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.

Wednesday, January 26, 2022

A is for And so to London!

The Toy Fair went ahead and I managed to attend after a bit of a SNFU at the book-in, Germany cancelled in the autumn and New York cancelled a few days ago, so outside the Far East it will rather be the 'only game in town' this year, hopefully, by next year it will all be so endemic (Covid-19 / SARS-COV-2) we will have a full suite of shows?

London Skyline from Clapham Junction
looking toward Waterloo

The visitor crowd was pretty-much as previous years, and the pub busier than ever, but as far as exhibitors went it was disappointing, Hornby-Airfix weren't there, nor were Lego or Blue Box (although the later stopped attending a few years ago), Papo didn't turn-up even though they were booked, I guess their lorries are stuck in a 'corresponding' queue at Calais to balance the Brwreakshit queue's our side of la Manche? While Schleich was disappointing, but the Mojo/CollectA stand made-up for that.

The upstairs annex was nearly empty, and the downstairs annex was pretty 'roomy', while Tobar and HGL had one stand with combined stock and no Schilling presence. So there wasn't the same quantity of stuff to cover, but I picked up the usual pile of catalogues, a few samples (seen before - World of Marbles' combat erasers), while neither Revell or Schleich were issuing catalogues despite having copies in sight!

The Shard - from Waterloo
It's the best of a dozen images!

So there will be articles forthcoming, but nothing urgent and I've still got 8 articles from TF19 and 16 from TF20 in the long queue, so who knows how it will all come out, some if it will probably be saved now to go straight to the company A-Z pages!

Contrary to you-know-who's past pontification on my output, very little of it is of any real importance! He himself has kept very quiet about how he's going to tell us everything about anything "in a timely manner" this year, given his past grandiose announcements - which always  turn into little or nothing!

Not to mention that I'm still trying to clear the old How they come in backlog, and have a new one there, picked up a few bits yesterday and have a mini season on the desk-top which I meant to get out before Christmas . . . so, whatever, whenever!

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