Sink my boats.

 'Liberty', an American civil war clipper and yes, I did lash those ropes to proper belay pins and put them through little wooden pulley blocks. With two pairs or tweezers and a lot of swearing.

Clicking should enlargify, if you think it's worth it.

I like boats. I don't like being on them very much, but I do like the shape, the intricacies, the detail. Bobbing about on water is not for me. Boats in general, I like.These days I prefer to make models of sailing ships in wood. One tip - in the photo above, those sail stitchings are not drawn on. I thought it might be a good idea to use real stitching. By the time I finished this model I had sworn never to do that again. I am, however, now fairly proficient with a sewing machine and still have most of my fingers.

In the past, a long time ago when model paint was far less than £100 a litre (10-ml pots are now over £1, get thee to the car-paint shop for much cheaper sprays and touch-up tins!) and models actually did come at pocket-money prices, I built warships. Kids like that sort of thing. Guns and lots of them. I built HMS Hood which suffered from a lucky shot by German gunners. If they hadn't hit the magazine it might now be a floating museum somewhere. It still makes a very nice model.

There was HMS Nelson. Three triple-gun turrets and all in the front. Big, big guns. Lots of other guns too in decreasing sizes and correspondingly increasing number all over the superstructure.

An aircraft carrier - can't remember the name but the model came from Airfix if that jogs anyone's memory - involved placing lots of tiny planes, including biplanes, with opened and with folded wings. Those planes weren't in one piece either. There were lifts in the deck that could be set to up or down (if I had it now I'd try to make them work). Big ships. Impressive ships. Sleek and scary ships. 'Don't piss-me-off' ships. Ships that could throw several tons of ordnance at an enemy every minute.

Ships that could have some guns targeting aircraft, some targeting small boats, some targeting destroyers, depth charges to throw at subs, some guns beating off other battleships and still have guns left over to pound the fire-power on the shoreline.A floating death machine that could sail right over the P&O ferry and fail to notice.

We don't have those any more. We have specialist ships now. They do one thing exceptionally well but they don't do much else.

In a fleet, that's no problem. You'd have fast destroyers and maybe even MTB's dodging and weaving at the smaller enemy while keeping the enemy's fast-and-small attack boats away from the lumbering battleship or the big target of the aircraft carrier.

It is evident that the Cameroid was not exposed to childhood model making and even the trivial technical learning that derived from it. He probably made the butler do it. His latest Great Idea is to send a really good Navy boat to the Falklands. It is an impressive ship, to be sure, but it's a specialist.

Speaking as someone who hates to be on or in water, as someone who could never be in any way part of the navy or of any part of the military, if Argentina put me in charge of their plans to take over the Falklands, I would say:

"Ground the planes. Send the ships and subs it can't fight and when it's sunk, then we send the planes."

 The military thinkers of Argentina have until the end of March to work this out. Cameroid thinks they won't. I, with no military past or experience beyond primitive teenage wargaming, worked it out in seconds. So has pretty much everybody else, whether they shot .22 pellets at models full of match heads or not.

Cameroid is the one who was voted to be in charge of the country. Well, almost. Many millions didn't vote for the Socialist Tory party but they scraped in anyway with a little help from nobody's friends.

Now they send a floating anti-aircraft battery to fight a naval war.

It's people like this who caused Noah to build an Ark.

Oh well. My favourite limping lyricist has a song for every occasion.