|
The Red Barn at Blindley Heath is our last
outside mid-month meeting of the year and signals that Christmas and New
Year are not far away. The outside season is effectively over, and due to
the aftereffects of the Covid slowdown, it was over much too quickly. The
weather here can be quite unpredictable. One year the whole of the car park
was under a foot of water. Last time here it was gloomy cold and drizzly
with a surprisingly good turnout of 24 proper vehicles. This year the
weather forecast promised nice and sunny, and gave us just as promised, -
a lovely sunny day with blue skies, and was relatively warm. The sun
however makes photography difficult because the cars are parked in the
shade and to photograph them it is necessary to shoot into the sun, with
often disappointing results.
The weather and the sun did however help
to bring out the members and some lovely cars arrived including the
President's not-much-seen-recently 1921 Citroen Model C. The matched set
which was to be provided by Michel Gosset in his Model C did not materialize
because he preferred the smell of smoke by following the local motor-biking bunch on his twin. Notwithstanding, there was an
impressive showing of 39 cars and 6 motorcycles, although not necessarily
all ours. Some members also came in moderns. Even more impressive was that
our Hon Tres managed the epic journey of 200 yards to get here in the
vintage Humber despite complaining of the amount of petrol it consumed doing it.
Red Barn is a very popular eatery with a lovely smart barn restaurant and
has a nice big roomy car park. The pub now has a large yurty pagoda
outside which was much used during the Covid era, including by us on a
couple of occasions The pub can sometimes be
quite packed and getting a table to have lunch can be quite difficult. It
started off relatively light in numbers but soon built up to a relatively
full car park of which we occupied our normal far-end slot. The mix of
cars on view was quite eclectic; from a heard-of-horses Mustang, through a load of
purrs of Jaguars, to wheezy 5 vintage chevaux of the Model C
Citroen, - although the traffic on the A22 is quite a leveler making
the extra gee-gees rather superfluous.
Please
note that the photographs on this page do not enlarge |
