Knights of Clubbing
What did your wargaming club smell like?
This seems a strange question, but as I ponder a lot of the things that got me into wargaming, and Warhammer in general, i keep coming back to the doubled-edged sword nostalgia. It often does not take much to trigger memories, a certain smell, seeing dust mite floating in a beam of sunlight on a certain kind of summers day, and I’m there, I can hear Manic Street Preachers and I know which friends I’m with and where. It’s a strange thing to come to understand that these memories, whilst cemented for me in the museum of wet meat that is the brain, are meaningless to everyone but me. I could go into mass detail about Trades Hall, the place where I began to play on a regular basis, and how that’s where my RPG writing began, but it would not hold any weight for anyone but me and possibly a few who went during 1994 to 2000 (and followed it to it’s second location).
And yet, I can tell you now what it smelt like. How the storage was rammed like Dante’s Tetris, a puzzle that mean it was possible to get Space Hulk out for a game, but only if you braved forty other boxes coming at you like a cardboard avalanche. I could explain the carpet that could have been laid in the late 80s and stayed well past it’s life cycle. But these are are just those smaller parts to a larger puzzle. Why are they so ingrained inside my head?
Is it the age I was at? Formative years indeed, and those memories form the building blocks of a person. Was it as good as I remember? It may well have been, but that is where the sharper part of nostalgia comes in. We truly colour the past in roses, because to the person who holds it, that memory is precious and special. Other factors come into play, the lack of responsibillities and the fact you are truly yet to understand the world around you. I know full well it wasn’t a magical time as I struggled with school and my own personality and mental health, something which has only just started to truly get understood recently.
It instead comes from a very simple concept. I was luckily enough to go a club that was a place where I could explore what it meant to be me without the pulling weight of expectation from others. I could truly talk about things that went through my head with an instant dismissal or a expression of non-interest or worse, a lack of understanding. It was a place of like-minded people gathering with a hobby in common that allowed for social relationships that were, especially at that time, considered “sad”. I mean, who the hell wants to talk Football. Eesh.
It’s been a common theme that, for the most part, every wargaming club I’ve been to fosters that same mentality (and I’ve noticed that when they don’t, they have a tendency to not last), which I want to celebrate at every turn. That welcoming nature is part and parcel and the most important part of any group, and it’s something I find most pleasing to see be a cornerstone of my old Trades Hall Group, and in the rare occurrences I can get to it these days, the Carlisle Wargames Club. The kids that are first stepping in now are the ones who remember the smell of the club in thirty years, and I for one would like to invite you all to take a moment to remember that first club of yours, and the people who kept it standing.
Until next time, I remain..
Adam