One for Daniel

Two of the twelve books I read during our recent Australian holiday -- on the parts of it when I was hiding from the kiddies in the bedroom at Albany, rather than the parts of it when we were swimming in waterfalls, photographing crocodiles and flying over the Arnhem Escarpment in the Top End -- concerned Alexander the Great. He is clearly something of an obsession of mine, although it's taken me some years to realise this -- you buy a book on post-Alexandrian Hellenism in the early 1990s, watch Michael Wood's In The Footsteps Of... television series later that decade, buy the DVD of Oliver Stone's film some years later, read the classic biography by Robin Lane Fox....

Anway, a few days after we returned to the UK, I ambled into the branch of Model Zone near my office, looking for a box of model figurines entitled "Ancient Life" -- featuring characters reclining on couches drinking wine, reciting poetry and all the other things that ancient characters did at home -- which had been drawn to my attention by Maureen and which I thought might be quite amusing to assemble and paint. The shop didn't have that, but rather than leave immediately I found my attention drawn to the various boxes of model soldiers of the ancient world produced by the same (Russian) company -- Republican Romans, Carthaginians, Scythians, cataphracts of an indeterminate nationality....and Macedonians and Greeks of the 4th-3rd centuries BCE, as led by Alexander into Asia to destroy the Persian Empire.

Yes. (You're surely ahead of me here.) I bought a box each of Macedonian cavalry, a Macedonian phalanx, and Greek hoplites. "It's just as well you have plenty of free time, isn't it?" said Judith when I showed them to her later. Indeed it is. With a bit of luck, I might even get around to painting and mounting them before I retire from full-time work in a couple of years' time. Even though I really ought to acquire some Persian model soldiers to oppose them as well....