LESSONS LEARNED

Well, I’ve been taught a few things over the past few days, and, with a little bit of luck I might actually remember them enough to realise that I might have actually learned something, too.

I’ve learned that being exhausted is exhausting in itself, and doesn’t get resolved by spending a few days at home with all its distractions and worries and nagging sense of having stuff to do.

I’ve learned that it can and does snow in March, long after you’d decided that you were done with that kind of thing for the year, and that the weather will decide to take a turn for the worse if I decide to take a little time off.

I’ve learned that, even if relationships can become slightly strained when you’re priorities are different and you both have a lot that you’d like to be getting on with and different plans for your days off, with a little bit of give-and-take, and a bit of humour, my grumbling soon fades away again and things get done.

Most of all, I think, I’ve learned that I’m not all that good at kit-based model-building.

I don’t seem to have the patience for it or enough interest in the details to create an immaculate job. I shouldn’t be surprised, I was much the same when I was eight and my 737s and 1-11s always came out with wonky lines and tiny thumb-prints in the paintwork.

Forty years on and I’m still much the same, and I find out that my sister was far better at painting straight lines on rockets when I was eight years old than I am even now.

In comparing the remains of the 1970s kit and the one I’m currently ruining, I discovered that Airfix mouldings are not as precise or well-formed as they once were and that the plastics that they currently use seem somehow flimsier than those used forty years ago.

I don’t know, it’s subtle, but it’s a tactility thing. The surfaces and the weight just feel “wrong” somehow.

That’ll be all of the progress in new materials made over those intervening decades I guess, and I’m sure that someone, somewhere is convinced that they’re somehow “better” than the old ones, but I remain to be convinced, although... Well, let’s just say that maybe the finished proportions actually are.

Not that it matters of course…

Those are just excuses born in my own disappointment with myself at not being more competent at dealing with the fine details as I blunder about with my chunky adult fingers and that dodgy circulatory system which makes my hands shake.

It is, after all, me that’s making an utter pig’s ear of it, and I can’t blame anyone else, but I was so hoping to have my own small but impressive tribute to the Apollo programme that I could proudly display in my living room, instead of just some knocked together half-arsed tat that I’ll have to hide away because I’m so embarrassed at its mediocrity…

Meanwhile, as I popped into the model shop at the garden centre to buy some more liquid poly in a tiny bottle that looked like it might contain either a banned chemical or merely some ear-drops (thus demonstrating in so many ways the great age I have now achieved…), I noticed a comforting smell of pipe tobacco in the air, and a number of grey-haired men with beards milling about, all of whom seemed to be on first-name terms with each other.

I took one look at this terrifying vision of my possible future and got the hell out of there…

Another lesson learned.