My week in Geek.

Over the past week I've been traveling around the South of England as part of my job.  In-between work, when I have time I like to explore the area that I'm in to see what's there.  This mainly gives me something to do rather than spend the evening in the hotel.   This week in particular has been especially good for finding some odd geeky things. 

At the start of the week I was in Guildford and found it's castle.  (Well I say castle but I actually think it's more of a Keep). Here's some photo's of it.

Guildford castle

It's rook seems to be missing.

Now the reason think this castle looks more like a Keep is because I grew up in Colchester where we have this castle...

Colchester castle. 

Now that's a proper castle!

Also near Guildford (Woking) I stumbled across this awesome Tri-pod sculpture which was apparently erected to celebrate HG Well's War of the Worlds.

just to the right of this sculpture was the local Games Workshop.  How awesome must it be to be playing 40K in there whilst in view of this thing!

And just around the corner I found this jetfighter, on a pole.  not sure why it was there but it looked cool.

Later in the week I was in Southampton and discovered that there was a V&A (That's Victoria and Albert Museum) exhibition on about War Gaming.  I decided to take a look.  I couldn't take  any photo's of the exhibit but there was a lot in there which covered the history of war gaming from the early war games from the Victorian period to military toys that kids use to play with during the First and Second World War to Airfix kits.  They even had video games featured such as Command & Conquer and Call of Duty.  The second part of the exhibit then focused on future and fantasy war gaming and included artefacts on display like a Lego Death Star.  Strangely though no Tabletop wargaming was featured at all.  This did strike me as odd as I did expect games such as Warhammer or Dystopian Wars to be featured or at least mentioned, after all they are a huge part of war gaming history and stand out from toy guns and tanks and computer games.  The closest they had was a copy of Risk on display.  I don't whether this was a deliberate thing but I think the exhibit did miss a vital element of what it was trying to showcase. 

Anyway I did manage to take a photo of this which made me wonder, id this why we play Tabletop war games?

Finally I picked up these two books in a charity shop I visited.  What a find!