The annual jam

Dear Diary,

It was so very nice to see Oliver yesterday and play some Old-Time music at a leisurely pace. The annual jam session (for having moved back to town we very rarely get to enjoy one another's company nowadays) went well.

The cRaZy cat-lady called, and I saw her in the evening. Despite getting completely sozzled on cheap vino blanc et rouge and some almost sultry but really quite off-putting (however drunk I may or may not have been at the time) cougar shots from the plump damsel as she intermittently flashed her bits at me like some giant withered marshmallow. In any case, I was more into talking about the new Roman Dorset book which I love, combining all my favourite aspects of learning: local history and Classical (particularly Roman, or even Romano-British) scholarship. The eccentric cat lady did her classic phrase, it had me falling off my chair, "The Romans weren't pagans Max." Oh really! Is that correct? Anyway. We parted ways amicably.

I have been thinking about getting back in to gaming again. It's not good. Not computer gaming you understand, but miniatures. I would like to have a Vegetius-style Roman army (25-28mm) with some Greek auxiliaries, to play the odd tournament. I am fanatical about the Romans, and the Greeks. It's silly really. I am like a small child with the idea of playing with toy soldiers, but, I think re-creating actual battles with the approximate ratios of troops fielded, and the terrain of the correct sort, historically, based on close readings of the primary sources, means it might be more than just a little boy's hobby. Sure, much as I long to sit there, on a sedan-chair propped up by Latin dictionaries, smoking a rather large cigar and drinking port from a cornucopia, commanding the Belaeric slingers to take on the battlements, while the Romans wait until the walls have been breached; much as I wish to be another Caesar, in my own mind at least, wearing a purple toga and pushing little trays of cavalry and infantry around, living out some kind of boyish megalomaniac fantasy: I feel the historical value of such frivolous pursuits far outweigh the imagined bellicose indulgence of a small boy's psyche. I like the random element, and thought perhaps the best system would involve giving sealed written orders to an independent arbiter, three turns in advance, as in Gemmell's Lion of Macedon.