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Rather like a box of cotton-wool buds that warns ‘Do not insert into ear canal’ and the punter replies incredulously: ‘But what else are they for?’ So it was with Airfix–loudly proclaimed to be ‘display models’ and not ‘toys’, and yet toys they so obviously were. Paint? Bah! We wanted to play with the bloody thing, not wait overnight while the Humbrol enamel dried on the still-unassembled pieces! Even the decals were an annoyance.

But, oh, there’s a word. Decals.

It’s hard to imagine a time when we hadn’t heard of them. A time, perhaps, when we could see an RAF livery without immediately picturing one. A time before we soaked one in a bowl of warm water, slid it off its backing paper and placed it on the wing of a Spitfire or a Wellington Bomber.

For the purposes of this entry, we’re limiting our examination to model planes. Because it was only the model planes that came in such a ridiculously varied range of scales and classes. Because you couldn’t hang a miniature replica vintage Darracq from a piece of fishing line thumbtacked to the ceiling. Because the big ships had annoyingly fiddly tacking rigging and plastic sails.

See also Hornby Railway Set, LEGO, Flight Deck

And because the planes had a truly aspirational hierarchy (which we seem to recall was based largely around the number of moving parts. Pretty much all the model cars had proper moving wheels, but it was only the bigger and badder model aircraft that included moving propellers, rotating gun-turrets and tyres, or fully opening bomb-bays and cockpits). Therefore, they win.

The decals, of course, were one of many hobby-threatening booby-traps designed to scupper your enjoyment, getting forever crinkled or folded before they could be applied properly. Here’s another: polystyrene cement–which could be guaranteed to coagulate into crusty white flakes all over your fingers and tabletop without ever acting as a useful plastic adhesive.¹

Worse still was discovering a missing part. You then had to fill out a flimsy form, send it off to Airfix and wait an interminable amount of time for the spare to arrive in the post.²But the biggest disappointment with any Airfix Kit was the huge disparity between the size of the box and the size of the finished model. We’re looking at you, Hawker Harrier.

1 It was also handy for adding an unwanted ‘frosted’ bathroom window effect to the previously clear cockpit covers.

2 Dick Emery, comedian and then president of the Airfix Modellers Club, ran his expanded polystyrene empire in the pages of British comics. In January 1975, he rather excitingly revealed the launch of the company’s new 1:12 scale construction kit of Anne Boleyn. That’ll get ’em gluing, Dick!