Thai Girl Tattle: Just Like a Rolling Stone
Andrew Hicks is a travelling man.
Do please visit Andrew's Web sites
http://www.thaigirl2004.com/
http://www.thaigirl2004.blogspot.com/
Cat and I had an amazing couple of months during which we've stayed with friends and family in Petersfield south of London, in Taunton, in Lapford near Exeter, in Stockholm, in the Charente, the Correze and the Morbihan in France, up north near Leeds and finally in Shrewsbury and Kidderminster. In total we've driven three thousand miles so Papa really is a rolling stone.
They call me Papa in Thailand and I'm not sure I like it too much and I'm dreading the day somebody stands up for me on the bus or Skytrain. Meantime I'll keep travelling and I'll take inspiration from one of the drivers at the Goodwood Festival of Speed who's still going fast at eighty years old.
The festival is an amazing celebration of motor sport and the car and I always love it for being so in-your-face. Burning clouds of carbon and truck loads of cash, it's so non-PC but such fun.
Cars from every possible era of motor sport in the hands of drivers equally historic tear angrily up the drive in front of Goodwood House, the home of super-toff and petrol head, Lord March. They push them hard though it's not too serious, just an excuse for the sounds and the smells and for the world's greatest gathering of the motor car made fire breathing monster and art.
It's good too that you can get so close to the cars and I managed some good shots of Tony Dron at the wheel of an eight cylinder Mercedes-Benz of 1937. My contemporary at school, he's had an exciting life as a motoring journalist and racing driver and at six foot five looks every bit the part.
Even more exciting was to see and hear one of the heroes of my childhood in another pre-war Mercedes, now aged eighty.
