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One of my co-workers received a letter today from a GM customer in Cambridgeshire, of all places. (He'd moved there and taken his car with him. I can't remember what it was, but I imagine it was one of our nicer ones. Camaro, maybe?)
Being the resident expert on All Things English by virtue of having spent my first four months of life in England, I was asked: What's in Cambridgeshire?
Now. I imagine the first thing that sprang to most of your minds was, oh, Cambridge university. Not me. Oh no.
I merrily piped up, "Duxford Air Show!"
Yep. I am that much of a nerd. My fondest memory of my dad is of waking up at four in the morning to drive three hours to Duxford Air Base, on the coldest, wettest summer day in history (I am Canadian. I survive winters at minus thirty degrees. I was wearing two sweaters and a jacket.), where Dad forked over a hundred and twenty pounds for two tickets (For those of you following along at home, that's nearly three hundred Canadian dollars) to Duxford's celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Battle of Britain. I sat in a Ukrainian Air Force backfire bomber, a relic of the cold war. I saw an ME-109. Dad taught me how to tell a Merlin engine from a Griffin engine by sound alone (the Merlin's pitched higher), and that the Mark II Spitfire was the recon model; this while I was crawling about under one. Dad pointed at a 'plane being wheeled out of a hangar and said "what's that one, then?" and I said "It's a Hurricane", and it was, and he grinned at me. He taught me how to tell all the Navy Cats apart.
Seven Mark IX Spitfires, all flying together. An Avro Lancaster, in the air. Mock dogfights. At the end, the Missing Man formation for all the dead airmen.
It was freezing cold, and it was wet, and I'd had two hours of sleep, and the hot chocolate was rubbish, and it was glorious.
Being the resident expert on All Things English by virtue of having spent my first four months of life in England, I was asked: What's in Cambridgeshire?
Now. I imagine the first thing that sprang to most of your minds was, oh, Cambridge university. Not me. Oh no.
I merrily piped up, "Duxford Air Show!"
Yep. I am that much of a nerd. My fondest memory of my dad is of waking up at four in the morning to drive three hours to Duxford Air Base, on the coldest, wettest summer day in history (I am Canadian. I survive winters at minus thirty degrees. I was wearing two sweaters and a jacket.), where Dad forked over a hundred and twenty pounds for two tickets (For those of you following along at home, that's nearly three hundred Canadian dollars) to Duxford's celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Battle of Britain. I sat in a Ukrainian Air Force backfire bomber, a relic of the cold war. I saw an ME-109. Dad taught me how to tell a Merlin engine from a Griffin engine by sound alone (the Merlin's pitched higher), and that the Mark II Spitfire was the recon model; this while I was crawling about under one. Dad pointed at a 'plane being wheeled out of a hangar and said "what's that one, then?" and I said "It's a Hurricane", and it was, and he grinned at me. He taught me how to tell all the Navy Cats apart.
Seven Mark IX Spitfires, all flying together. An Avro Lancaster, in the air. Mock dogfights. At the end, the Missing Man formation for all the dead airmen.
It was freezing cold, and it was wet, and I'd had two hours of sleep, and the hot chocolate was rubbish, and it was glorious.
