Tiger Woods has shown me the light and the way! It is time, dear reader, for me to come out of the closet, well, not the closet exactly, but my study, actually, and 'fess up to the secret, one might almost call it 'Top Secret', activity in which I indulge. You see, I play with soldiers! No, no, no, not real soldiers, I mean toy soldiers. I blame 'SoD' because when he was about 10 years old he started taking an interest and so we joined a small wargamers club in which we operated as a team, that is, I gave the orders and he did all the fiddly-diddly painting of tiny model soldiers so that we had an 'army' of Napoleonic figures with which to play. This continued for some years until the time when I found it increasingly difficult to lean across a 10' table to reach my troops, it being an invariable law of wargaming that one's troops end up in the middle of the table and never on the edge where you can reach them. 'SoD', despite being well into middle-age by now, continues with his table-top gaming but I have retired to the much easier world of computer wargames which I can play dedicate my life to in the comfort of my study. I hasten to add, in mitigation, that I have no interest in those 'shoot 'em up' games, preferring to waste my time tax my military brain with what are called 'strategic' or 'operational' games'.
One of my favourites is Combat Mission 2, admittedly a little dated now, which is set in the eastern front during WWII. The graphics are simply amazing in that you can view the entire battlefield as though at high altitude in a 'plane, or you can zoom down lower and lower until you have a realistic man's eye view of the terrain as seen by the soldiers. However, since the expiration of King Lear, I now have a gaping hole in my life which, if I don't fill it quickly, will be re-allocated by she-who-must-be-obeyed to decorating the bedroom, changing the garden layout, or whatever! Seeking a new game for the first time in years, I came across War in the Pacific: Admiral's Edition. This covers the entire far eastern campaign in WWII - and I do mean entire! From Burma to New Zealand, from Ceylon to Los Angeles. It includes armies, fleets, transports, aircraft - everything. It will almost certainly take me weeks to master the rules and years to actually win the war - even if I play the American side with a nuke or two! I may have to go to night school, or perhaps Staff College might be better.
Anyway, that's me taken care of for the next few years. Don't be too quick to sneer, all men's hobbies are inexplicable to other men. For example, several of my friends go off several times a week to walk in a beautiful country park but instead of enjoying the walk they take some peculiar looking sticks with them and insist on hitting a little white ball ahead of them as they stroll. Then they get in a fearful strop when the ball goes missing or fails to go where it should. I know, ridiculous isn't it, but that's men's hobbies for you. Anyway, I can't hang around here wasting my time, I've got a war to win!
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