You may have wondered what happened to this blogger. Did I vanish after a period of jaded frustration, disappearing like a whiff of magical smoke? Was I seriously ill once more? Did the little, blue things that jabber in the darkness of the twilight hours finally consume me?

None of those things. 

The cause was simple and of the material realm... divorce and the financial desolation that inevitably follows. Home gone, belongings lost and the lead pile scattered. One day during lockdown I had a family and the next, I didn't. 

The years that followed involved moving from one temporary home to the next. Then, just over twelve months  ago we were able to buy a little rundown bungalow in the depths of Essex. And by 'the depths' I really do mean that. Its a tiny English village with a cricket pitch, a pub, a village hall and a huge village green. That's it... though a very large pond spreads beyond my front garden where herons and deer drink in the misty mornings, the very bank dropping from the edge of my lawn. 

I share this home with a nice new 'non-lead loving' lady and our offspring - who rotate around as families of this type do. 

All my logins for Facebook, Blogger etc were stored on what was the family computer and it took time to get the machine back in my possession but it was old then and I had difficulty getting it running again. It sat under a desk for years with me occasionally glancing at it and reminding myself to fix that damn thing, even if it was to just get the photographs from my children's early days back. 

Providence struck recently at work where during training the security system was updated. We ended up locked out of our computers and iPads and the technician who arrived to disentangle the wires and unpick the technological scramble sat in my room pontificating. As he worked he showed me how to retrieve passwords as an aside, and I stored that little nugget for future use. 

School ended with carols on the playground but a sickness bug at home. I found myself at last adrift in a house full of poorlies isolated to the spare room. Suddenly, the urge to set up the old computer raised its groggy head and with trepidation I put the thing back together again... many hours later I managed to retrieve my account details and port them over to my new computer. I thought to clear my profiles as my new partner and I had a very serious 'no social media' agreement out of necessity but with the passing of time and the defeat of those to set out to make our new chance in life as difficult as possible, I decided to retain them, at least for a while. 

Fiddling around on Facebook trying to clear out my old life, I saw a link posted by old GW staffer Graeme Davis about an Oldhammer Youtuber. This caught my interest as when this blog was started over twelve years ago Youtube and Facebook were very different entities. I was astonished at what I saw... hours of carefully put together Oldhammer content and a mention of this very, long dead I might point out, blog....

Enough of the lamentations of days past and celebrations of those enthusiasts that came after me.  This blog was never meant as a personal diary listing life's many woes and should quite rightfully concern itself with it's raison d'existence: Old School Warhammer. 

But why this particular hobby? And why this particular era in question? How did a quiet school boy who ate alphabeti spaghetti on toast and watched Wack-a-Day during the holidays become such an fan of fantastical little lead men and the designers who created them? And why did he end up writing a blog for many years, inspiring so many others, meeting his heroes and painting up more miniatures than he could count?

What not football, like so many of my contemporaries? 

Or motorcars?

What on earth drove my to amass such a varied collection of memorabilia over twenty years or more?

Having pondered this question this morning, I think I have already answered my own question. It was a journey of influences big and small and the culture of 1980s Britain that instilled in me this fascination, perhaps former obsession, with a particular range of tiny little men. I suspect that you all have similar journeys, though unique in their twists and turns. 

I'm calling this my 'Road to Warhammer' and curiously enough this list and the idea for this blog post has lain undisturbed since I left it here unpublished in 2017. Of course, I have totally rewritten it for the present for this is a very different era than the one that saw this blog first published. There was very little online about this era in 2012 save The Stuff Of Legends and the Citadel Collecting Group. Now, you guys are swamped. 

Anyway, Back to my 'Road to Warhammer'. What influences lead me to picking up that copy of WD all those years back and falling in love with the imagery and ethos of that time? Well we have a curious collection of TV shows, films, computer games and even breakfast cereals!!? 

Lets get going down that road shall we?

The first stop along our road has to be He-Man. I don't think its the little lead men that fascinate me as much as that '80s aesthetic, no doubt tinged with nostalgic memories of the comfort of childhood. A time when men were men, and women women and they both wore leather and fur swimming attire as they did battle with the evil forces of the rival toy line. 

He-Man is probably the start of my fantasy loving story that ends with Warhammer (as shown in its 3rd edition) and the late Bryan Ansell's vision for his Citadel Miniatures. I had many of the early figures and have plenty of happy memories of playing with them and of course watching the TV-Show. Here the archetype of the musclebound hero made popular by a strange concoction of Robert E Howard and Arnie in the early '80s classic Conan the Barbarian. It would be many years after, when I was at university, that is discovered this connection of course but to my '80s self He-Man was as wonderful and as original as anything else. 

The heroic proportions are all there, the bright colours, the single poses the simple but striking designs and of course the fantastical landscape in which they resided. It being an American show, the struggle between good vs evil is very evident and not in anyway subversive, as it was in the UK at the time. 

What do you think about when someone mentions the name of this '80s classic? David Bowie's tights (more hosiery!!?), the bizarre musical numbers, the bit when Hoggle urinates visibly and we all laughed? For me its those goblins... or what I feel a goblin should look like, complete with dubious British accent, spindly legs and medieval accruements. They need to be sneaky, gangly, brown or green and rather naff at anything but squabbling to be a real goblin... oh how I miss the '80s take on the little green villains of yesteryear. 

Of course, Kev Adams would dominate GW for years with his take on what a goblin should look like and I loved the creatures so well that my daughter, when she was small, was nicknamed the goblin by me... I used to tell her she would turn green if she was too naughty... ha ha!

This film no doubt set me on the steps to loving small little amusing creatures... you can nver have too many goblins. The 'Road to Warhammer' goes ever on, Mr Baggins. 

The final film on my list is Willow. Released in 1988 and very much in my minds eye when I first caught site of White Dwarf 107 in the newsagent in Wareham. I loved this film and I can remember collecting the scenery and figures released in breakfast cereal at the time. I'm pretty sure it was spring or summer and I played with these to death...

Here's the ad from the back of a box of Corn Flakes circa 1988.

I can't think of any other toy that set me on the path to collecting miniatures than these M.U.S.C.L.E.S. They were supposed to be wrestlers but back in the mid '80s I didn't know what a wrestler was... these were just pink little men who duffed each other up and came in attractive 10 packs,as can be seen here.

I had loads of these and there seemed to be a never ending supply of imaginative designs for me to pour over. I used to play with these in a neighbouring child's sandpit and we'd build huge castles and trench lines for they to fight over, only to see them all buried in the battle. We'd carefully excavate them afterwards in a bizarre form of archaeology which would later take me to university to do much the same, not with Citadel miniatures then though sadly. 

Hang on, don't wrestler's wear tights?

What can I say about the influence on Fighting Fantasy on me? Blog post after blog post could be lavished on that as I had loads of the books back then and they were probably the first proper exposure to the black and white scrawly '80s artstyle that I love so much. Out of the Pit was a fantastic book and one I didn't actually own. There was a copy in my middle school library and I used to lord over it imagining all of the wonderous creatures that were contained within. 

This book was the first glance I had at what later became known to me as bestiaries. Books of beasts that described the horrors that awaited in dark places and a taste of the creativity and passion that the creators of these things seemed to have in spades back then. Pretty sure that the striking image of this cover-art lead me towards the joys of Chaos in Warhammer and the naming of this very blog. 

By the way, is that Venger again up the back? Those wings get everywhere!