About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Sunday, January 11, 2009

T is for Tractors

These are a few of my tractors, I have a soft spot for farm vehicles and figures, my fathers family have a farm near Retford in Nottingham and in the days before Health & Safety we spent many a holiday riding the grain trailers, running under the chaff-walkers of the combines and jumping out of the old Victorian loading stage into the grain mountain two stories below! I've also spent some time working farms in the past. This is the Paramount tractor, it came with various implements (which I will cover another day) and the figure is approximately 1:72, although the tractor is a bit big. These are by Jean and as can be seen, the tractor came in civil or military colouring. An added touch was the lifting bonnet (hood) which revealed a very basic engine for the farmer to work on! A selection of Hong Kong production with an old hay-turning rake-harrow and a tipping trailer. The little green one is the sort of thing that may have come with Kinder Eggs, not that I believe it did, it's small enough to have originated in a Christmas cracker? Behind is the Britains Lilliput Farm Tractor, with the nearly always missing driver, in front of which is the Hornby Dublo tractor, which never had a driver - as far as I know - being designed to be used as a load for rail flat-beds and low-loaders, or left parked around the marshalling yard! Finally a carded set of Hong Kong efforts, there is actually a piece missing from the bottom right, I suspect a trailer, and keep meaning to test fit my lose HK trailers to see if one fits. The yellow one above looks like a good candidate, but came with a completely different tractor, however such details mean nothing when dealing with HK output!

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