The Village Hobby Pt 2: Men and train sets

Hobbies are a low key Faustian pack, at least among those who are in gainful and resentful employment. The deal is that you will work in an unrewarding job that is simply there to bankroll your real life. It's like being a super-hero, you spend all day pretending to be normal, and spend your nights making dioramas of famous scenes from World War II if dinosaurs had been involved - and who doesn't thrill a little when confronted with a 1/32 scale recreation of a T Rex battling a British tank unit on a Parisian street corner, or a Spitfire downing a pterodactyl over Big Ben (yes of course the dinosaurs fought on the side of the Axis - they were recreated using perverted Nazi science, what are you, thick?)

One of the positives of this trade-off is that while you sure as hell don't give work a thought while you are away from it, you can devote time at work to your hobby. Not overtly of course, as for instance waders, a tackle box and a keep-net writhing with angry fish might cause comment as you take communion, but you can certainly give your pastime some thought.

This is because, as anyone who has ever sat in a meeting featuring PowerPoint and has spent the time from Slide three until 'any questions' idly wondering if you could capitalise on the upcoming badger cull by introducing a range of 'Woodland Soups' without being too specific about the content, or the likelihood of contracting TB as a result of ingestion, will be able to confirm, musing is not easily detectable (unless you operate a lathe or are a surgeon, in which case bloody well concentrate and stop wondering whether that triceratops model you ordered for your recreation of the siege of Stalingrad has arrived yet).

If you have a hobby, and you are at work, and your badge says that you are 'happy to help', then you are a fibber. But that's OK because badges that read 'Hello, I'm Gary, ambivalent about helping, but if you want to discuss what would win in a fight, a T Rex or a Cromwell, I am very much your man' are difficult to find, even on the Internet.

When you leave work for good you are unencumbered by nine to five distraction and the fear that your colleagues might find out what you do at the weekend and judge you because you rather like folk dance, or weaving, or competitive masturbation, and you can level up from hobbyist to enthusiast. And there is no better place to see retired folk in enthusiastic action than a railway line run by enthusiasts (unlike commercial train companies, which are staffed by unenthusiasts).

Retired enthusiasts are such a regular feature of steam train lines that you could be forgiven for concluding that the train crew came with the engine when it was new and have simply stuck with it after it was acquired by a trust formed of people who like grease, polishing things and smelling faintly of equal parts soot and sawrfega.

Because maybe it's the grimy faces, but bloody hell do the enthusiasts look happy when they smile. And who can blame them? You know that whooshing feeling you get in your stomach when you see a bloody big loco thunder by and the whistle shrieks and the clouds of steam flow back over the carriages like a white mink stole thrown over the shoulder of a silent movie starlet, well they get that all the time, from marmite to horlicks and in their dreams as well.

Steam enthusiasts are the ultimate hobbyists. You can be enthusiastic about your skydiving, or your golf, or your fishing or God help you your Morris dancing (by the way, putting on some bells, thwacking a twig and doing a jig in a car park followed by ten hours of drinking makes you a Real Ale enthusiast, not a folk dance enthusiast, although the two are often confused), or about dressing up as a Roundhead or investigating paranormal activity (usually in pubs, handy for accessing spirits) but being a steam enthusiast, traction or rail, is commitment. And romantic.

A change of scene

What between the riots, recession and no Downton Abbey on the telly on a Sunday night, one could be forgiven for concluding that things could be described as grim. And that’s just at home, when one turns on the idiot lantern to the BBC Speculation 24 channel (other ways of upsetting yourself and commenting on how a newsreader’s blouse is inappropriate are available) you let a whole world of misery flicker into the room. If it’s not the planet trying to make life difficult for people, it’s other people trying to do so.

Is it any wonder that people turn, in a variety of ways, to alternative realities? The great thing is that doing so does not require a huge glowing contraption that makes a whooshing noise and flings you to an alternative England where there are cool airships, the Crazy Frog ring tone was never invented and neither Hitler, Murdoch or Cowell attained positions of influence, rather people are constructing their own realities.

And they are well catered for. Stop in at any newsagents and, after you have bought your scratchcards and fags and noted down the number on the card in the window advertising a ‘large chest for sale’, you may notice the plethora of magazines that line the walls like a fresco pained by somebody with multiple personality disorder and a passion for part-works about quilting. The gateway to alternative worlds is here. Either different worlds altogether, inhabited by celebrities who although they notionally occupy the same planet that the public do, inhabit a different existence, or a minute focus on a part of the reader’s world, such as the one that collects lace.

And especially railway modellers. There are any number of magazines dedicated to modelling, military and civilian and by far the most populous of these are for railway model enthusiasts.

We have all, at one time or another, run a toy train around an oval track but, for the serious modeller, it’s much more than that, it’s the creation of a perfect world, where the trains have character, rather than being shaped like an articulated dildo and where they pull in and out of stations, normally small country stations, that have station masters and porters and are even probably manned at night.

Most importantly, the trains run on time. Because the modeller can write his (no ‘or her’ here) timetable.

This is indeed an alternative world, one in which the modeller has control of the rolling stock, every run and every shunt. Imagine the sensation of power and relief that a commuter must feel running their own train service. An alternative, preferable world, complete and to scale and never, ever, late.

