A tray for today

My tray - existing in its natural state of clutter

Today was a long day and it followed a day that had been very long as well. I become seized with a selfish desire to play after days like that, to do something hobby related. I'm too tire to do anything useful around the house or write or anything like that, but I can stick a toy soldier together.

As I have mentioned before I have started raising Dutch troops for the Waterloo campaign. The boxes arrived from Models2U the other day and I set to work with a will, washing and sorting the contents.

And damned if there weren't some RHA fellows in there as well...

First on the block are the Dutch gunners from Waterloo 1815. I was in a bit of pickle with these as they used French guns during the Hundred Days and they come with British guns. Fortunately, I went searching through my box of figures and came across a bag of old ESCI figures given to me by a friend who lost interest in Napoleonics some time ago.

Two gun carriages looking rather forlorn

A search through the bag yielded two French gun carriages, but only one tube. The tubes from the Dutch Artillery sets had very strange thick trunnions on them, which wouldn't fit and didn't look the thing at all. Eventually, I lighted upon a set of French Guard Artillery. I only need one of these, so I was able to sacrifice one of the tubes from the set to use with my Dutchmen.

Two Dutch guns awaiting crew

The tube took a bit of encouragement to sit right and I needed to trim the elevating screw a little with a stanley, but I think they look fine.

Two Dutch gun crews based up

Not having the mental energy to do much I else, I cut the Dutch gunners from their sprue and glued them to bases. That seemed like quite enough hard work for one night!

On a completely unrelated note - Joy and Forgetfulness will be having one of its periodic outages as Mrs Kinch and I are going on holiday. We'll be revisiting our Honey Moon haunt of Bath with a day trip to Bristol. Mrs Kinch is particularly excited about walking with Meerkats at Longleat.

We will have a car with us and any suggestions anyone might have for good game or book shops or anything in particular worth seeing along the way will be gratefully received.