Spoilt...

... for choice. I've been much less productive on the toy soldier/model/wargames front since the beginning of  2013 in the Year of Our Lord. This, of course, has led me to buy not less, but more stuff, and the mountain of toys grows daily. As readers know, I have a very interesting Bergepanzer 38 waiting to be built. I opened the box earlier, and found:

'The horror !', to quote Conrad's most famous novel (I shall re-read all of his novels one day, and transport myself back to the time when I was a callow, dreaming Sixth Former at one of Old England's old grammar schools. They sit on a shelf not two feet away, waiting.). 'The horror!' - just look at those track links, and bear in mind just how small the '38 is in 1/72. But I will be bold. Soon-ish. Now, DaveM has already raised some points about the recovery version of the Hetzer, so I will have to rummage around to make sure that I make the right call about that spade, and the recovery kit that the Bergepanzer 38 carried. In addition to Hilary Doyle's New Vanguard title on the Hetzer, I have a very, very thorough book, Hetzer; Jagdpanzer 38, by Vladimir Francev, Charles K. Kliment, and Milan Kopecky (MBI, Prague, 2001). As you will  realise, these authors are from just the right place to have written about the Hetzer, and if you are interested in that deadly little tank killer, then you would really appreciate the book.

To offset the horror of the track links, I have (thanks to Saturday's postie):

PSC - the wargamer's friend. Lief, over on Figurfanatikern, provided a review of these carriers last year in his normal perfect English - how can a Viking speak/write such perfect, colloquial English? Amazing! My PSC carriers will get a Western Desert finish, but I am tempted by France/Belgium 1940, something that I've had lurking at the back of my mind since a trip to Calais nearly 10 years ago to follow the action described in Airey Neave's Flames of Calais. Neave (also of Colditz fame) was supposedly murdered by the INLA, although some well informed people (including his fellow MP, Enoch Powell) believed that the CIA was responsible.

Stripes. The SM81 build led, of course, to my later post on the Caudron Simoun, and Heller's kit, which I made up some 20 years ago. I said in that post that the yellow, striped red, scheme was of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's aircraft that he crashed in the Sahara. After posting, I started to check images on the internet, and it became clear that I was wrong - why, indeed, would I have ever imagined that Saint-X would bother to have his aircraft finished in 'high viz' ? Nooo, that wouldn't have impressed the skinny French chicks, or his Spanish wife, Consuelo. Anyway, too much peering at photos of the Simoun sent me to Hannants' website, and I have another kit:

Interestingly, my sideswipe at the Euro in the post on stripes led to one 'Nundanket' entering the lists in favour of the Euro. This has lead to fierce exchanges. Rather good! And since I last responded to Nundanket, I see the Eurozone has a new 'success' - taking money directly from the bank accounts of (Greek) Cypriots. Our American cousins would call that robbery. And they'd be right.