Building models
---------------

I was in a large department store the other day (rarely a pleasant undertaking
for me), and I stopped briefly in my tracks when I saw at the end of an aisle in
the toy section a range of Revel model paints and a small selection of model
plans and ships.

When I was a lot younger, I used to build a lot of models of military aircraft
(mostly Soviet - I think this was because all the library books on aviation I
could get in rural South Australia were published a few decades back during the
height of the Cold War and I was intrigued by the strageness of "the other
side").  The vast majority of these were purchased in the toy sections of Big W
department stores when we occasionally travelled into what were "big cities" to
me at the time.  I almost never got a chance to visit a specialist hobby store.
Despite this, I seem to recall there always being a pretty healthy range of
model kits to choose from, even though this was just the toy section of a
generic department store.  As I grew up, though, model kits slowly but surely
disappeared from these stores.  I'm not sure if this is the reason I stopped
building them or if I just lost interest as I grew up and they happened to
disappear at roughly the same time.

Anyway, it was nostalgia-inducing and heartening to see that Finnish kids
apparently still have the option to buy these things easily and cheaply long
after Aussie kids have lost it.  Most of the models I saw were of ships rather
than aircraft, and they had two Imperial Japanese Navy kits, the infamous
Yamato and also the aircraft carrier Shokaku.  I don't really know much at all
about the IJN, but I know that it's something a lot of people geek right out to.
Many of the characters in Evangelion are named after IJN ships (see
https://wiki.evageeks.org/Warships_in_Evangelion).  I have to admit I briefly
considered buying and building those kits, just to relive a little of my
childhood, but I ended up not, and probably for the best.  Best case scenario, I
would have fun for a couple of evenings (these were very basic kits) and produced
something that I would just end up throwing away next time I moved.  Worst case
scenario it would trigger some kind of addiction and I'd waste hundreds of Euros
over the next three years building beautiful but fragile things I'd then agonise
over what to do with when I left.

Oh, and for the record, I preferred Humbrol over Revel for my paints, probably
for no good reason whatsoever.