David Grummitt
Managing Editor
Guideline Publications david@guidelinepublications.co.uk
For those of you who follow the hobby on social media, you probably can’t help but have noticed the controversy around this year’s judging at the IPMS USA Nationals. A photo emerged of a judge holding up a model entered in the contest and apparently examining the underside of it with a torch. The upshot was that the IPMS changed its rules about handling models entered in the competition. The furore prompted a lot of reflection on the nature of the hobby and the importance of competitions, a topic I’ve touched on before in this editorial. It seems to me odd that any judge would want to or find it necessary to pick up a model to examine, although I understand to some extent the arguments made as to why they should. Anyone who has taken models to a competition or displayed them at a show as part of a club stand will know that the odd broken aerial, machine gun or the like is inevitably part and parcel of such events. For that reason, I was reluctant to touch or move other people’s models on our club stand; it’s one thing to break your own models, but quite another to break someone else’s. I recall the terrible moment, many years ago, when a former editor of this magazine dropped his camera on a small-scale model on display at a show in Folkestone! Equally, models do get stolen at shows, the antithesis of the hobby’s ethos. If you do engage in the social side of the hobby and bring your models to shows you must expect a few breakages and accidents, but still, it’s everyone’s responsibility, and especially the show organisers, to minimise those risks.