When I’m Seventeen
Devon has eight years to wait until he can legally drive a car. But that doesn’t stop a boy thinking ahead. The trouble is, when you’re nine and obviously a very cool dude, do you go for the Dodge, or the Chevy?
Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 24mm, 1/320 at f 3.5, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Tweaked in Lightroom to give some warmth to the greens, yellows, oranges… Honestly, when you’re looking at some of the coolest cars in…Doncaster…just how do you choose?
Especially when the Chevy has a trunk large enough to basically live in:
Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 26mm, 1/60 at f 3.5, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Took away the greens to colour-pop this one, just for fun. He looks pretty grown-up here. But will you just look at that car? It’ll look even cooler in 2017, when he can drive the thing.
No, we didn’t buy anything. This evening was one of my family experiments – I took Marie and Devon to Doncaster, where we met up with my good old friend James Haigh (who I met when I was 11), to watch a presentation on Project Bloodhound - the forthcoming 1,000mph World Land Speed Record car – given by one of my true heroes, Richard Noble. Noble is the former WLSR holder, and just two weeks before Devon and I watched the excellent two-part documentary about Thrust SSC, which Noble created and which was driven by Andy Green, from our nearby air force base at RAF Wittering. I’m a bit of a land speed record nut, and thought it’d be cool to take everyone to see what was sure to be a riveting presentation.
Well, it was – if you’re a petrolhead. I’m semi-petrolhead, as is James, so we’d happily have sat thru the whole thing (it’s an amazing story – watch out for it), but Marie and Devon had spent more exciting evenings watching paint dry, so to save the occasion I did what all Dads have to do, frequently: namely, give up your passion, a little bit, and go the way of the majority. Still, I enjoyed what I saw, as did my good buddy James, whose own story – including emigrating to Sweden, and driving a succession of ‘unfortunate’ cars – may be told another time.
