I'll tell you a story ...

... about losing my wargaming and railway modelling mojo.

I think that periodically most wargamers and railway modellers lose their enthusiasm for their hobbies. Sometimes it lasts a few day, sometimes a few weeks ... and sometimes even longer. In my case, this lack of enthusiasm has been coming on for some time and for several reasons.

Firstly, since I broke my leg on 10th April last year, getting to my toy/wargame room – where I do most of my wargaming and railway modelling – has been difficult. After a spell in hospital, I was confined to bed until the end of last August and could not walk – even aided – until the middle of September. I finally made it up to my toy/wargame room in mid-October, once we had a stairlift installed. However, accessing the room still remains problematic, and carrying figures, terrain, etc., up or down from the room is very difficult. This means that my wargaming and railway modelling are pretty well restricted to a single room on the top floor of our house ... and that rooms gets very hot during the summer months.

Secondly, most of my wargaming figures and terrain are in a storage unit some miles away and not easily accessible. We did this in preparation for our planned house move last year ... the house move that never took place because I broke my leg! I do have my Belle Époque collection and some of my Eastern Front/Great Patriotic War collection in my toy/wargame room as well as a small selection of Hexon II hexes ... but I really need more of the latter to hand to be able to fight a wargame. That said, most of my model railway stuff is in my toy/wargame room and easily accessible.

Thirdly, I seem to feel mentally and physically tired almost all the time. There is a well-known joke about old people falling asleep almost as soon as they sit in an armchair, but I can confirm that like most jokes, it contains an element of truth! I regularly wake up in the morning feeling as if I haven't slept well and doze off for up to an hour most afternoons. This is not conducive to working on one's hobbies as the tiredness saps one's ability to concentrate and then one begins to make mistakes, which are – in turn – very demoralising.

Fourthly, my recent floating shelf model railway project has – to use an appropriate metaphor – hit the buffers. As I mentioned in a past blog post, I had problems with the paint I was using not sticking to the plastic that covered the MDF floating shelf. I did find a solution (peel off the Fablon-like plastic to expose the MDF) but after that I ran into another problem, this time with the layout's wiring. Now this is not something that I expected to happen as I am using KATO Unitrack, which is well-known for its ease of use and outstanding reliability. I finally traced the problem to one of the points, whose mechanism was jamming and replaced it ... only to find that almost all of my locomotives had stopped working! Even after servicing each of the locomotives (i.e. cleaning the contacts and oiling the bearings), the reliability of all but one of them remains marginal if not downright poor.

Now, experience has shown me that when things are going wrong, it makes no sense to continue pushing forward. Doing that merely reinforces failure ... and can lead to a feeling of greater ennui and even depression. I am – therefore – planning to stop working on any serious wargaming or model railway projects for the next few weeks. I hope that by taking a break, my enthusiasm and energy will return sometime soon. I will, however, continue to blog as often as I can.

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The title of this blog post comes from the opening line of the following poem.

I'll tell you a story
About Jack a Nory,
And now my story's begun;
I'll tell you another
Of Jack and his brother,
And now my story is done.

This short poem, which dates from the middle the eighteenth century, gave its name to JACKANORY, ...

... the famous BBC children's TV programme that was broadcast between 13th December 1965 and 24th March 1996. It featured an actor (often a famous one, including Tom Baker, Bernard Cribbins, Edward Fox, Sir Michael Horden, Sir Ian McKellen, Spike Milligan, Sir Tony Robinson, Sir Patrick Stewart, and Kenneth Williams) reading children's books or folk tales, usually whilst they were seated in an armchair.