Alan The day before Goodwood, a friend asked which single car I most wanted to find. I answered without hesitating, and then I found it, unroped and close enough to lean into. What I didn’t expect was the man standing beside it, who told me that if you drive a car hard enough to break it, you haven’t failed, you’ve found your next improvement.
6 min read • Special Report
Before I lost my sight, I drove, and I loved it. This week the RNIB invited me to climb inside one of the Waymo test cars now learning the streets of London, and to hear what a room of thirty visually impaired people really thinks about handing the wheel to a machine. This one is different: a special report from an afternoon where hope and hard questions sat side by side.
Read time: 11 minutes.
I very nearly turned round at Cambridge station, unable to find the shuttle and wondering whether the whole day was a mistake. What changed my mind wasn’t an aircraft at all, but an A-Team van, a scientist holding thousand-year-old ice, and a running commentary that quietly told me exactly where to look. At Duxford the flying is extraordinary, but it’s the people who make you want to come back.
16 min read • Micro-case studies included
I don’t own a Ferrari and never will, so I wasn’t sure a Sunday morning Cars & Coffee was a morning for me. I went anyway, and read a black silhouette, a white one and an impossibly wide one off their shapes alone, only to find I’d photographed a Daytona SP3, a McLaren P1 and my first ever Pagani Utopia. You don’t need to own the car to belong on the square.
5 min read • Micro-case study included
Years of assuming a library full of books wasn’t for me, undone in a single afternoon. The Magna Carta read through a phone camera, an original Enigma machine, and a member of staff called Stephen who left his desk to walk me there himself. Sometimes the hardest barrier is the assumption you never thought to test.
7 min read • Accessibility checklist included
A museum exhibition that asked me to experience it, not view it. Low light, dark blue walls, a soundscape, a giant plesiosaur hanging overhead, and an ammonite millions of years old that I could actually put my hands on. The hard part wasn’t navigating the dark. It was slowing down enough to let it work.
8 min read · Accessibility checklist included
London’s most overwhelming market, and somehow one of my favourite places in it. Thousands of people, traders shouting over the trains, dozens of languages, and a white cane in the middle of all of it. The first time, I fled to a burger at the edge. Now I queue twenty-five minutes for a sausage roll and mean it.
8 min read · Survival strategies included
The ship is the easy part. The real challenge starts the moment I step off it, into an unfamiliar city every morning with a white cane and only a rough sense of which way the sea is. Lost in Barcelona, rescued by a stranger at a Bruges ticket machine, and nineteen storeys up a ropes course because curiosity won.
8 min read · Accessibility checklist included
Vast, loud and brilliantly overwhelming. From the nerves at my first accessible viewing platform to tracing wood veneer with a Bentley craftsman, twice now, and worth every step.
8 min read • Accessibility checklist included
Two years from “couldn’t manage a parkrun” to a World Major, run without a guide, conquered in the head long before the road, with a brass band in a tunnel along the way.
9 min read • What I’d do differently