A Life’s Work (and After)

It may not surprise you to hear that I like a yarn. My use of yarn is meant to be understood in the way it was used around me when I was a growing up in the company of people who’d lived through WWI, the Great Depression and WWII: not so much a story being told, but a chat or a gossip with stories woven into the talk. The sort of talking you do leaning on a farm gate or over a back fence. Perhaps it’s a rather out of date term in these days of ‘FaceTime’ and social media, but I like a yarn and I would hazard a guess that a lot of the readers of this magazine do too.

I especially like a yarn with modelling friends I might not have seen for a while. I always try to make time to drop in and see such friends when I’m in their area. A particularly good friend of mine – I’ll refer to him as ‘Spots’ to protect his privacy – and I had a long yarn a few months ago after paying a visit to a layout of a friend of his. The layout in question has been built by its owner in a large, purpose-built building.

This is no ‘shed’, but rather a huge rectangular building built and finished to a standard equal to a house. I find myself at a loss for how to describe the layout being constructed in this building, an unusual situation for me as I’m rarely lost for words. The word that most readily comes to mind when I think about this layout is phenomenal: the scale, ambition and quality of the whole enterprise