I’m very sorry to say that I won’t be trading at Scale Model World in Telford this year.

I’m at pains to say this is no reflection on the show itself or the organisers, but is entirely a result of my work commitments.

As you are probably aware, Tommy’s War is a small business that I wholly own and run in my spare time outside of my full time job. Full-time I work in a marketing agency and I have a senior role and a lot of responsibility.

Through the course of 2021 my workload has increased due to a number of circumstances and it’s now not unusually for me to work 12-14 hours a day and most of the weekend. This reduces the amount of time I have available for my own interests, and as you can imagine, I tend to be very tired when I do get spare time.

The result is that I’ve not been able to move Tommy’s War forward over the course of the last six months as I’d planned and I’ve no new releases in the pipeline which are the staple of the business (and the main reason customers like to visit my stand at shows). I’ve also not had a chance to replenish stocks, so products like the Vickers Machine Gun set remain out of stock.

With this in mind I felt it was the right decision for me to not attend Telford. The show is just two days but I estimate it would have taken me 2-3 days to prepare and 1 day to get everything put back away after, and at this stage it simply wasn’t viable to attend with limited stock levels with that sort of time commitment required.

While this is frustrating for customers, I’m hoping that the situation will ease generally for Tommy’s War. I have a work colleague returning to work after absence in the New Year and we have moved some resources around to help. This should mean that my workload should start to decrease.

But while I won’t be at Telford, I am planning to get my stock back into order and I will have a quantity of those Vickers dioramas in-stock at the end of November for the Christmas period.

I’ve also been working with Alex Long and we’ve created a German paint guide to accompany the British one (which will be reprinted at the same time), currently this is with my designer.

As many of you will know, Nino takes the summer off to travel to the coast, he should be back now and I’ll speak to him and find out what his workload is like.

In terms of other items out of stock, they are likely to be available in the New Year now before I get those back into stock.

I’m sorry to anyone planning to travel to Telford for their disappointment