Yesterday saw a return to the annual pilgrimage to the Salute show, one if not the largest wargaming show in the UK.

Previous years have been characterised by long queues to get in, dim lighting and, in the morning at least, an event so crowded that it was hard to even get to see a trade stand let alone buy anything.

Well this year it was very different. No queues at all by the time we arrived half an hour after the event opened at 10.30am, the same dim lighting, but a distinct absence of any crowds. The show was busy, but good busy: plenty of room to move around.

There was also less to see: there were several noticeable gaps where trade stands should have been, and as many empty demonstration tables where people hadn’t turned up to run their game. This was presumably all down to COVID, and is a real shame, particularly as the venue was operating a strict vaxed/lateral flow policy before you could come in.

The theme of this year’s show was the Battle of Britain, and one of the good things to see was the Hurricane and Spitfire aircraft on show…complete with pilots sitting in chairs drinking tea and flirting with WAAFs!

Nothing to do with the show, but quite amusing, was the fact that Excel was also hosting a Star Trek convention, meaning that the small number of military reenactors present was utterly dwarfed by the vast numbers of Trekkers in the venue dressed up in their uniforms…including daughter #2 who took full advantage of me going to Excel to tag along and take us to the Trek event as well.

And very expensive that proved too.

I don’t know how much Rifleman Harris charges for his autograph, but I suspect that it’s much less than I paid for daughter #2 to get a signed photo from two of the cast of Deep Space 9. It was certainly more than I spent on figures!

So a smaller, less busy Salute this year, which actually was no bad thing. Not many of the demo games warranted a mention, with the obvious exception of the O Group game featuring some wonderful terrain representing Stalingrad sloping down to the Volga. Looked fantastic and I would love to play IABSM on the set up!