Vapnartak

On Sunday 7th I left best beloved in charge of bugglesnuff and went to Vapnartak, a wargames convention at the York race ground. It's far from the biggest con in the country, with less than two thousand visitors and only lasting a day, but situated in the five story race track building with vast glass windows overlooking the expanse of grassy track (turned by recent weather into a flat of glassy ponds) it is perhaps the most opulent.

Though I would ordinarily spend a convention leisurely drifting from stall to stall abusing the plastic in my wallet, I was taking part in a wargames tournament. I'll save the details except to observe - if you are a UK Warmachine player, Vapnartak is a one day event well worth travelling for, brilliantly organised and judged, with great tables and a broad standard of competition for players new and experienced. I lost three games, won one, enjoyed them all immensely, and to Greg from Newcastle - that last game was a blast. A well deserved win to you.

(Of further note for UK Warmachine players - Guildball, the English designed skirmish minis game made by former Warmachine tournament veterans, had at least as many players, maybe twice as many, and I would be very interested to know whether this pattern is repeated across the country).

Shopping wise, I picked up some new airbrush paints, cleaning fluid, cleaning pot, and some tiny wee flowers to make my models' bases all pretty. Only the very best for my metal dollies. The trade halls burgeoned with demonstration, participation and show games on a huge scale. Recreations of the battle of the Alamo, Stewart pacification of the Scots, a French foreign legion siege, dozens more, all on tables 10 feet or longer lovingly layered with miniatures and terrain. The sort of thing that would have a formative impact on a child.

Two weeks from now I'll be in London for the epic Smogcon tournament. Thank Christ for grandparents. Best beloved, you're a star.

Sunset Yellow

Best Beloved likes her some children's cereal. Frosted Boulders, Sugar Blimps, Crunchy Cinnamon Pillows, stuff that's essentially a crunchy pudding to lure children into eating first thing in the day. I include Cheerios in this - adults who think you're eating adult food when you have a bowl of Cheerios, you are mistaken. Likewise Crunchy Nut, which is Frosties for people who don't own their vices.

So in the international aisle at Tesco I spot a little cluster of American cereals. I love the boxes of American cereals as they perfectly embody the earnestness of Yanky packaging, proclaiming their health benefits like a Victorian pill bottle, while perfectly executing a pop-artistic gaucheness and naivety of design that you don't see outside action figures and waterslides in the UK. My eyes were drawn to the Apple Zings. These have many ironic virtues - they're made by 'mom brands' cereals, a name that could only be born in the hell cauldron of uncriticized capitalism. Some diligent importer had overstickered the ingredients list to match some European edict. At the bottom of the list was the proviso 'May have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children'. They're a children's cereal that causes ADHD. Obviously I bought them.

A little later in the week my parents were visiting and I decided to show the Zings to my dad. 'Read the ingredients list,' I said. He used to be a special educational needs teacher. I figured that ADHD brekkers would give him a chuckle.

'Jesus Christ,' he said, 'Where did you find these?'

'Tesco.'

'Tesco? Why did they have these at Tesco?'

'They were in the international aisle.'

He called my stepmum over. 'Have a look at these love.' She was a midwife.

'They've got Sunset Yellow in them!' She said. Sunset Yellow is an E number. 'Isn't that banned?'

'They did ban that,' My dad said, 'Back in the 80s.'

'Why did you buy this?' Asked my stepmum. 'You wouldn't want children eating this. This wouldn't be safe for breastfeeding. Who's eating this?'

Best Beloved, who is breastfeeding the Buggle, had been eating it for the last three days.

'I am eating it.' I said. 'I am the only person who is eating this.'

Making deposits in Satan's piggybank

You have a different relationship to effluvia once you're a parent. For instance - when was the last time you had shit on your arms? Those without children might imagine a slight toilet paper malfunction that leaves one finger faecally daubed, but I mean right up your arms, up near the elbow. When was the last time that shit was put there by someone's foot?

At the moment the shit has the consistency, texture, even the smell of cottage cheese. Not a good cottage cheese. Tesco everyday basics, maybe. This makes it less offensive when smeared liberally up my forearms and shirt, but has put us off cottage cheese. As a vegetarian I find this upsetting.

Often the infant will be sitting on one's lap, squirming, squawking, obviously processing a good quantity of Asda own brand. There's nothing to do but egg her on.

'Shit. Shit. Shit, you magnificent bastard! Shit your tiny brains out!'

Eventually she does.

