W is for Window Dressing!

Not least than because it sat around the half-centennial of a certain 'small step'; the theme for this year's Fleet Carnival's retail window-display competition was 'Space', and if you want a reason for the demise of the High Street - among all the others - this post will illustrate one: complacent disinterest in saving themselves; a problem currently affecting the wider populace - worldwide!

Serendipity is one of the multi-room/corridor display-cabinet, shared-space managed antique and collectables 'arcades', and one of the exhibitors - having distinctly non-antique modern toys - provided the bulk of the display, consequently it's full of interesting stuff for toy collectors to see, but seemed to be a bit 'easy'!

A close-up of the two characters closest to this Blog's heart - not! But nice to see it in this condition with Jabba's squeezey-cocktail tube & tap, the little squeaker and such like!

The party and balloon shop; Party Boutique, not a chain but an independent business, went with space-related stock, which is fair and expectable, but again, for me not a winning strategy as - again - it's too easy?

Captured Moment is one of the local photo-shops, and again an independent (the chain, up the road about 25-doors didn't enter!), went with what I suspect are kid-made Luna-rovers and a few blow-ups of planets and things.

The rocket is a blow-up, but has been constructed into a 3-D object in the corner there. The craft element gives this one an edge.

Yeah! 'Fire-up the photocopier and see what happens!'. Seriously guy's & girls; next year either make an effort or don't bother at all!

Two of the charity shops had a go, Blue Cross got theirs up first and have - if nothing else - ended up with an eclectic collection of whatever they had as space-related stock, presumably 'at the moment', but possibly they had had a few weeks or months notice of the theme and had squirreled-away a few bits? As far as this post goes; it's the best for what can you find?

Like the balloon-shop, the haberdashers Sew Busy (geddit!) went with their own subject-relative stock, but stock which had to have more work done to it than just being blown-up or taped to the window, as a consequence there is a lot of effort involved in this window, and some fun stuff to spot.

Things have been sewn, glued or brought together with a design-bent, although it has a bunch of balloons as well! I'm not sure how a Clangers astronomy set got into the window, or the shop, but you can't really beat a Clanger 'thing', except maybe with a Womble thing!

The other charity shop to enter (from a total of seven!) left it 'till the night before, and followed the lead of Blue Cross, to the same effect - I love the silver slipeprs, for some reason it makes me think of Junior School productions of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat!

Now, again a bit of a rant-opportunity here! Hopefully the idiots' have got bored and gawn-orff, so it's only those of you who've read this far hoping to see if there's an ulterior motive to this mediocre nonsense, and there is!

Now, I hope the sewing shop won? If it was a staggered prize format, I would further hope the photographer's came second and Blue Cross third. Purely on level of effort involved, with Blue Cross having the best of the others and getting it up several days before the Cancer charity. But each judge to his own, and some may have scored the balloon shop higher?

But the real point to get from this is that it ably shows just why the High Street is in the state it's in. There must be 300+ retail enterprises in Fleet with a display frontage, and seven of them made an effort to enter a competition aimed at engendering interest in the 'retail space'! It's a shocking indictment of the complacency of these people, no wonder they keep going bust, they're not willing to save themselves!

If a hundred of them had had a stab, there would have been a real hype about the thing; you may have got the local telly-news down for the day? Certainly local radio is always looking for decent output which isn't depressing crime and local authority failure. You may have got more kids from the surrounding villages badgering their parent to '...go to Fleet and look at the space windows?' instead, the whole thing was over in less than seven days and for five of those only had six entrants!

Jabba the Hutt and lazy retailer's - in the one Blog post - fancy that!

D is for Dino-viroment!

So, we're having a big 'ole local day for local people here at Small Scale World today, and if you don't like it; you might end up in a pie! There have been various events locally over the summer with some connection to toys, of which this is the most tenuous of linkages, but dinosaurs are a case apart!

First you need to deliver your dinosaur - and you thought they came in eggs!

A relatively life-size Triceratops is probably the star of the show, outside the parade of shops at the far-end of the High Street (where the equally huge hippopotamus was last year) and looking like he was fresh out of the paint-shop. He also looks like a harmless vegetarian despite the horns.

Sainsbury's get a Parasaurolophus (sounds like a 1970's Greek shipping magnate, or a charater from Tin Tin!) in whom you can see the ancestral features of modern birds far more clearly than you can in a triceratops, which just looks like a spiky cow! I mean; whatever this might evolve into, it'aint gonna' be a crocodile or a tortoise, is it?!

Nasty little raptor hanging round outside the bike shop during the day, Deinonychus patrols the furniture store at night - small enough to wander-off with, and let's face it, a lot of suburban gardens would be improved with the addition of a nasty little raptor!

A much smaller Stegosaurus in the window of the dance-apparel shop at the back of the high street is a late tick on the card the kids can pick-up to help them follow the dinosaur trail and entre the competition.

