Let me take you back to… May 1983

 Traditionally (well, since the early 70s), my family always holidayed in the Tregony Holiday Park in Cornwall during the late May Whitsun week. This is because my dad’s factory used to close for that week (along with the August bank holiday) before they allowed the workers to have a choice, but we carried on anyway because errr…. Tradition? Anyhoo, I was nearing the point of desperately not wanting to holiday with my parents but still wasn’t trusted to stay home alone for a week in case I set fire to the house or just ate chocolate. To be fair, that probably would have happened but it did mean I ended up a tad teenagerish and spent most of the week bored. It didn’t help that May 1983 was wet and dull and Spandau Ballet were rampant in the charts.

But all was not lost because I had brought my own entertainment! I’d found a fishing tackle box for a quid in a discount store (for the life of me I can’t remember where) and had stocked it with my Pony Wars card figures, scenery and other useful wargaming stuff. I was also armed with the Newbury Colonial Rules and the April edition of Military Modelling with Stuart Asquith’s article on Cowpens. Well, what do you think I was going to do? Revise for my retakes? Go to St Mawes again?

So I commandeered the coffee table, sorted my carefully curated card bits and bobs into the two armies and went at it. Very slowly… It soon dawned on me that Newbury rules didn’t exactly give me the Loose Files and American Scramble I’d read about (didn’t stop me buying Cambrai to Sinai, though did it? 🤡) and worse, there was no way I would consider it for colonial actions. I played to the bitter end, the Tax Dodgers were given a pounding and then my mum suggested going to St Mawes.

This was something of a low point in the year, but it did teach me something: avoid complex rules. And St Mawes.

But, I still have the tackle box which now contains all my modelling kit. It’s covered in Milliput fingerprints where I created hundreds of 10mm and 25mm figures and gets a sort out every two or three years, when I chuck out something that I find I need the following week.

Where all the magic happens.

So what next? Can I get Recon to work? Will the weather improve? Will I ever practice my French vocab? Can I remember the chemical equation for photosynthesis without surreptitiously scratching it on a pencil?  Will Clare Grogan ever answer any of those letters I send her on a daily basis?

 Find out in the next instalment…

PS The Tregony Holiday Park was actually very nice and would go there again if it hadn’t been sold and turned into a housing estate. Oddly, if you go to the location now you can still make out the park layout.

PPS Always hated St Mawes. Once you’ve seen the castle, that’s it. Nothing else to do if you are a child and worse if you are a teenager because your parents are with you! Last time I visited was on Honeymoon and it’s just a rich twat’s paradise now. We sat across from one of the swanky hotels, slurping cornets and wondering how money seems to go to the most stupid on earth. However, we had a laugh watching some idiot woman, dressed like an ‘I Dream of  Jeannie’ cosplay, manoeuvre a shaded pram containing two ratty dogs up the hotel steps.