We have avoided any piss-in-the-face episodes, which I have heard are part of the rich tapestry of boy parenting, but piss-in-the-bath is pretty regular. This event causes you to confront your own hard limits. Suppose you were planning to bathe using this water. You are aware that urine is pretty much just water and ammonia - that's practically a cleaning product. If the baby had peed in the bath without your knowledge it would do you not a jot of harm. But you do know. And if you leave the water in now, you are proactively choosing to bathe in baby piss. It's not just icky. It's something a badly medicated celebrity would do in an LA detox retreat

You even treat your own emissions differently. For instance - the baby, after thirty uninterrupted minutes of howling, is asleep, tied to your chest in a harness. You realise that for the last fifteen minutes your bladder has been toiling against the pressure of hot gallons of piss. You attempt to set her down in her crib but no sooner do you unlatch the first clasp on the harness then she is wide awake, shrieking directly into your face. Refix the harness and she is asleep so deeply it resembles a coma. You attempt this a few times, each time unleashing an earsplitting burst of red noise. Several parents and harnessed babies of different sizes could serve as a rudimentary, awful musical instrument. By this point your bladder feels like a car tire is being inflated inside it.

I am not too proud to admit that I have pissed standing up with my baby harnessed to my chest. I plugged her ears with wax, like Odysseus tied to the mast, so she did not hear the siren song of piss hitting pan. But shitting with my baby affixed to me is a motion too far. Her mother may feel differently, given as the infant spent nine months living happily and directly beside her gurgling bowels.

The other great thing about baby shit, besides nothing, is that you come up with all sorts of great metaphors for taking a dump. It's a literary coal mine. For instance:

Opening the Conservative party conference.
Another fine offering by AA Gill.
A lengthy session in the Finnish Parliament.
Giving a Welsh grammar lesson.
Three line whip in the lower chamber.
Letting slip the dogs of war.
Releasing that difficult second album.
Planting flowers at Thatcher's grave.

Strike a pose, vogue

Here are names I have come up with for poses the baby adopts:

Paint me like one of your French girls
Uncle Fester
Victorian suicide
Dead mouse
The plank
Window collision sparrow
Rugby ball
Cartoon drunk
Mincing
Mister Burns

Sable

I finally unpacked my toy soldier painting equipment, only to find I had no worthwhile size 0 brushes. So, a trip.

Two trips, as I made the mistake of buying Games Workshop brushes on my first foray. Avoid these brushes like the plague. After one use they'd begun to fork. I cane my brushes, but even by my standard this is a dismal performance. Cheap glue or cheap hair - everything about them is cheap but the price.

The second time I went to the Art Shop in the York Shambles. These narrow medieval streets with overhanging Tudor buildings are the kind of thing Americans visit the UK for. Super twee. They're cobbled too which is pretty good when you have a pushchair, a nice bumpety bumpety that puts the buggle down to sleep.

Brushes sound like Harry Potter wands - instead of Dragon's Heartstring and Phoenix Feather you're looking for pony or squirrel or sable hair. I picked up a size 1 synthetic watercolour brush with an extra long tip, and splashed on a size 0 Windsor and Newton series 7. These were kept in individual tubes on the counter, to protect them from oxygen, I assume.

'Windsor and Newton, size 0, series seven watercolour. A pine shaft and kolinsky sable bristles. How interesting,' The shopkeeper said. 'The sable that gave the fur to make this brush gave fur to make only one other. Sometimes brushes share a special connection, you see.'

'But who owns the other brush?' I asked.

The wizened brush seller leaned across the counter and looked at me across half moon glasses with a dark expression.

'He who must not be named.'

So I think I got somebody else's brush, but fuck it. My prophecy now.

I asked for advice on brushcare, which is why I went to a shop and didn't just buy the thing cheaper online. Her advice: for sable and other natural hair brushes, it's possible to retain springiness and point for longer by conditioning the brush with hair conditioner once a month. To protect brushes from acrylic paint there's very little to be done, the pigment is a bugger for creeping up and settling under the ferule or near the base of the brush. However, preparing the brush by wetting it and removing the water from the tip leaves a protective band of water under the ferrule that should prevent the pigment and its medium travelling up when you actually load it with paint. On a £12 brush I'll take that kind of care.

'And beware the agents of the dark one.' She added. 'They will try all tricks to separate you from your brush. So make sure you hide it, secret and safe.'

'Like in a drawer?'

'Is it lockable?'

'No. Its on an IKEA desk unit.'

'A drawer would do, yes.'

Suicidal sleeping

The baby approaches 'safe sleeping' like a frat boy approaches safe sex - not at all if there's any hope of the alternative. She will drift off blissfully (no matter how snotty, cantankerous or irascible she has become) when in bed with a parent. This seems quite natural, but cosleeping is a SIDS risk, what with the possibility of rolling over and crushing the bab like a big dumb rabbit.

She particularly likes drifting off in the carseat while wearing her outdoors puffer jacket. Slowly cooking like a foil wrapped beef joint, or perhaps developing irrecoverable spinal deformities from the unnatural jellybean posture the seat squishes her into. Nevertheless it covers the half an hour I need to pack the cans away after we're back from shopping so sod it, job's a good 'un.

