When I was a solitary, bespectacled and distinctly oikotropic child growing up in Dundee, there was a close approximation to Heaven at the end of the red arrow in the photograph. That, in the late 1960s, was the location of Brian Sherriff’s model shop in the Cowgate. The place was stuffed, floor to ceiling, with plastic model kits, at which it was possible for a child to gawp for a good hour before leaving the premises clutching a single tinlet of Humbrol enamel paint. Occasional indulgent relatives would buy me small Airfix kits, which I would bodge together with an excess of glue, and then suspend from my bedroom ceiling.

Fast forward forty years, by which time model shops like Brian Sherriff’s had become rare, as children found increasingly electronic modes of entertainment. I was wandering down a side street in a small town on the south coast of England, when I happened on one of the Last Decent Model Shops In Britain. Perched on a high shelf behind the counter was a huge 1/72 scale Revell Space Shuttle model. Something about the kit-saturation of the environment, combined with the neck-craning position of the box, zapped me back through the decades, and I was that speccy Dundonian child again. But this time I had disposable income.

As soon as I got home, I phoned the shop and organized delivery. For some reason I neglected to tell the Boon Companion about this. So when I came home from work one day to discover a really huge box in the hallway, I had to confess that I was possibly undergoing a midlife crisis. After inspecting the contents of the box, the Boon Companion opined that she’d seen much worse midlife crises than this one, and at least it didn’t involve either a motorcycle or a mistress.

It took a disproportionately long time to build the thing. Bits went well, bits went badly. I used much less glue, but I messed up the seams between the parts. The decals went on well, but I realized that hand-painting was not the way ahead. And there clearly was a way ahead, because I felt a definite need to get better at this.

Like all pre-retirement activities, I began to develop a backlog. There were things I wanted to spend time researching and building, but no time to do the job properly. So this bit of the blog should turn into a build log for future projects drawn from the backlog.

Reproachfully prominent in the stash is the Revell 1/96 scale Saturn V, a reissue of a huge old kit (there’s perhaps some sort of psychological trend going on here that doesn’t bear close examination). There were well-known defects in the original kit, and unfortunately Revell did nothing to rectify them in the reissue. So it needs a fair bit of fixer-uppery and detailing.

There’s also a stack of six 1/48 scale World War II fighter aircraft, all of which were flown by my late father at some time during the war: a Hurricane IIb and IIc, a Spitfire mark IX and XIV, and a Thunderbolt I and II. These I want to build to match as closely as possible the specific aircraft he flew.

And there’s a lot of other stuff—American spacecraft from the high days of the Space Race, and a selection of flying boats. For some reason I do love a nice flying boat.