In the Beginning - there was Airfix


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Years back I used to make planes.
On those saturday mornings I had enough money I'd rush down to the local post office and buy whatever Airfix offered I could stretch to.
Once back naivete, impatience and over-confidence would mean I slapped the kits together without once looking at the instructions. The result would then be hung up in the car-porch-cum-shed and dangle in view through the kitchen window. The whole family could then wonder at the many gluey fingermarks on canopies and wing or the oddly open joints obvious here and there.
One day in the post-office I noticed they had some tanks as well.
My youthful brain cranked up into an over-drive of vacillation...
Planes fly... But I got one of most of them planes... No more room for hanging them up... Dad threatened physical violence that time one fell on him... Maybe planes ain't so good?
Tanks would be something different, none of them transparent canopies to show up fingermarks... BIG GUNS....
So my collecting planes was replaced by collecting tanks.
One day mid way through th 7 weeks of summer school holidays a friend of mine explained he had another use for those model tanks. Oh Yeah? WW2 desert, seen through an 11 year old's rather hazy filter of events.
Wny desert?
He had one of those Don Featherstone or maybe Chas Grant books which have a simple set of rules in em and they recommended desert because of simple terrain.
SO.... Chase them dinosaurs out the back garden... tear the bendy plastic men off the sprues and away we went.
A couple of years later micro tanks and WRG 1925-50 rules arrived and we went micro.

Despite a rather rocky start on the old model making my interest was still there and those mis-shapes skytrex used to call micro-tanks with pins for guns just didn't really cut the mustard.
1/35th scale tamiya tanks and little men were obviously the way forward.

Back then you could actually buy lead wargames figures in real shops, locally!
There were several to choose from in Liverpool. Aside from micro tanks, I was interested in ECW. If you're also part of the "greying" of the hobby then you can probably imagine how long ago this was seeing as Hinchliffe 25s were my choice.... well... only option I think.