PARIS (AP) – He sits at the dining room table, putting the finishing touches on his World War II miniature tank. Deeply focused, he keeps his hand steady while working to make the reduced plastic model look as realistic as possible.
And while he does, Maxime Fannoy, a close husband and father who runs the coronavirus with his family in Belgium, feels that the tireless nightmare of the pandemic of the outside world is fortunately fading.
“It simply came to our notice then. When you’re building a kit or a scene, immerse yourself in it, ”says Fannoy. “Everything else loses its importance and, in the current context, is a real help.”
Rejuvenated by quarantines and blockades, the old school hobby of creating miniature worlds by gathering and decorating scale models or circulating mini trains on mini tracks enjoys a revival: plastic therapy against pandemic blues.
Sales are booming as families dodging their social lives keep their idle hands and minds busy modeling and dusting off train games. The British brand Airfix saw it work with plastic kits for Spitfires, the iconic World War II fighter jet. Hornby, which owns Airfix and also manufactures a number of train and car models with other brands, has once again been profitable with increasing sales.
The analog pleasures of gluing and painting, fixing and violin, are also pushing some members of the digital generation away from their screens. Teenagers spot the modeling mistake of parents and grandparents who suddenly reunite over time to enjoy hobbies that many had been too busy to pursue since childhood.
In France, 70-year-old retiree Guy Warein says his reforms to a train game model that had been collecting dust in the attic have helped him connect with his video game grandchildren, throwing them “out of the virtual world in reality “.
On a visit when there was no school, the eldest, 16, said: “‘Come on grandfather, let’s see the trains and make them work.’ So we put them together and did things together, ”says Warein. “It’s a meeting 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 fixed the room where he intended to circulate them on a U-shaped layout that he himself was designing. The activity helped Warein, a former educator and city councilor, tune in to the pandemic and its anxieties.
“Fill time and forget what’s going on around you,” he says. “Turning on the radio or television is like being beaten, because they systematically talk about the virus and the misfortunes it has caused. … Having a hobby allows me to think about other things. ”
Manufacturers have struggled to cope with the rising global interest rates. Hornby CEO Lyndon Davies says he had to airlift 10,000 Spitfire kits from a factory in India when Airfix stocks first ran out in the company’s 71-year history.
“What you don’t want from your children, from your grandchildren, is that they sit and watch TV or look at their phones all the time. This pandemic has brought families together at home, ”he says. “They’ve used the kinds of products we make to try to forget what was going on in the outside world.”
Another British manufacturer, Peco, has hired additional staff to meet growing orders (50% in some markets) for its miniature trains, tracks and modeling accessories.
“This happens everywhere: our markets in the UK, all over Europe, Australia, North America and China,” says Steve Haynes, the sales manager. “People make much greater use of their free time, their free time, their forced time trapped at home to combat boredom, tackle isolation and do something creative.”
In Belgium, Fannoy calls himself a “model maker made from the lock.” He had been buying plastic kits for a long time because they reminded him of his childhood, but he had never had time to build them. Instead, he hoarded them in a closet.
When the pandemic closed his busy life and forced him to do his job as a business developer from home, he set to work in his depot, stocking up on brushes and paints in the last days before closing. .
He first completed a series of 1/24 scale rally vehicles. In late 2020 followed a World War II Tiger tank, painted to look rugged and mounted in a winter scene with troops and a jeep. He posted photos of the diorama, the result of 50 hours of manual work, on Facebook.
“I usually start in the evening around eight in the evening and stop around eleven at night until midnight,” Fannoy says. “I can no longer do the things I normally would. So what do I do? I open a kit and work on it. In fact, it is my wife who comes and takes me out of this mini-world where I live ”.
“The hours fly by. It’s a form of meditation, ”he says. “It helped me a lot to get through last year.”
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