A Short Break

The blog is a few day’s late this week.   I try to post it each Sunday, but we had a break this week.

We have just returned from a ten day visit to the UK to look after our grand children whilst my son and his wife had paid their first visit to New York.   Not exactly a holiday, but certainly a break – from Wargaming at least.

Wargaming and things Napoleonic have been a constant part of our life since 1969.   Since then, it seems in retrospect, hardly a day has passed when I have not been painting, building, planning or reading about the subject.  I am sure that cannot be true, there must have been many days when it was not true.   But that is how it seems looking back.

Since we retired seven years ago the subject has taken up even more of my time.   But now all the armies are painted.   All the buildings are completed.  The final wargames room has been completed and the final wargames table built.   The final reorganisation of my armies and campaign system has been completed.   All of my time is now devoted to running two campaigns and fighting wargames.

It’s not exactly a 9 to 5 thing.   We do fit in a lot of other things.   But most days I fit in two or three hours on the computer updating blogs or running the two campaigns.   And there is, almost always, a wargame in progress.

We are fortunate to have a dedicated wargames room complete with 6x6 foot wargames table.  It could have been bigger, but we agreed that is the ideal size for two people to game on.  Our armies are organised to fight on that size table, with enough space to manoeuvre the armies, but not a long table to walk around.   We used to have one 12x6 foot.  Great for multi player games of 4 or 6, but much to large for two players.

We tend to play for an hour or two four or even five days a week.   In the hot summer’s here in Spain the games room is the coolest part of the house.   In the colder winters it is the warmest.   So our few hours Wargaming provides a welcome break in the day.

So leaving our comfortable routine and going to look after the grand children, aged 2 and 6, was quite a shock.   It was lovely to see them again, and to spend some time with them.   But you do forget just how tiring two young children can be.   Or perhaps they just get more tiring as you get older.

I brought my laptop with me, intending to keep the campaigns up to date when the kids were in bed.   But I found that by then I was also shattered and just wanted half an hour in front of the TV and then bed myself.

So it’s a real joy to be back home and back in my routine.    It was delayed by two days due to a flu like infection the youngest gave me as a farewell present.   This resulted in a very uncomfortable flight back to Spain, followed by two days in bed recovering.

But all is well now.   I may not feel much like eating or drinking, but I am very happy to be back on the computer and working on the campaign’s again.

Sad really.   But sad in a nice sort of way.