Judging a magazine by it's cover

While magazines in the past were generally content to contain nothing more than articles with pictures to illustrate the words, or pictures with words to explain the images (or, in certain glossy cases, lots of pictures, very few words and what words there were preporting to be from readers who had had quite exciting erotic experiences that they felt they had to share with other readers, when the reality was that the apex of an erotic experience for a reader of such material was actually a crafty hand shandy parked up in a in a lay-by between sales meetings while perusing it), magazines today come with all sorts of free stuff attached to the front of them, CDs and DVDs being the most common cover mounts because they are handily flat, while stuff like golf balls and fresh veg you don't see so much of.

Kids' comics have, of course, long been exponents of enticing new readers with a free gift. Now the norm, it used to be the exception and seeing a cheap bit of tat selotaped to the front cover of a comic sent a thrill of excitement and must-have pester power through a young lad keen to start tooting on their 'space distress siren' or, as it might more properly be called, crap plastic whistle.

Comics came with 'space spinners' (plastic hoop), 'club wallets' (cardboard envelope) and other novelties that made the magazine popular with kids and, thirty years on, drives comic collectors to fits of sorrowful rage as they come across another first issue with a mutilated cover where the toy had been ripped off, or to effervesce with joy if they come across one that has not.

Also available as cover mounts, sweets (or, more normally, a sweet, but hey, a sweet is a sweet, right?) or 'space dust' which I'm not sure is a sweet or some sort of junior amphetamine. What was odd was that these toys and sweets were never available to readers in Northern Ireland. Obviously it was considered that it would be unwise to fuel sectarian violence with sugary treats.

Of course, cover mounts were not confined to kids publications. I seem to recall that every single edition of the 'Peoples' Friend' ever published came with a free rain hood. This was genius, women who have a tartan shopping trolly in one hand and the magazine in the other are unable to hold an umbrella as they wait for the bus in the rain, reading hospital romances.

These days the chief exponents of the cover mount are the collectible or the hobby part works. The collectible part works promise you 'strange smells of the world' and have a different jar for you to sniff the contents of every week, or something.

The hobby part works used to be straightforward, you got a magazine that told you about Nelson and the navy and, free with part one, the bowsprit of the 'Victory'. By the time you had worked your way to the rudder you probably had a stack of magazines about eight foot high, a greater understanding of life in the navy in the Neoplionic era than any man alive and a nagging sensation that you missed issue 176 and, with it, a starboard gun port. Could be worse, the magazine could fold before you collect the issue with the glue for assembling the damn thing.

The thing to do is to cut your losses after issue three, go to a model shop, buy a replica kit, glue and paints and then leave the whole thing unmade on a shelf for a few decades. It's the same result as collecting the part work without all the schlepping down to the newsagent, where the danger is that you will be enticed by one of the more edgy, modern, cooler part works, like 'learn to bake' with a different cake tin free with every issue, or 'the family surgeon' with each edition covering some common operation in detail and containing a piece of surgical kit. Just remember to collect the issue with the batteries before you try attempt anything likely to require the defribulator. And remember, Botox is not a toy.

Vogue -part 2

Ever since I saw the film ‘The September Issue’, I’ve wanted to pick up an issue of Vogue.

‘The September Issue’ is a documentary about putting together the September issue (duh!) of American Vogue. It’s like ‘The devil wears prada’ but impossibly more glamorous, cruel and wonderful and it left me thinking that with a few more perfectionists, the Earth would be a better place, or a smoking cinder.

Essentially the editor of the magazine has to try and crush the defiance of lots of creative people while simultaneously bringing out the very qualities that make them creative. The whole place is like a beehive – full of poison, manufacturing something sweet and everyone serving the queen.

Favourite scene? The model wolfing down a tart. I have no love for any woman who is an anodyne waif…but the second she attacked that jam tart with gusto…bloody ding dong, you’re telling me she’s beautiful and real too? (And has access to free food? I mean it’s free right, and she could bring it home and it’s not like she’s going to eat all of it.)

Deal time…when they launch the 1,000 page issue – I’ll buy it. If only because I want to see what the writing is like. If they can firehose money on photo shoots then they should emulate Playboy in terms of writing. If Mailer and Hemingway used to write for Playboy, why aren’t Amis, Ford and Coe write for Vogue.

What I particularly liked about the documentary was the obvious passion that everyone had for the subject. But let’s not think that this is isolated to the world of fashion. Among the many magazines at the news stand are modelling magazines, not magazines with models being skinny women but rather the models being 00 scale. That’s right ‘Model Village World’, the rest of us might think that it’s ridiculous but these people have a passion for documenting an unobtainable beauty, like a 1950s perfect chocolate box English village (complete with sleeping cats and sleeping murder) but it’s less furiously ridiculous than seven pages of a glossy magazine devoted to the snood. Scale modelling. Remove the ‘scale’ and is there any difference? Come to think of it is there any difference even if you leave in the ‘scale’ – the models in Vogue are size 0 (if not scale 00) and real women are, what, size 16?

In establishing the fashion model industry we have created a breed of people who would otherwise perish in the wild or have to serially shag Premiership footballers.