Oh bugger. I'll have Greece then.

​(I was going to select The Hermitage, a dire restaurant in Folkestone that served me rotten fish and then tasteless venison, but it appears that they also beat me to it!)

Our Price
Rumbelows
Radio Rentals

or

Clinton Cards
Barratts
Peacocks

PYFITG

Any particular reason for Hornby? A fond part of my childhood (original and current). I'd be sad to see them go.

Same here, I commandeered my Dad's shed as a child with a train set - lucky he was into it too.

I fear they're losing ground to the digital alternatives, when you're up against the likes of this, suddenly playing with models loses all appeal. :|

I just figure that the hobby market - model trains not least -are declining fast, and being maintained by an ageing customer base.  I wouldn't want to see them go either.

Perhaps I need to play it, but I just don't understand how a virtual model could come close to the real life model.

*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnAMDg7IVWs

You're probably right, but it was actually my daughters (in particular 5 year old Emily, our Thomas obsessive) that got me back into it.

I think kids like having something tangible, hence the popularity of proper Lego still. Virtual things lack something.

I still prefer real board games. :{)

One interesting thing is that Airfix (owned by Hornby) seem to be doing well, at least as far as releasing new kits goes. My interest in building plastic kits was recently rekindled after about 15 years when Gaynor got me a Battlestar Galactica Viper a couple of Christmasses ago. While I'm not building them at the rate my teenage self did, I've done a few others since then, and found that somewhat inevitably there are vibrant, informative and irredeemably geeky online communities devoted to the subject. The general concensus is that most of the new kits that Airfix are releasing are very good indeed, and are competing well against the far east alternatives, not least because exchange rates mean that the prices of the big Japanese brands are getting ridiculous.

I'm not sure if The Kids are buying them, but there seem to be plenty of middle-aged men with disposable income enough to buy multiple copies of the kits that interest them, and the time and inclination to spend hours arguing on the internet about the exact shade of sky blue used on the underside of Spitfires on July 17th, 1940.

I think I'd find building airfix kits kinda therapeutic. But I wouldn't know what to do with them once they were built.

Delete them.

I can't decide whether suggesting just destroying them once you've built them would be sensible advice or not.

Seems a waste :(

(giggle)

It is a waste, on the other hand, you don't end up having a shelf-load of dusty plastic things slowly getting bits knocked off them. When I was making models first time round, the shelves of models were a constant reminder that I should have been using my time to do more interesting things, so I kind of resented them. 

This time round, I've got plenty of other interesting things to be doing, so I don't feel resentful.

Maybe there's some sort of compromise to be had where the shelf is actually a very slow-moving conveyor belt which takes a year to roll something from one end to the other, and there's a bin at the end of it.

That would be perfect :D

That would be about right, I think.