PARIS (AP) – Throws himself at the dining room table, putting the finishing touches on his miniature World War II tank. Deep in concentration, he keeps his hand steady while working to make the reduced plastic model look as realistic as possible.
And as he does so, Maxime Fannoy – a closed husband and father who rides the coronavirus with his family in Belgium – feels that the relentless pandemic nightmare of the outside world is happily escaping.
“It’s an escape. When you build a kit or a scene, you really immerse yourself, ”says Fannoy. “Everything else loses its importance and, in the current context, this is a real help.”
Rejuvenated by quarantines and blockages, the fun of the old school of creating miniature worlds by assembling and decorating scale models or running mini trains on mini-tracks enjoys a revival – plastic therapy against the blues pandemic.
Sales are booming as families cut off from their social lives keep their hands and minds busy, making models and dusting off train sets. The British brand Airfix saw a run on plastic kits for Spitfires, the iconic fighter plane from the Second World War. Hornby, which owns Airfix and also makes a number of train and car models under other brands, has become profitable again as sales increase.
The analogical pleasures of gluing and painting, fixing and fiddling also take some members of the digital generation away from their screens. Adolescents catch the modeling error from parents and grandparents who suddenly find themselves in time to indulge in hobbies that many had been too busy to pursue since childhood.
In France, 70-year-old retiree Guy Warein says his renovations to the closure of a set of trains that had collected dust in his attic helped him connect with his video game grandchildren, pulling them “from the virtual world in reality. ”
On a visit when the school came out, the eldest, 16, said: “Come on, Grandpa, let’s go see the trains and make them work.” So we put them together and did things together, ”says Warein. “It’s a reunion of generations and that can only be beneficial.”
So he repaired the HO-scale locomotives and rolling stock inherited from his father-in-law and arranged the room in which he intends to run them on a U-shaped structure that he is designing. The activity helped Warein, a former educator and city councilor, to resolve the pandemic and its anxieties.
“You fill your time and forget what’s going on around you,” he says. “Turning on the radio or television is like hitting a cane, because they talk systematically about the virus and the misfortunes it has brought. … Having a hobby allows me to think of other things. ”
Manufacturers have struggled to cope with rising global interest rates. Hornby CEO Lyndon Davies says he had to transport 10,000 Spitfire kits from a factory in India when Airfix stocks dried up for the first time in the company’s 71-year history.
“What you don’t want from your children, your grandchildren, is to watch TV or watch phones all the time. This pandemic has really brought families home together, ”he says. “They used the kinds of products we make to try to forget what’s going on in the outside world.”
Another British manufacturer, Peco, has hired additional staff to meet growing orders – up 50% in some markets – for its miniature trains, rails and modeling accessories.
“This is happening everywhere: our markets in the UK, Europe, Australia, North America and China,” says Steve Haynes, sales manager. “People use a lot more free time, free time, forced time locked up at home to address boredom, to address isolation and to do something creative.”
In Belgium, Fannoy is called a “manufacturer of locksmiths”. He had bought plastic kits a long time ago because they reminded him of his childhood, but he had never had time to build them. Instead, he packed them in a closet.
When the pandemic ended his busy life and forced him to do his job as a home business developer, he started working in his warehouse, stocking himself with brushes and paints in the last days before the blockade.
He first completed a series of 1/24 scale rally cars. At the end of 2020 followed a World War II Tiger tank, painted to look weatherproof and mounted in a winter scene with troops and jeeps, at the end of 2020. He posted photos of the diorama, the result of 50 hours of manual work, on Facebook.
“I usually start in the evening around 20:00 and stop around 23:00 until midnight,” says Fannoy. “I can’t do the things I would normally do. So what do I do? I open a kit and work on it. In fact, my wife comes and takes me out of this mini-world I live in ”.
“The hours are flying. It’s a form of meditation, “he says. “It’s helped a lot in the last year.”
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