Blast from the past
After an old flame of Dave’s gets in touch she ends up flying from her home in the US to pay a visit and sample the delights of Britain from the seat of a Discovery 1
Regular readers may recall me mentioning a couple of months ago how an old girlfriend from 1983 had managed to track me down and get in touch. Well, despite that gap of 34 years and the fact that we live 3500 miles apart, we got on like a house on fire when she left her home in New York to spend a week with me in the UK.
Even though Debbie has spent the last two months snapping and sending me pictures of Range Rovers and Discoverys she has seen roaming the mean streets of Manhattan, she has never actually been in a Land Rover before. That was something I put right straight away, picking her up from Heathrow Airport in style… well, my washed and polished Discovery 1. I reckoned my mud-encrusted 1984 Ninety might have been too much. As we motored back to Northamptonshire via an unusually quiet M25 and M1, Debbie got to appreciate her first views of the British countryside for more than three decades from the elevated driving position of the Disco. As a Land Rover owner who seldom ventures into lesser cars, I tend to forget just how much better the view is from our vantage point. And as a Brit, I take for granted the fact that we have so much history around us. For example, many of the buildings in my village are older than the United States of America. Locals were supping ale in the King’s Head 100 years before the Declaration of Independence in 1776. By closing time some nights, one or two regulars look as if they’ve been there that long, too.
With a history of their own going back just three centuries or so, American visitors to the UK are usually keen to sample some of ours. Debbie was eager to see where Robin Hood once roamed, so I was keen to oblige, but first I took her to see a bit of history of her own. The ancestors of George Washington, the first President of the United States, lived in Northamptonshire, so I took her a couple of miles up the road to Thrapston, where the village church has a stone memorial to Sir John Washington, his great-greatgreat uncle. It dates back to about 1590 and includes the Washington’s coat of arms, featuring the stars and stripes that were incorporated into the American flag.
Popular legend will tell you that Robin Hood lived around Nottingham and roamed nearby Sherwood Forest, but Robin and his merry band of outlaws wouldn’t have evaded capture for long if they’d stayed confined to such a small area. In fact, their patch comprised much of the East Midlands, which in the Middle Ages was mainly covered in continuous forests. Thus Robin roamed widely throughout this vast tract of wildwood and records at Rockingham Castle, now home