It has been a while...

...Four and a half years! This blog was my first adventure into blogging and since then I have opened and closed a few others, as my involvement in my various interests have waxed and waned. This has meant some content has been taken away from this, my original concept. This, as well as life and other commitments, has also taken me away from spending any amount of time in the workshop or even writing about it. Our Meccano blog (now no longer updated, but still available to view) had taken the most content away from here, and other blogs such as our fishing blog and art blog take care of those areas of our life.

Our life is about to change rapidly. We are planning a move, having lived here since the late 1970's it will be a big change for us. Worst of all, we will have to leave the workshop and little 'turning' shed behind, but that means we will need new ones! To sell our current property, the workshop will be reconfigured as a home office (this was always the plan), and the turning shed will revert to being a garden shed with storage for mowers and other gardening stuff.

In the meantime, life goes on. The move is not going to happen overnight and we need to streamline our life. Sue and I were never lucky enough to have children and this has meant we have been able to peruse our interests without having the 'complication' of supporting a family. Don't misunderstand me, this was never the plan, it is just the way it turned out.

The first major decision was to heavily reduce our commitment to Meccano, both the company and the hobby. We have been collecting and building with Meccano most of our married life and it had got to the stage it was ruling our life. The perspective had become skewed and we were living our life around it. It got to the point, especially when we were working for and representing the company within the Meccano enthusiast fraternity, that it was taking up most of our weekends and limiting our freedom to peruse other interests.

What has a pepper and three mushrooms got to do with anything?
Nothing, it is just a nice picture!

Because of our domestic situation, we had nothing to check our long-standing involvement in all things Meccano. It was not until the new owners of the company started to move away from the product we knew and loved, and we realised there was no young-blood coming into the hobby, that we realised the end was nigh as far as the hobby we knew was concerned. Our enjoyment was beginning to become commitment and we knew this had to change. At the beginning of last year (2017) we finally gave in and announced to the rest of the Meccano world that we were getting out and selling our collection lock stock and barrel.

This is something we have never done before. We have always had a selection of interests that we have pursued with various degrees of enthusiasm from time to time. Never before have we decided to completely give up on something we have been so deeply involved with. The result has been life-changing. No more commitment to attend shows, and meetings, and a complete freedom as to what we do at the weekend. It was not until we did it, we realised just how much of our life it was eating up.

Most of our interests have been with us as long as I can remember. We have never been into 'five-minute wonders', you know the sort of thing I mean, get interested in something, buy all the gear and sell it a few months down the road to fund the next pastime. Meccano was our main interest, one that we both were heavily involved in. With one exception, all our other interests have been things we have built up a love for, and knowledge of, over decades. That exception is fishing, or should I say, more correctly, angling. If someone had told me I would become fascinated by fishing a few years ago, I would have laughed at them.

When I was a child I was a stay at home, model building, collecting sort of kid. I was never really interested in sport of any kind. My dad was a record collector and outings were usually to a record shop, thinly disguised as a trip to 'the West End' (of London) or some out of the way place that just happened to support a record shop or Hi-Fi show. The Rediffusion show, held at Earls Court, was one such outing that graced the early years of the 1960s. 

First pike... and me!

I have lived in this area, only moving a few (single figure) miles from where I was born, in all of those 60+ years. Fishing was one of those things that was not common amongst my mates, so I never got close to it. There was not the opportunity either. They filled in the Surrey Canal when I was a kid but even before that it was a dead lifeless ribbon of urban decay threading its way from the very much run-down Surrey Docks to its destinations at Walworth Road and Peckham Basin. The local rivers are very small, the only park to offer fishing was Crystal Palace Park and that was not on our doorstep. All this meant that until I was well into my fifty-ninth year, I had never held a fishing rod let alone a live fish. 

My brother, Tim, who is ten years (well, 9 years, six months, 27 days, 4 hours and 37 minutes) younger than me, had done a bit of fishing as my parents owned a holiday chalet on the North Kent coast and he had done a bit of sea fishing there. He had also dabbled in fishing with one of our cousins in his youth. He now lives a good fifty miles away and we hardly see much of each other. One day, during one of our occasional long telephone conversations we were discussing the idea of finding an interest we could pursue jointly and get to spend some time together, something we have never rally done that much of, even as kids. The ten years between us meant there was very little common ground when I lived at home.

We settled on the idea of going fishing. I had an idyllic idea that I would be sitting on a sunny bank somewhere chatting and sinking the odd pint while Tim was demonstrating to me how to fish. As it has turned out, now three and a half years later, it is me who is doing all the fishing. For the first time in my adult life I have found something new to do that I had never had any inkling to do before. The story of our interest in fishing is documented on my other blog How to Drown Maggots. 

The model I built for the Royal Mail stamp

My other interests are still bubbling along. Last year a series of stamps was released to celebrate classic toys. One of the stamps was to depict a Meccano model and I was lucky enough to be commissioned by Royal Mail to build it and discuss the look of the stamp with the designer. How is that for a culmination of my interests to come together, to get the satisfaction of seeing one of my models immortalised on a stamp and to get paid for it! It just does not get any better than that! 

1:48 scale (American O-scale) Narrow gauge Climax loco, On30

Where does that leave us with this blog? Well, the answer to that is right here. As Sue and I peruse our other interests we find ourselves back in the workshop rekindling our love of woodworking and combining that with art and design mixed in with a spot of creative woodturning. There is also room for a spot of narrow gauge railway modelling, some electronics and even a rummage through the stamp collections in the evenings. That is so long as we don't get too bogged down with the big flower shows. We decided to give Chelsea a miss again this year because of our impending move, but there is always next year. 

Sue at the Chelsea Flower show

Enough bashing of keys, time to get the workshop sorted and do something worth writing about. That could very well be the recovering of the roof of said workshop - Yes, due to some of next-doors trees rubbing on the roof and the roofing felt getting towards the end of its life expectancy it looks like that job can wait no longer...

Ralph.