Another nasty little raptor, a Dilong Paradoxus, is hanging-out in the main shopping precinct, which in Fleet's case is more of an arcade, but without the beauty of a Victorian glass-roof or the lovely turned, planned, wood mouldings you used to see in such structures.

The Tyrannosaurus was very disappointing and not very Rex, being both the smallest model employed in the trail and having had its moth stuffed with brochures; you would walk past it if you weren't looking for it.

However - in complete contrast; I'm not normally a particular fan of the flying dinosaurs, but as far as models go, and as far as the other animals in this summer 'event' goes, this is a stunning model, and seeing a realistic one changes one's approach to them; it's like an intercontinental ballistic bird! And the parallels with the flying machines in the recent Batman movies aren't coincidence - there's nothing new under the sun and Pteranodon was under there first!

They - apparently - ARE delivered by egg! In the Bath!

There's another raptor; a proper Velociraptor, it's worrying how many of them are raptors really, suppose the come alive at night, I've seen that museum movie!

A kerthunkasaur! This one calls itself Ankylosaurus, why it feels the need to do that when I've given it such a thoughtful moniker is anyone's guess, but there's no accounting for taste! The huntin' shootin' fishin' brigade immediately put a silly hat on it!

Someone from the organisers must have had a word, as the hat was gone by day-3, but I think it's fair to say kerthunkie' hasn't recovered from the experience yet, it's looking quite traumatised . . . is there a dino-therapist in the house?

As this isn't a toy soldier post per-se and my critics have hopefully already gorn-orff in a huff, I may as well have a small rant while I'm at it . . .

. . . these are fun, and I like them, I'm sure they will bring a few (what? 0.02%?) extra customers (at the expense of a neighbouring town's High Street?), and the kids will love them, but, just because something is fun and exciting, is not a good enough reason to indulge in it for 'its' sake.

For instance, sex is (or can be) both fun and exciting, but, were one to indulge in sexual activity in the High Street, by oneself or with a partner, with or without the partner's acquiescence, one would - quite rightly - be arrested. The length of the list of charges following-after the inevitable 'Common Indecency' being dictated by the number (and level of acquiescence) of the/any partner/s!

There must be warehouses full of these and last year's wild animals and the nutcrackers and other such things (which leads one to the horrible thought that giant effing-Disney characters are probably somewhere down the line!), manufactured out of glass-matt-reinforced, two-part epoxy-resin plastic; an almost totally un-recyclable material, with a large carbon-footprint and which doesn't retain its full material-integrity for long under the elements; fraying at the points and crumbling to glass powder and micro-polymer to be washed into the environment by rain - a fate which befalls quantities of the sanding/fettlings from the manufacturing phase!

Anyone who has paid any serious attention to what the weather has been doing over the last 18-moths, five years, fifteen years, is probably now minded to believe the 99% of climate scientists who are - themselves - of grim-mind?

If we go on, just blindly sating our appetites for easier transport, for novelty, for entertainment, for frivolous-consumables, for turning mad ideas (a warehouse full of fibre-glass dinosaurs would have been a mad idea not that long ago) into reality, we will fail to save the planet from  . . . err . . . us?

Deaths from Asthma and other lung/breathing condition in London, in LA, in Kolkata would suggest it's already too-late for tens of thousands of our fellow pink-monkeys.

How about, we get the kids in local schools to make (or help make - with adult crafters) the dinosaurs, or last year's (mostly threatened species) wild animals - FOR the High Street - out of recycled products such as [as in my childhood] chicken-wire over wood formers, loo-rolls, card packing, carpet tubes, cereal boxes &etc., using eco-friendly paints and adhesives? Just a thought!

Enviromental Health - They think not!

A friend of mine had been having a bit of bother with his Employer/Landlord (?) and turned (as you might imagine we all would)...to the local authority who have a statutory duty in these matters. Only it turned out they don't really, in fact as long as we keep paying them their salaries, they'll do as little as they can


This is what his bedroom looks like, and has done for some time, he brought it to the attention of the home-owners solicitors some 5 months ago, but it still looks like this and he still sleeps on the Sofa.

So he got in touch with the council and was told someone would get back to him on Monday, FOUR weeks latter he got a letter telling him they were assuming everything was OK and that if they didn't hear from him in a day or two they'd close the case. Furious phone-call later and he had an appointment for the middle of the next week, where he was told someone from 'eevee' would ring him the next week.

Someone did on the Monday, she said she'd get back to him by the middle of the week. She didn't! Sometime on the Friday (in office hours) he rang to find out what was happening, only to get the 'We've all gone-off for the weekend, try again Monday' message, he left a message alright, it produced a phone-call first thing the following Monday with an assurance that they would ring him by Wednesday...

...without the promised call he got this from Sue on the Thursday. Has she earned her money, do you think? Perhaps if we sack a few of these useless jobsworths we could keep a few mobile Library's going, so vulnerable people in outlying areas can get help finding books that might tell them how to get stuff done when the people tasked with doing so by legislation fail to.