Musings of a Green Man

The idea of priests in the midst of conflict has fascinated me for many, many years. Maybe it's a Northern Irish thing. After all, i grew up with images of clergymen caught up in Bloody Sunday and numerous other violent events. I grew up with Presbyterian firebrand Ian Paisley often seen on the news manning barricades, attending twelfth night bonfires, etc. Maybe it's the result of growing up watching MASH, with Fr. Mulcahy an integral part of the 4077th. Maybe it's something else altogether, like my starting into the hobby with the Genestealer Cult. I noticed recently that I have a bit of a habit of having clergy in my forces. My 17th century Berlin force had 5 priests among 200 or so models. When it became the basis for my Empire army for Warhammer Fantasy, i added a few more. My Imperial Guard from 1999-2003, which was about 200 strong, again had 5 priests. My space marines have over a dozen chaplains, including 2 on bikes and 3 in Terminator armour. And so it go...

Not that there's been much traffic on this blog thus far, but posts may be a little erratic for a few weeks as there's been another death in the family.

I live in a house built in the 1930s, as part of the interbellum urban expansion. After the second world war, what Ireland termed the Emergency, the building was converted from 2 single bedroom flats into a 2 bedroom house. It has left its mark on the building: our living room has a picture rail that marks the old cornice of the ground floor, with mouldings buried under layers of paint and wallpaper, girders across the old walls and such. This may seem irrelevant to a blog on gaming and scale miniatures, but it is all too relevant. In the late 1950s and the 1960s the craze of "modernising" hit, and numerous crimes against architecture were committed in the name of Modernism. This new trend stripped huge swathes of those buildings that survived the Blitz, and the possibly overzealous retaliation that wiped out huge amounts of the 19th and early 20th century buildings across western Europe. Buildings that were older that were recoverable were restored; more modern buildings we...