I guess I should start with a little about my self and my hobby background. 

It all started with this, my first miniature which I proudly bought for 50p from my FLGS back when I was 12, which I excitedly took home and badly painted with my dads Humbrol enamel paints. From then I was hooked, I had a group of friends who were similarly interested one of whom had a 2nd edition copy of Warhammer fantasy battles and so the collection began to grow to the first small army, playing battles on bare tables or carpets with a very loose grasp on the rules. Then came 40k, I still have my original copy of rogue trader in pretty good condition, which showed me a new universe, which struck more of a chord with me than the fantasy worlds of elves and dwarves. We formed a games club at school and gained a few more members to our group and experimented with other games, playing car wars, D&D, Paranoia as well as having a long running blood bowl league, but 40k was still the main focus of my hobby time.

Our group carried on gaming together after school and through 6th form college, but when I got to uni it was a bit different, the gaming club there seemed to be on a whole other level of geekiness to how I saw myself at that point, so I didn't join, instead joining the American football team and the dangerous sport club (not sure what this says about me). I still collected and painted miniatures albeit at a slower rate on a student grant (yes, I'm old enough that I still got one) throughout my degree and post grad and still played the odd game with my mates when I went back home in the holidays. After uni as soon as I could afford to I moved out and into a shared house that I co-owned with my 2 best friends who had been part of my gaming group from those early days. Between us we invested in gaming boards to cover our dining table and a large collection of scenery incluing a full set of the original mighty fortress. With these we would have battles that sometimes lasted days between work and other things, but this meant we could keep this set up (we never actually dined at the table). Then slowly we started to play less and less as we spent more time with online gaming and eventually one of our trio moved to the States for work and my focus shifted to the search for love.

Thinking no woman would look twice at a geeky gamer type and since we seemed to have stopped playing altogether now I decided to sell most of my miniatures and all of our scenery etc, just keeping a few choice miniatures that I couldn't bear to lose. It seemed to work as not long after I meet the woman who would go on to become my wife. My hiatus from the hobby ended a few year later, when I had a nasty injury playing rugby (my other passion), I won't go into detail, but suffice to say I ended up with metal work holding my left leg together, this meant I was laid up for a long time and was not able to play rugby for a whole season. During this time I started playing the warhammer online RPG and had bought the special edition of the game which came with a limited edtion metal miniature of an Orc warlord.

I still had my old paints and decided to paint it up, on doing so i remembered how much I enjoyed it and that lead me to buy a few forgeworld Tau miniatures I liked the look of just for the sake of painting them. Of course this lead on to buying more and more to paint, but at least I was painting them, before buying more and my wife seemed happy that at least in kept me out of harms way on the rugby pitch. My collection at this point was fairly eclectic and couldn't really be formed into any armies as a lot of it had been heavily converted a focused on the 'rule off cool'  school of model building and kitbashing.

Then my old friend returned from the states, now with kids and had decided he was going to teach his 2 boys how to play 40k and had bought a load of cheap marines on ebay and challenged me to a game. I managed to cobble together 1000pts of eldar (mostly from the wraith host box set I had just bought) and although a few models had illegal weapons load outs we did battle. I won quite convincingly and it also made me remember what fun we had had doing this. Since then we now play when we can (my eldar again beat his marines just last weekend) and have also managed to bring back in to our little group 2 of our old friends from those school games club days, managing a bloodbowl league and a short kill team campaign between us.

My miniatures collection seems to have grown exponentially over the past few years, to the point that I have to use an excel spreadsheet to keep track of them, so I can tell you that currently I have 1324 miniatures and bits of scenery, with 86.8% of that fully painted. I haven't actually bought many miniatures recently so that percnetage has gone up, but the recent acquisition of a 3d printer certainly hasn't helped as this has become a new source of kitbshing elements and I have a whole bunch of files just waiting to be printed, as well as 3d modelling some of my own elements and even selling a few on Cults.

That's all for now, will be back soon with more on my current hobby situation.