I have this new catch phrase at the moment. I've adopted it to remind myself that life isn't always made better by one's dreams coming true. Its fantasy realised, is nightmare and I believe it may have been something Freud once said. He was certainly paraphrased by Slavoj Žižek as if he had. The implication is, if I get what I really want, then it will not be as good as I think it will, possibly quite the opposite (actually its tempting to think that of children too after you've been stuck for a fortnight with three of them suffering from chicken pox, one after the other).
My current frustrations lie in several fields of endeavour, but the field I currently long to cultivate is the field of naval war gaming. This is partly due to my rereading Patrick O'Brian, and partly because having moved into a smaller room (to make way for the children as all fathers apparently end up doing) I have hung up three old prints my father used to own. These are scale drawings by John Gardner and depict HMS Shannon, HMS Alert and HMS Terror.
In order to finally get my head around the technical terms employed by Patrick O'Brian, as well as getting a better over view of the history involved, I've started yet another gaming blog in the hope of finding the time to run a few more naval battles. Its been more than two years since we did the last one, and I'm eager for the distraction. The problem I face however, is that none of my friends are particularly interested in Napoleonic naval combat, and I have not managed to convince any of them to read the twenty O'Brian novels that grace my shelves (I cannot bring myself to read the final, unfinished novel).
2 comments:
I too love the idea of warfare in the age of sail. The problems as I see them are:
1.To get the feel of sail you need a decent size of ship but the thought of rigging them puts me off.
2.Go smaller and whilst weather is crucial you lose the sailors perspective of the action.
3.Cost. Langton produce some lovely models but they ain't cheap. Airfix never did enough different ships to make it worthwhile investing.
We have ambitious hopes to do naval wargaming in 28mm scale once we get our 80 years war project up and running, and a lot of what I'm lookng at now has the construction of a 28mm Dutch galleon as its ultimate goal.
What I'm looking at at the moment however is on a much smaller scale, using our DBNaval rules and my little wood and paper models as we've done in the past.
Magister Militum do some nice 1/1200 scale ships, but considering how much they'd get used, they are far too expensive for me and way too much work.
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