Hobby Diary Post (Amidst COVID-19)

Hello dear readers, long time no see. This is slightly off topic, but I hope it will make sense in the end.

We have finished moving flats and we are in an overall safer and quieter place than before. The move could not have been timed better, because we have left behind the raging proles of our previous environment, where an early close at the local Lidl meant the beginning of The Hunger Games' new episode. I can't imagine the situation there now.

Just after we moved in and collected our first pieces of furniture, the first reports of the global virus hysteria began reaching Hungary. It took little time to identify the first contagions as well. 

Here's the thing though: the Hungarian medical services are understaffed, underpaid, and in general unprepared for dealing with the number of virus patients we are likely to see, where more advanced countires such as Italy had proven to be failing. While government news outlets made it an issue to point out at every possible occasion that the first proven patients were foreigners (Iranians to top it off), simultaneously they failed to diagnose Hungarian citizens arriving home from, amongst other places, Northern Italy, also elderly patients with coronavirus symptoms but no proven contact. At the time of writing this post, we are at 50 proven contagions, 2 cured and 1 death, but considering that neighbouring Slovakia with half of our population has more, well...

People are fighting it out over daily items- you may have heard from the mass TP buys in Australia, well here one of the home delivery guys told us that somebody just bought a literal metric ton of supplies, before there were more than 10 diagnosed patients in the country. This includes purchasing all the ANTIBACTERIAL disinfectants and surgery masks, which have no effect on the virus at all, but people with recent operations or chronic respiratory diseases can't get them because of all these idiots.

But there's good things amongst all the bad. We can shut ourselves in, avoiding almost all contacts. This affects most hobbyists and model makers around the world, as I found out in many Facebook groups, as they can launch themselves against the piles of plastic and paints bought earlier and finish them in good time.

I am between jobs currently, but we have enough reserves so I do not have to rush things, so I, too, can focus on some of my projects. In the picture above, you can see the semi-assembled Trumpeter 1/700 Bismarck, which I'm currently painting (finished adding the grey and washes, plus some smaller pieces like the seaplane and boats). I'll make a nice sea base for it as well and make it a display piece.

My further plans include building (at least) two versions of the MNF Bretagne in her 1935-40 refit, one ship in a bottle, and the other a desert diorama. I really like the tripod structure, and it could prove a nice challenge to reconstruct it using period photos and blueprints. Well, getting the blueprint on paper is also somewhat of a challenge currently, but I can manage. I also managed to finish Camus' The Plague just before the real large turd hit the fan and larger numbers of contagions began to surface.

So, we are fine (including the tiny pug), and I hope it will stay this way. I wish for the following period to be as trouble-free as it can for all of you.