PotCXXIpouri - another slight return

 Still catching up with what you all missed while my broadband wasn't working. I attended the Bradford Literature Festival's inevitable, and welcome, J.B. Priestley event, which this year addressed 'English Journey'. Commissioned by the prominent left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz this is an account of the great man's travels around England at the height of the depression. A precursor to, and an inspiration for, Orwell's 'Road to Wigan Pier' it shares that book's unwillingness to look away from the effect of poverty on society and, in particular, on children. Not so, of course, the members of the governing party in the U.K. Against the background of a report showing that the cohort of children born during the period of austerity brought in by Cameron and Osborne are shorter both than their predecessors and than children of the equivalent age elsewhere in Europe, these two smug poshos turned up at the Covid enquiry to deny that the same austerity had anything to do with the country's unpreparedness for the pandemic. 

A more recent example of self inflicted economic and social damage has also been in the news concerning the seventh anniversary of the referendum on leaving the EU, a referendum that, by no coincidence, took place whilst the same two deadbeats were in charge. I gave my views here at the time - and indeed here at the time as well - and haven't changed them at all. Professor John Curtice (for the benefit of overseas readers let me point out that when it comes to psephology in the UK the Prof is 'the man') says that the reason the polls currently show a majority thinking that leaving the UK was a mistake isn't so much that people have changed their minds as that a significant number of those who voted Leave have subsequently died. Good.

Back to the No Future

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." 

- George Orwell, 1984

The latest accusation levelled at DC is that he has retrospectively amended previous blog posts to make it look as if he predicted the current pandemic. On behalf of bloggists everywhere I wish to protest most strongly at his actions. If readers start assuming that items have been reworked then no one will, for example, believe my post from some years back in which I correctly forecast the result of the 2020 Grand National.

Dominic Cummings reflects on his current career prospects

Somehow one gets the feeling that even if Dom's future self travelled back in time to pass on the secrets of the future, that he would reject the advice on the basis that he knew better anyway.

Mr and Mrs Miller

"Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on - that is, badly." 

- George Orwell

James' new windmill put in an appearance for this week's game, but despite what Orwell wrote in 'Animal Farm' things definitely got better. Orwell's mill represented the industrialisation of the Soviet Union, whereas James' represents Up 1 sometimes and Down 1 on other occasions, which perhaps explains the difference. Or more likely it was the tweaks made to the skirmish rules regarding how far in front of the formed body they could be. In either event it was a very enjoyable first half (or possibly third) of the game. I've got much more morale and significantly outnumber the French in the centre, but am probably going to quite quickly lose the town of San Honore. The rules are getting close to being finished I think. I am a bit confused about how skirmishers get pushed back, but perhaps that's just me.

Elsewhere, heat has returned to the Casa Epictetus after nine days. This may come as a disappointment to some of the ladies of West and North Yorkshire, but frankly I need a rest. A bit of warmth is just the right environment for some painting  so I was glad to receive my recent order from Newline Designs. If you recall I had originally bought two chariots and two packs of crew only to discover that each pack of crew contained sufficient for two chariots. Naturally I therefore bought two more chariots. To my surprise each of the new arrivals has a crew in the pack already, leaving me, as before, with two extra crews. This one could run and run.

The laser cutter is still hors de combat.

From the age of uniformity

"Sameness is the mother of disgust, variety the cure" - Petrarch

The main purpose behind the Great War project was to give me something to paint whenever I felt like painting. As it happens I have indeed been in the zone for a few days and so things have moved forwards. Inevitably this has required further thought on a variety of practical issues related to the rules and how it will all be manifested in a game - I'm thinking for example of basing conventions for crewed weapons - but it has also made me think about the aesthetics. Odd, perhaps, to focus on that aspect when everything is khaki and grey, but it's a side of things that does bother me.

My personal approach to painting has always been to do what is required to make the figures look OK when viewed en masse on the tabletop, and frankly not to waste time or energy by doing any more than that. I have continued with that approach into this project. The relatively small number of poses often available for figures has also never bothered me that much. Indeed for the rather stylised manner in which I have been playing Napoleonics (C&C rules on a hex/offset square grid) it seemed to me that uniformity in the ranks actually enhanced the look of the thing. Not so with WWI, my first foray into anything remotely modern for more than forty years. What one wants here, I think, and even when viewed at arms length, is the opposite: heterogeneity. I don't think the poses have to be radically different from each other - there are only so many things that one is likely to do with a rifle on a battlefield - just sufficiently so that the brain doesn't identify them all as identical as the eye scans across them.

I have no problem with doing a bit of figure remodelling; it scratches the same itch as painting. Sometime I shall have to post a photo of the model of a Napoleonic hussar dancing with a lady of dubious virtue that I wasted some time putting together a few years ago.  Anyway, as previously reported I have been chopping up Tommies throwing Mills bombs to try to get some variety, which as a consequence has left me with some customised riflemen as well. All in all the British should be OK. The problem is ordinary German riflemen. For perhaps obvious reasons most late war German infantry produced in plastic are Stormtroopers. I shall either have to up the level of my modelling skills, buy some metal figures or let the Germans do all the attacking.

Doubleplusgood

And so to the theatre. The West Yorkshire Playhouse was the venue for Headlong Theatre’s interpretation of 1984. I didn’t anticipate a bundle of laughs, and so it proved. Orwell’s prophetic (a population always under surveillance through screens, the mass of the people kept subservient and amused by manufactured entertainment, internal oppression justified by constant conflict overseas and exaggerated threat of terrorism at home) and gloomy (“the future is a boot stamping on a human face forever”) satire/warning was as disturbing as ever. 

Headlong bill themselves as a digital company and I had rather wondered what that meant. Well, simply enough it means that they use lots of video. Indeed some quite important parts of the action (those in the back room of the antiques shop) took place off stage and were relayed and projected. The staging was also excellent in more conventional ways with a clever coup de theatre when Winston Smith was taken in for interrogation. Also clever was the use of the book’s often overlooked (and in some senses cheerful) appendix to create a device where Smith’s diaries were framed as being read by a book group – a fairly fatuous book group at that.

So an excellent production. If I have a gripe it is about the source material. The first part of the book, in which the dystopian vision of IngSoc, two minute hates and newspeak is unfolded, is of the highest class. But I have never really bought into the second part: brainwashing, betrayal and rats in Room 101. Why didn’t they just shoot him – and her come to that? Given the unpersonning of various other characters along the way then why invest all that time in Smith?