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Childhood's End (June 29th 2020 and 2026)

1. Airfix Models

Despite having the worst childhood tremor imaginable, I spent an inordinate amount of time making and painting Airfix construction kits - mostly WW2 planes, but also tanks, warships and one twelfth scale historical figures.
There seemed to come a day in most youthful modellers' lives when they realise that the model planes hanging in 'dogfighting' pose from their bedroom ceilings are really boring and need to be burnt in the yard or garden as a form of catharsis - and as a punishment for the modeller being born before the internet was created.
The combination of glue and Humbrol paints meant that the various Spitfires, Messerschmitts and Heinkels 'went up' just like the real thing - as did HMS Ajax, the Scharnhorst and the Lee Grant tank I'd spent so long carefully constructing.
In the spirit of historical verisimiltude, I re-constructed the final moments of Joan of Arc at the stake in her beloved Rouen (which I 're-imagined' in the garden of our house in Anfield by putting a wooden strip from an orange box over the open incinerator).
Joan went to meet her maker quite spectacularly (it's what she would have wanted), so I 'Hollywoodised' the histories of the other Airfix figures in my collection by having Julius Caesar, Oliver Cromwell, Queen Elizabeth I and Napoleon all being torched in a similar fashion - with Henry VIII suffering most of all by being splashed with nail varnish remover for some extra pizzazz.
It served him right for dissolving the monasteries.

Next week: trading my hoop and stick (neither euphemism nor rhyming slang) for a motorbike!