If we offered her a plastic bag to shove her head in before bed time I bet she'd take it.

Die Damen von Kaos

Tzeentch
The Season's Queen. Demon princess, a Persephone bride to Tzeentch's underworld. Spring and Summer are his seasons when growth and change and the unfurling of seeds bring out new life, renewal, and thaw the bones of winter dead. Then she is abroad in the realms of magic, tending young demons, lambing the damned mutants, tilling and planting fields of warp lilies, spinetrees, spellgrass. In Autumn and Winter she is in the mortal realm, foul mooded, pining for her husband and his gardens of everchange. She builds little models to relieve the tedium out of living souls and their tiresome, slow morphing bodies.

Clothed demagogue. Clothes have a secret language that the wearer does not know but the reader does. Treacherous words: 'Fool.' 'Buffoon'. 'Pauper'. Women more than men must learn their language for fear of wearing the clothes that say 'Victim.' 'Target.' 'Asking for it.' The cruelty of men made the language of cloth, but Tzeentch is jealous of all secrets. Those women who learn the true language of clothes are precious to him, and if they petition him and make supplications he will grant them garments of surpassing beauty and unignorable voice. Clothes that say 'Mistress,' 'Lady,' 'Regent of all who have eyes to see,' in tones too loud to ignore and too regal to disobey.

Nonwomen. A madness that takes over good women and true. The minds of many melt and mingle - they are one person of many bodies, or one body of many parts. Until they are found out they go about their several businesses to one purpose, exalting the lord of the strange in secret fashions, making by nine parts and nine unseeming gestures a single cantation, or building in nine points nine innocent icons that together and apart are of unholy purpose. They corrupt by inches, churn the good sod to foul mud. When they touch they flow together like melting candles.

Nurgle
Scratching beauty. Once, Nurgle wagered Slaanesh that he could make a maiden stare longer into a mirror glass than could his sister-brother. Slaanesh found a maiden plain and gave to her a glass in which she saw herself more beautiful than any other girl abouts. And into this glass she would stare for hours on end, longing for a face that was not real. But in the end she cursed the mirror and cast it down and it shattered to pieces beside her, for she knew the face was not and could never be hers. And to another maiden, beautiful, did Nurgle give a mirror that showed her beauty truly and to great effect - except that it showed upon her a blemish mark that no other mirror showed. And though she could not find it except in the mirror yet the maiden picked at this blemish and plied her skin with caustics in an effort to be rid of it, and in time her skin was damaged sorely and the blemish that was not real became so. And now the mirror showed her ever more awful and terrible ailments and deformities that were not in truth part of her yet fair face, and in her desperation to be rid of them she with lance and scalpel and foul ointment ripped and tore and flensed her own flesh until it was ruined utterly, a hole of sores and flowing wounds that she could not help but pick, pick, pick at. And at last, having won the bet some time ago, and being not overly cruel, Nurgle entered her mind and let her see herself as she truly was, a creature of disease entire, a mouldering beauty fit to host the Lords and Ladies of plague. And she is his faithful servant, and she delights in sharing her gifts with others.

Blister sisters. Peat cutters and charcoal burners for the fire beneath the pot wherein Nurgle brews novel contagion. Their affliction begins with a single blister on the forehead which soon grows down the face, claiming the eyes and nose, and back over the scalp, loosing the hair. The cheeks split at the corner of the lips so that the grin grows idiotically broader until it reaches the ears, which then fall off. Buboes swell their groin and armpits, their limbs bloat with water and bad blood and their skin cracks and spills. They are slow to notice intruders but relentless with their peat mattocks and splitting axes.

Midden maidens. Infinite cruelty in the punishment of witches, adulteresses, infanticides. When a woman, drowning in a midden, forsakes all - her family, God and soul - for the mere hope of revenge, then is she Nurgle's. He changes the savour of dung to wine, and she lives in sewers and privies, and spits cholera in wells.

Khorne
Hunt bitches. The God of the Hunt is a loutish oaf who rejects womankind from his band. Khorne has no compunctions such. Sleek skinned, long legged, great distended jaws and teeth sharpened to points or capped in brass. Run in packs and delight in running huntsmen to ground, then tearing them apart.

Blood widows. War begets widows and orphans. Those who harbour rage more than grief, desire revenge more than peace may tread the path of Khorne. He lends them the strength they desire, and seeds in their heart a blood hunger that will only grow. The mightiest follow the Wronged Queen in her scythed chariot, her mane of flowing fire.

Brass Spiders. Male Brass Spiders exist, piddling small demons of no consequence. The females are giantesses, armoured greatly, eight limbs speartipped, mandibles like spiked mangles, eight jewelled red eyes. They topple fortresses and build funnel webs of human bone.