Summer Blues

As we approach the beginning of September it's alarming to me that my last blog post was at the end of March; five months later I'm still in the same state of modelling lethargy. Over the last few months I've barely touched plastic, which I can attribute to various factors. Firstly, it just feels downright wrong to head downstairs to the bench in the basement while my wife's on the deck in the hot sunshine... Secondly, I'm feeling burnt out after a few years of intensive article writing, working to deadlines and cataloguing every stage – I enjoy it, but it can begin to feel more like work than recreation. Thirdly, several (though fortunately not all) of the forums that I used to visit on a daily basis for inspiration seem to have been taken over by snide, cynical, short-fused posters. And now the English Premier League is on TV again, how am I supposed to get any building done at weekends?

The last completion, back in February, was an Airfix 1/72 Curtiss Helldiver. Any rational person wanting a SB2C model would have started with the beautifully engineered, reasonably priced, readily available, highly accurate Academy kit. In my defense I was asked by the editor of Airfix Model World to build the old 1968 kit (albeit in a new box with lovely decals). To be honest, I probably derived more enjoyment/satisfaction from updating this old beast than I would have from building the state-of-the-art Academy kit, although the latter would undoubtedly have been way more accurate and a nicer model. The full build article has just been published in the September issue of AMW.