An Old, Dirty Wet Seadog & New Tricks.

Slapping some new words around and trying to figure out what to do next.

In blog time, a few weeks ago, I announced that I was closing down the blog, or at least walking away from it while I figure out how I can best use what remains of my life in the best way possible. If that sounds like me having a good old maudle then I would say no : i’m in my late 60’s, in relatively poor health and don’t expect to make old, or very old bones – that’s just the way it is and i’m mostly resigned to the fact that most of my life is behind me.

Last year – ok so call it 2024, I gave up sailing and at the same time found that I was becoming too weak to even plod around the lanes here but then this part of Cornwall is the lumpy and crinkly end and to even leave the house is a steep-ish flog up or down the lane. I think I have a problem brewing and that problem is the end of a very long,dark and wet winter, during which i’m likely to experience a bout of Seasonal Affective Disorder (S.A.D for short) otherwise known as the winter blues. This time around I suspect that it could be worse because I don’t have much to engage my mind with : paradoxically I haven’t been sleeping at all well due to the combination of a ‘tingly’ prostate and an over active mind brought on, I think, by too much time spent on the interwebs and not enough time spent doing physical work and/or exercise.

The end of 2025 and the workshop gets a solid and dry floor for the first time in it’s 40 or 50 year old life’

In late November Steve the builder and one of his mates barrowed in the concrete from the truck that only just managed to get into our shared drive. I couldn’t take any part in that as I have nowhere near enough grunt to be wheeling around barrow loads of wet concrete mix and to be honest I would only have been in their way. At the same time I put my efforts into digging and back filling the new trench around two sides of the workshop (the problematic wet sides) which are now a French drain/soakaway. With Steve (that’s Steve the actual builder) having rendered the inside up to the level of what will eventually be the wall panel battens that part of the job is finished.

Almost at the end of the year I put in the order for 30 square meters of insulated metal roof panels and then sat around twidlling my thumbs as the order will take around 30 days. After that i’ll be able to work on the job with Steve as the roof panels are light but awkward and i’m tolerably adept at woodwork. For fun I just spent a few hours building a working model of the workshop so that I can explain to myself the structure of the new roof : after that it’s game on for me as I can then start the whole next stage which is to fit out the workshop plus I can use the actual model and a 75mm figurine to help me visualize the space.

Time to learn some new tricks.

During the utter stupidity of the Covid 19 lockdown what got me through the first few weeks was a daily hit of watching art critic Waldemar Janusczak (sorry about my spelling) talking and filming his way through great art. Then I started building the Pathfinder and the rest, as they say, is history. This time it feels like lockdown all over mainly in that I don’t know what to do with myself and my days are increasingly tedious. I do have a daily entertainment fix and this time it’s the Mythbusters series by Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman – iv’e been following Savage’s own ‘maker’ channel for years and it’s one of his sayings that has immediately become a new lesson.

Anyway, that aside, one of the Myths covered was the one expressed by the saying “Cant teach and old new tricks” and obviously the duo proved otherwise with a pair of older Mamalukes – a breed that is renowned as being headstrong and difficult to train so yes, i’m trying to learn new tricks – that, if you hadn’t noticed, is the subject of this return to blogging. I don’t want to go on and on but I thought to create a very short list of the new tricks that i’m trying to learn.

1. In Mythbusters and in his own maker channel Adam Savage says that in building a thing, any thing you like, you maybe have to do it three times as the first iteration is mainly about making all of the mistakes and learning the process and the second iteration you’re applying the lessons learned but it’s iteration three that is the charm. With boats I know that my first (and only) build wasn’t that great although it looked ok, floated and seemed to sail ok, With something cheap and simple such as my workshop model – that one is iteration two btw – what iv’e done so far is mainly learning the process so now I should (and can) go on to iteration three, which is the one I hope will help me in the actual process of fitting out the workshop.

2. The second lesson or perhaps the main question about what to do next and how to go about it.

I’ll have to explain this in the form of an analogy and the form of that is in a short story about my late mother’s life after retiring from her job as chief secretary to the Coop society board of (boring) directors in Turd town – AK.A .Peterborough. At that time I was so deep into my nursing career that I didn’t get home very often. It didn’t help either that I worked way oop north and it took half a day on the train or several hours on whatever bike I was riding at the time : one time I had to give up during what felt like a blizzard while crossing the moor. Long story short but when I did make it home that time mum had a new hobby and she was even taking a city & guilds course in the subject.

