Of Dreams and Nightmares.

So, planning is well underway for the second Partizan show of the year which will be held at the Newark Showground on Sunday 19th August.

Invites are out to games, societies and traders and most replies are already in. If you have received an invite but have not yet replied please do try to let me know as soon as possible if you can attend as we need to get the floorplan finalised well in advance of the show.

Advertising is in place both online and with the Wargames magazines. If you are trading at the show then over the next few days you should receive flyers which we hope you will include in your mail order dispatches.

Later this week we will update the website with the latest lists of traders, games and society stands. After that it is just a case of waiting for the last few replies, sending confirmations out to everyone  and then producing the final floorplan.

And then we await the most important moment in all Partizan planning. The Partizan Dream.

This has become something of a legend amongst the Partizan crew, rather akin to the ravens at the Tower of London.

Basically it goes like this:

It is Sunday morning, either just before or just after opening time at the show. We are wandering around the halls - always the stygian gloom of Kelham rather than the bright new venue - and the place is filled with empty tables. A few poorly produced games (unpainted figures on a blanket) sit alongside trade stands usually selling potted plants or house cleaning products. And inside the dream we think this is all great and everything is as it should be. It is only when we wake up that the cold sweats start.

Alternatively everything is in place and we open the doors to... one small child and a lost delivery driver.

Another variant is that the venue has inexplicably shrunk to the size of one small room and we have 40 traders and 60 games to fit into a space the size of my kitchen - on more than one occasion it has actually been my kitchen.

The point about these dreams is that they are invariably about failure and disaster for the show and one or other of us invariably has them before each show. So much so that it is now part of the Partizan mythos that as long as one of us has The Dream everything will be fine. And of course the year we don't have The Dream the show will be a catastrophe.

So as well as getting the final preparations ready for the show, we will be doing everything we can to ensure we get the right sort of nightmares before 19th August.

If not we might just stay in bed and give the whole thing a miss.