it is worth reading for the discussion of battle aspects not often covered. Unfortunately there are very few illustrations, all in black and white and very badly reproduced and the index is poor."

So, worth a read, but borrow don't buy.

Time Becomes Space

 And so to the opera. For some reason this blog has been neglecting its self-ordained role of bringing reviews of the most life-affirming of the arts to wargamers who don't give a toss. Half a dozen operas have passed without comment this year (plus this one which snuck in somehow), but Parsifal is going to get the treatment, not least because it lasted five hours.

Musically, it was wonderful. Five hours seems a long time (*), but as with other Wagner operas that I have seen it actually goes very quickly, especially if one takes the sensible option of just surrendering to it without constantly trying to estimate when the the next interval is. Plus of course, taking the other sensible option of going to the toilet first. As with Ian McKellen's 'King Lear' I think one should say to oneself that if those on the stage can stick it out then so can I.

The semi-staged concert production was striking, with the orchestra - on top form - present on stage, but not able to be seen clearly because of a slightly opaque curtain between them and the singers and bright lights shining from the back. The singers were uniformly excellent, although I would pick out Katerina Karnéus as Kundry for special mention. Kundry, incidentally, undergoes almost as big a change between acts as Puccini's Mimi. 

But what is it all about? Good question; buggered if I know. Superficially, it's about the Grail legend Parsifal being the German version of Percival. I have seen it suggested that Wagner had convinced himself that the word was related to the Parsees of India, which seems odd because they are Zoroastrians, and this is overtly Christian, albeit layered with even more mumbo-jumbo than normal. It could be about compassion, but the characters spend more time placing curses on each other than one would expect from truly compassionate people (**). It's possible that there is some connection being drawn between castration and celibacy - this is before Freud of course - or perhaps it's a commentary on the risks men run from women who may emasculate them, Kundry again; she really is the most interesting character involved.

The programme went to great lengths to say that if one didn't know that Wagner was anti-semitic then one couldn't deuce it from the libretto. Maybe not, but equally one can see why in later decades sinister types would seize on operas about groups of uniformed Aryans with unresolved homoerotic tensions whose destiny can only be fulfilled on the arrival of a charismatic leader. 

* Probably because it is

** In particular the question of who had originally placed the curse on Kundry confused me enormously. If anyone knows, please leave it in the comments.

Three Strong Women

 "A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done" 

- Marge Piercy

Yesterday's post ended with a reference to Catherine of Aragon and - is it planned? is it coincidence? - it was that queen, as portrayed by Bea Segura, who stole the show in 'Henry VIII' at the Globe a couple of weeks ago. In fact the Spanish actress was the only good thing about it, it being all too clear why no one ever puts on this collaboration between Shakespeare and John Fletcher. I'd certainly never seen it before and couldn't have told you anything about it beyond the fact that it was an accident with a cannon on the opening night that led to the burning down of the original Globe. This production gave a co-writing credit to Hannah Khalil who had been tasked with making it focussed more on the female characters. She did this by importing lines from other plays and poetry by Shakespeare and giving them to Catherine, Princess Mary and Ann Bullen (sic). I'm not entirely sure it worked, because hearing Mary speak lines which one knew really belonged to Lear just made me wish I was watching that play instead. Anyway, Segura was great as a woman determined not to be pushed aside for the convenience of others and it was good to be back in the Globe again after it had been forced to close by the plague.

Much better was 'The Corn Is Green' at the National Theatre, although as it cost literally a dozen times as much to watch then so it should have been. This semi-autobiographical piece by Emlyn Williams about a poor child from a Welsh-speaking mining community being mentored by an inspirational teacher and eventually winning a scholarship to Oxford, was heart-warming without being sickly sweet. Even a stage full of miners, faces blacked with coal dust and singing hymns, seemed to work in context. Nicola Walker as Miss Moffat, overcoming the class and gender prejudices ranged against her, was excellent. The evening also provided something I'd never seen before when the backstage machinery to bring the set on for the second half malfunctioned, and so the actors simply performed with a third of the stage bare. The show must go on. 

The third really good performance of a strong woman that I have seen recently was that of Bettrys Jones, as Ellen Wilkinson, in Caroline Bird's 'Red Ellen'. Wilkinson was the only female Labour MP elected in the October 1924 election, served in the wartime coalition government and was the second ever female cabinet member as Minister for Education under Attlee, before her untimely death in 1947. There's a lot to fit in, from the Jarrow March to the Spanish Civil War, and the staging if pacey, with lots of set and costume changes occurring before our eyes. A host of supporting characters are played by the small cast - including Einstein, Hemingway, Churchill and Herbert Morrison - but the focus is always on Ellen herself, who is never offstage. 

As the programme says: forever on the right side of history, forever on the wrong side of life.

The Alteration

 I find that I didn't say everything I wanted to yesterday. I think I was distracted by listening to Test Match Special and wondering if there was an alternative timeline in which England were any good. Jonathan Agnew reported that after the first day's play he had been asked by the ICC's anti-corruption team whether he thought there was anything suspicious about the loss of so many England wickets in such a short time. He had given the only possible answer: "Haven't you been watching for the last two years?".

Anyway, what I wanted to mention was that I don't mind alternative history fiction, because it's, you know, fiction. I'm not talking about about time-travelling fantasy where someone goes back to the middle ages with a machine gun, but simply a novel set somewhere sometime where things have turned out differently. Robert Harris's 'Fatherland' would an example probably known to many readers (*), and a Nazi victory in the Second World War has spawned many others. The only one of these currently on my to-read list is Philip K. Dick's 'The Man In The High Castle'. However, this blog's recommendation in the genre is 'The Alteration' by Kingsley Amis.

The two main alternative path taken in the book is no Protestant Reformation, and therefore no Enlightenment and so scientific progress has been slowed and restricted. The Roman Catholic church now dominates a totalitarian Europe through what is a cross between the Inquisition and the Gestapo. The novel is set in the 1970s and a number of people prominent in that decade pop up in different guises, as do many historical figures. There are many allusions to familiar cultural artefacts in this different context, but perhaps the one to highlight is an alternative history book within a book: 'The Man In The High Castle' by Philip K. Dick in which Henry VIII has had a son by Catherine of Aragon.

* If, of course, the blog had many readers in the first place.

The Armchair General

 I am not particularly a fan of counterfactual history, but have been reading 'The Armchair General' by John Buckley.

The premise of the book is not so much what if things had happened differently, but more specifically what if allied commanders had made different decisions at various stages during the Second World War. The structure is that for each of eight scenarios the reader is presented with binary options, then for each of those routes there is another binary option and so on, leading to a small number of alternative situations. The author claims these to be 'plausible rather than fantastical' and that seems a reasonable description to me.

The reality is that readers will go back and take all the alternative paths anyway, so it ends up being not so much one counterfactual history as a group of possible outcomes collectively illustrating why and how choices were made. The areas covered are all of a strategic nature with Market Garden being the most operational.

I don't think there are any huge surprises in it, especially for the sort of person who reads wargaming blogs, but it's well put together and I found it an enjoyable read.