PARIS (AP) — He hunches at the dining room table, putting the finishing touches on his miniature World War II tank. Deep in concentration, he keeps his hand steady as he works to make the scaled-down plastic model look as realistic as possible.And as he does so, Maxime Fannoy — locked-down husband and father riding out the coronavirus with his family in Belgium — feels the outside world’s unremitting pandemic nightmare slip thankfully out of focus.
"It’s an escape. When you are building a kit or a scene, you really plunge into it," Fannoy says. "Everything else loses its importance, and in the current context, that is a real help."
Rejuvenated by quarantines and lockdowns, the old-school pastime of creating miniature worlds by assembling and decorating scaled-down models or running mini trains on mini tracks is enjoying a revival — plastic therapy against the pandemic blues.