It's Autumn And An Old Man's Mind Turns To Knobs, Knockers & Charles Dance

 Gosh, is it really 42 and a half years since I began gaming? I fear it is.

If I stop and think that I am heading towards 60, I have the mother of all panic attacks. So little time left for gaming and just quietly going about my business. 

I've suffered severe insomnia of late, so this has been one of the recurring '3AM Specials', those thoughts which crop up in all their technicolour glory in the dark pre-breakfast of the soul which is itself a product of not being asleep when you should be.

I was just thinking, as I knocked out another 4 Denizen Miniatures, Federation Marines, listening to some Jethro Tull (to which I was introduced almost 40 years ago by my B.F.A.M, Roger and which made me buy 'Original Masters' as a primer) that the weather outside in all it's Autumnal misery made me yearn for one of my old solo trips into Sheffield city centre circa 1982 to gaze in wonder at the door furniture I always promised myself I would buy when I grew up, in 'Knobs & Knockers and thence mayhap to Exit Books to try to find the key to unlocking the counter culture comics and political pamphlets which that shop had. They had ZERO relation to gaming but as is the way with teens, the strangest connections are made between the most obscure things as they try to navigate things they want to understand.

I have never found anyone other than Alan Staniforth, who accompanied me on many an early visit to town, who remembers Exit. I have always been attracted to the out of the way parts of any city, and perhaps that's why I love the 1987 'classic' Hidden City starring Charles Dance. To this day my wife has to stop me from diving into unmarked doorways behind which who knows what happens. DAMN YOU STEPHEN POLIAKOFF!

It's liberating to be challenged and to look a security guard, full of self importance, straight in the eye and give him an unapologetic excuse for being there or just disregard them and say 'I'll be a couple of minutes' and vanish up a staircase or down a corridor. Mind you, if you can get me an accompanied visit to the top floor of the Fountain Precinct here in Sheffield (a magnificient tiled and smoke glazed edifice built in the 70s) I'd be very, very grateful.

It's one bucket list item which evades me, but it's a building from which I wish to see the view of the city and perhaps see backwards in time, and maybe, if the the time of day is right, see the 14 year-old me, making his way, lost in his own worlds, to Beatties and thence to the newly opened Games Workshop. Perhaps, perhaps...

As I type, these remembrances are making others bloom like the first bluebells of spring...

 The first time I went to the Sheffield Triples, unassociated with any organised gaming group; chip butties on french bread from the little kiosk behind Redgates toy shop, eaten on top of the multi storey car park before descending back to street level down the ramps imagining it was a dungeon. 

Testing 'high impact' dice in another car park stairwell and imagining those stairs were an escape rout from Servalan and Federation Security troopers, who where in hot pursuit. 

Avoiding older kids, a motley mix of Punks, Skinheads and even 'Teddy Boys' as we searched for the latest Adam & The Ants or Stiff Little Fingers 7-inch, in a time before I found the lifelong joys of Prog' Rock, but which so shaped the future me.

Finding my first Citadel and Ral Partha miniatures in Hopkinson's Toys, in 1981, in their grubby but so tantalising card topped baggies. I knew then that there was something special they were part of, but I had yet to find the keys.

So much found, but so much still left to find in this amazing hobby. No, that does it a disservice; it's a way of life, a way of navigating the world.

An overcast Wednesday afternoon in Games workshop for private browsing and deciphering of this wargaming and roleplaying thing. 15mm Heritage Napoleonics and 25mm C01 Fighters all under the same roof, in a time before Warhammer when there was so much more passion than there is now, as those who view my formative years as some kind of pre-holocaust, hell hole with a snide irony and revisionist tendencies. "Oh, why won't they fuck off and find their own worlds?", I cry, memory deep in another 3AM movie of the mind. If you weren't there, you never could be.

*sigh*

In other news, I received an out of the blue refund on an order I placed back in August with a well known company, to the tune of almost £3000, because it was too much of a struggle to supply the goods. This annoyed me, as it's totally messed about with my work schedule - why did I just get a mental flash of school mashed potatoes, cirrca 1979 as I typed that? - and means I now have to source models elsewhere, which frankly pisses me off in a big way, but no, I won't indulge in a naming or petty stamping of feet like some wargaming Veruca Salt. As long as the money finds it's way back to my account eventually, I shall adapt and survive.

We're off to Fiasco at Leeds Armouries in the morning and hope to meet up with Roger and his youngest issue, so I am looking forward to friendship, good banter and no doubt some eye-rolling when I exclaim in joy at that new range of Schleswig-Holstein invasion of the Andalucian hills of 1876 or some other 'niche' period.

And with that, I need to varnish some figures and then see if I can play Call Of Duty for the first time since my thumb surgery. I hope so, but the thumb is still somewhat deformed by scarring and very, very tender.

TTFN