Memory Lane - A Reflectionary Pause In The Narrative

 I was musing the other day, as is my wont, that I was off the starting blocks pretty damned fast, once I had a handle on the hobby. by 1984 I was a veteran gamer.

Looking back, it was the start of an addiction in the truest sense. Had my drug of choice been heroin, I'd have been dead by now, such was my decication to constantly seeking a 'hit'. This is no exaggeration or hyperbole.

Every moment of my waking life that I had to myself was spent in gaming, painting, reading about painting and gaming, and watching every TV programme which had even 5 seconds of gaming content, literal or tangental. I realise now, that I was a lost cause and have probably wasted my life in the conventional sense.

 I'd discovered RPGs, historical, sci-fi gaming  not to mention boardgames other than the traditional toy shop offerings. And there was this new thing in late 82 /early 83 called Warhammer:  The Game Of Fantasy Battles, although I'd seen the wonderful Middle Earth range of 15mm figures from Jacobite Miniatures and the Lidless Eye wargames rules on my first wide-eyed visit to the Triples show in the Victoria Hotel, which made me realise that there were many more people living the secret life of gamers, than the few people Alan & I had met so far.

I had been thoroughly initiated into a secret brotherhood of arcane mysteries, and was already working my way with Crowley-esque efficiency into the the higher degrees.

In fact, if we take the Golden Dawn as our model, very few of today's gamers would ever get beyond the First Tier, and that's OK, but the Second Tier is much more fun, although it takes a lot of scarifice to get there. The pay-off is that the price you pay is with your soul, so you have to be sure that you don't crave the normal things in life. 

Incidentally, if you have an interest in the life of Aleister Crowley, grab a copy of 'Perdurabo', which is the most thorough biography of the man and his passions.

Certainly, by late 1983, I was at every convention I could get to across the U.K, I gamed 6 to 8 times a week, had a desk filled with minis and paints in the history classrooms and wangled a key to the off-limits science rooms so that a group of 6 of us, lads and lasses (but nothing inbetween) could play D&D at lunch time, out of sight of the thuggish little twats who stalked the corridors and cloakrooms looking for fresh targets to bully.

I'll tell more of the desk full of minis I had at school. It was a Faustian pact, which oddly for the mouse-like person I was back than, and doubly so as a kid in a comprehensive school in the 80s, I was not at the thin edge of the metaphorical wedge. 

As I sit here typing in my kitchen, I have copies of Miniature Wargames (the originals) , 800 ECW Scots and two boxes of Traveller figures laid out around me, waiting for various actions to be undertaken, and behind meat the other side of the room, my sonic cleaner is buzzing with an 80 degree celsius vat of degreaser, working on yet more models, saved from oblivion. The question now, is can I also be saved from oblivion, or, after 4 and a half decades is it to late.

And, would I really, put on the spot, want to be saved?