Who doesn't like a wizard on a giant pentagram?

 I sometimes wonder what went wrong with teenagers, as I have wondered this morning upon hearing on Radio 4 of the horrific knife attack on children in Southport.

I'm glad that I grew up in the 70s and 80s, which, despite being dangerous, with punks and skinheads chasing long-haired types like your author around the streets and in one memorable instance, the Manchester Arndale centre - a great way to window shop at high speed, you rarely heard of such savage behaviour as unfolded yesterday in what is a quiet West coast town which I have fond memories of.

The world is going rapidly insane...

Anyway, let's head back to the 80s and the aethereal world my peers and I lived in...

I spent my weekend cleaning and priming almost 500 old school minis, including 140 Chaos Warriors, 224 Night Goblins and 132 Lesser and Lesser Night Goblins, ahead of shipping around 30 kilos (gotta love the physical presence of old lead) off to my painter, signalling the end of Project Weird Shit. 

True, there are still Slann, Amazons and some more Chaos Warriors, but that's only another 360 models and then, dear rear - the project is complete.

I had forgotten just how beefy the old Chaos Warriors were en masse, and let me tell you, they went on 25mm bases for a reason. I base in groups of 4 or 6 models so, I'm really looking forward to eventually fielding 11 units of 20 of the buggers, interspersed with 10 units of 16 Beastmen, along with assorted demons, creatures of Chaos and suchlike.

The Green Horde is simply out of hand... I suppose that a counting up needs to take place, but I think it has to be around 2000 models, probably more.

I don't know how many cans of primer I've gone through, but on Saturday and Sunday I used 1.5 litres! I think I've probably gone through 6 litres in total, which is a lot of paint in any language.

My friends are also busy collecting and painting their own forces, and I reckon we collectively must have 10,000 fantasy figures, the majority being old school stuff.

People look aghast when we tell them, but let me be frank here, we lived in Games Workshop and the other game stores in the area. As I have related previously, at age 14 I was earning £50 per week plus what I saved from school dinners and my spending money, which could equate to 180 figures per week, many of which were purchased in multiples of 5 and ten of the same (with head variants) pose. I specialised in Orcs and Goblins, whilst at the same time, even though it would be 4 or 5 years before we met, another friend was similarly going into the store and clearing the shelves of Elves.

One of my all time 'addiction' models is the wonderful Ral PArtha wizard on palanquin, borne by trolls, and of course there's one in my army already:


Yesterday, I received another variant of this model: 

At 6:30 AM today, I popped the whole model into my ultrasonic cleaner and heated it up in a bath of 'Elbow Grease' degreaser to 80 celsius and then gave it 30 minutes of cleaning.

Within an hour, it was clean, apart from a bit of epoxy to remove with tweezers:


As you can see, the throne and wizard are different, meaning I can field two in my armies - brothers perhaps? Enemies? Allies? Only time will tell...


 Now, I need to find any other variants and acquire them. Oh dear... Remember my saying that the project was finished?


TTFN



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