In her new hobby she realized early on that she had none of the basic skills needed – it was almost as though she’d decided to build a John Welsford Pathfinder but had never used a pull saw or marked (spiled) a hull panel. In her case she started with having to learn how to draw freehand and how to make the closest thing to a technical drawing to work from. Enter yours truly because I at least had one of my few ‘O’ levels in technical drawing and our first drawing/plan was a part of the inside of the roof of Turd town’s cathedral which she later made into an embroidered seat cover for a piano stool.

Much later in her embroidery career one of her finals pieces was almost jewel like in that it was as close a copy of some of the Sutton Hoo finds as can be realized with fabric and thread : i’ll blow her trumpet for her and say that they were worthy of being displayed alongside the originals.

Going even further back I once had a Saturday job at Turd town’s one and only model store and for a while I knew the proprietor’s wayward son who was a long haired art student that later built a full on custom chopper (motorcycle) and I think he did all of the work himself from a start of never having owned a bike. What I knew him for was that he had done an exhibition grade job of converting one of the Historex miniature figures, a Napoleonic guard Hussar to match a famous painting of the same.

Iv’e searched and searched but still can’t find a copy of the original although I seem to remember that he displayed the model alongside of a copy of a print of the original painting. In short it was magnificent and I hope that it’s still in someone’s display case somewhere. In terms of model making and figure conversions it was streets beyond anything i’d seen done – and I used to go and see the best of the best on display at the model engineer exhibition once a year. Something like this but startlingly alive – I guess his training in art was a big help.

As I write, it’s my late mum’s birthday and like her iv’e found myself retired from a long career and wondering what to do with myself next. Now obviously i’m rebuilding the workshop which has been a whole shed ton of physical work – just in the floor digging out, which took ten weeks, I dug and carried out some 13 ‘yards’ of rocks and clay. The final work and interior rebuild I expect to take all of the winter, spring and into the summer of 2026. It’s after that that things start to get really interesting as I have just a hint of a sniff of an idea about one of the things that I might just use it for except that to do what I am daydreaming about right now needs me to learn a whole new set of skills.

I would like to finish with a bit of a teaser so here goes.

The kind of thing I want to do is what prop makers for film have to do when the make the miniatures sets for films like the Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit – to be a bit more specific i’m thinking of the physical miniatures of fantasy places such as Tolkien’s Lake Town and the Goblin mine under the mountain that the Dwarves get ensnared in. Ok so I know that some of that was done with computer (CGI) effects but a lot was done with background matte painting and actual models. The main difference in my case is that whatever I model and build will have parts of several railways running through it : not exactly railway modelling per se and more like a fantasy diorama of somewhere that doesn’t exist.

One immediate action that iv’e taken is a bit like the beginning of my Pathfinder project in that I started to use my old workshop doors as a written aide memoire to tell me what jobs I had to work on and what things I had to buy : it became my running ‘to buy’ list and I find now, having read James Gurney several times that I need to create a lit of small jobs to do (such as make a start on sketches and colors) and a thankfully small shopping list. One upcoming job is for me to build a copy of the display board that he pins or tapes sketches and/or photographs onto. I already have a file of digital images that I would rather have as prints so on my job list is to transfer them to a memory stick and each time we go to the supermarket to print a few out using their hardware – that, for example, would be the beginning of sketching and coloring the things that I will later be building.

I’m not an artist and I don’t have any of the basic training or background as a hobbyist model maker/artist so the main lesson I take from James Gurney and others is that to do it well there is a lot of work and in a way a lot of ‘process’. What i’m doing isn’t exactly art but neither is it not art : it is or at least is going to include (I almost said end up as) a load of model making where I also have to learn a whole load of new skills : although iv’e talked about model railways here, what I intend isn’t exactly railway modeling but to explain what it is will take another post.

I’m led to believe that this image is AI generated and not a photograph of the underground ancient city ofDerinkuyu in modern dayTurkey……the forms, shapes and colors are interesting but it doesn’t have a railway run by Goblins………