The Curates Egg

It has been a strange and eventful couple of days. I have managed to visit not one but two boot sales as well as a visit to the Navwar shop. The two boot sales yielded some real goodies of the written persuasion i.e. books. I acquired on Saturday a hardback copy of Anthony Beevor's 'Berlin - The Downfall 1945' for the princely sum of 50p. This will furnish a nice cheery read for those balmy summer evenings in the garden......................;-) Today saw me acquire hardbacks of 'Blood, Tears and Folly' by Len Deighton - this is a study of what made WW2 special in many different levels and is what I would describe as a 'broad brush' history. Along with this I acquired 'The Battle of Britain - The Jubilee History' by Richard Hough and Denis Richards. The Battle of Britain is one of my all time fave films and I would love to game this using Tumbling Dice 1/600th models - that will be another project for the back burner methinks! The two of these came from the same seller and cost the paltry sum of £2.50 for the pair. The final title is 'The Armed Rovers' by Roy Nesbitt and is an account of the exploits of the Beaufort and Beaufighter squadrons operating in the Mediterranean during WW2. The Med is a preferred theatre of operations for me and so this was a welcome surprise at 50p for the ex library softback. All in all then, a pretty successful couple of days but then it went wrong, horribly wrong..........

You may recall that I was going to visit Navwar on Saturday with the intention of acquiring everything I needed for the Russian Black Sea fleet 1914 to 1917 as well as the Greek and Turkish stuff - both actual and hypothetical. I was able to acquire everything I needed and was feeling pretty pleased with myself until this morning when I made a dreadful discovery.

The Lejtenant Pucsin class of TBDs (Black Sea Russian) were to be represented by, as posted earlier on the blog, the two funnel E (River) class RN destroyer. That would have been fine and dandy had the aforementioned Russian TBD looked anything like the E class. Sadly, due to the incorrect interpretation of a very fuzzy picture I have managed to get this completely wrong as the class had 4 equally spaced funnels - not 2. So I have bagged them up and will be returning them to Navwar in order to exchange them for something more suitable.

In respect of the Curates Egg it is fairly safe to say that whilst the weekend has thus far been good in parts the faux pas in respect of the Russian TBDs has served to take the shine off it somewhat!