Never suspected I was so stylish...

Señor Blakemore (a.k.a Sidney Roundwood) has kindly nominated my blog for the latest topic trend in the blogger's world, called the Stylish Award. If I'm not wrong, now I need to take three steps:



1. Give a big thank you to the person giving you the award
It's a real pleasure to accept this (otherwise undeserved) award. Sidney is one of the key brains at the Lardie Island, the reason for publishing this blog. I really appreciate that Sidney remembered my blog when nominating a list of his favourites.

Sidney's blog is a MUST and a reference for anyone playing WWI either with TFL's rule or any other set. His teach-ins on terrain making  and his very original developments on how to put on the game table key features of the 1914-1918 conflict (trench raids, tanks...) are best to none in the blogging world.

Thousand thanks indeed

2. Tell you a few things that you don't know about me

My first memories of "wargaming" are in the late sixties, a very large kitchen table at my parents' flat  where my mum allowed me to build my "military base" with hundres of small Airfix-type figures
manufactured by a Spanish company and sold in envelopes costing one "duro" (= 5 pesetas each), as well as uncountable plastic tanks and planes.

Fast forward now (early seventies), I see a very long corridor at home filled with British and French Airfix Napoleonics lines (anyone remember the Airfix Farm?) deployed, my brother on one side and myself at the other; "cannon balls" (our marbles collection!!)  flying all around, the winner being the one having at least one soldier standing... and my mother shouting a warning word about retribution if one of the lamps was ever broken with the marbles.

A word about my father (he passed away in 1999, a cruel cancer), a visionary who forced me to take English lessons since very young and made the (then) astonishing decision of sending me in 1975 to England to study English during the summer... Guys, this may sound no-brainer now, but we're talking here Spain 1975 a still underdeveloped country and Franco still alive! Who on earth in this country was thinking then that fluent English knowledge was to be a key advantage for one's future?... I need not to say the significant financial effort that these trips represented to my family... Big thanks, dad (and mum), we really still miss you after all these years.

Wargaming. I was one of the founders of probably the oldest wargaming clubs in Madrid, in 1982; around 20 wargamers (a rare species then),  we gather ourselves in  small empty flat belonging the family of one of the members  in a freezing January in a flat and launched Club Dragón. Almost 30 years later (...My God, time flies!!) it fetaures around 120 members and it is probably one of the largest clubs in Spain.

My wife (who I met and date for the first time many, many moons ago, at the University in the early 80s)  puts no objections to my hobby (in fact, she was for many years a very powerful wizard in our Dungeon & Dragons Saturday evening games...)  and probably is quite happy that I don't have other typically-male hobbies (sports, cars or motorbikes...). And who knows, that might be one of the reasons that our marriage still stands after all these  years (20th anniversary celebrated in Paris  last April... see the blog entry about the Museée de l'Armée)... the other two reasons being, likely. our two wonderful children (11 and 16 years old now).

Enough of me by now, let's move to the third step


3. Nominate the blogs I enjoy reading
Not an easy task, I have joined several blogs because I find interesting all of them and I make the effort to follow closely and leave as many messagges as possible to the bloggers.Reviewing my list, I've just discovered that I follow over 40. I'll mention now 10, in no particular order of preference:

Furt's Adventures in Lead
Big Lee's Miniature Adventures
Hetairoi wargames
Michael Fisser's Ministories
Phil Robinson's News from the Front
Joe a.k.a. Flightdoc Platoon Forward
Rafa Pardo's Project Leipzig (1813)
The Angry Lurker
John de Terre Neuve's Wargaming in 28mm
Bigredbatcave

Well I think, that's it, happy blogging and reading to all (and of course, happy wargaming, our common nexus)