Moving Forwards... Slowly!

Following a burst of activity when it seemed like UK Airsoft was about to return, frenchie ponders the result and how things are now moving forwards.

How do you write about airsoft in a year largely without airsoft? With some difficulty I must confess. After a minor amount of “HooHah” in the UK airsoft scene, following attempts to reopen some sites early and to run national games on others – swiftly scotched in the face of vocally hostile opinion - it has all gone sensible.

Site have reopened, slowly, trying to make the best of a poor situation. Some have taken the opportunity of forced closure to clean up and rebuild features. For example, I’m delighted to see that “Players of War” have resurrected their “Train Station”, a feature of their original site, lost when they were forced to move some years ago. I have some happy memories of fighting around that. I had a chat with Beth Hannigan, who along with her husband Ernie, have run the site in central Scotland for 12 years. I wanted to find out whether or not reopening had been problematic. Her short answer was “no, not really” but it quickly emerged that local and national authorities had been less than helpful. Whether that was a lack of information on their part, or whether no-one wanted to make a decision, I leave up to your preference for “cock-up versus conspiracy” world view. In the end, Beth felt she had to make her own decision and although she consulted with the local authority as she put it, “The Council didn’t disagree with my argument, so gave us the go-ahead to proceed, simply because they couldn’t say no either”.