What you all are required to see:

The YouTube Movie of the Highland Fling 2023

https://youtu.be/WsvfeqZ3lyU

From the Goldingham studios, a very high-class production which gives you the feel and see the environment which is what brings many from overseas to experience the proper vintage roads, landscapes and conditions that challenge them. No computer games or AI in this production.

Chairmans Report

I have just come back from the Winter Art Deco in Napier. Having been to a couple summer festivals and being on the peripheral of events. A group of car friends decided to do the Full Monty and get into it so to speak. We booked into the Masonic Hotel, dressed to the period and got in with the Art Deco Trust to book shows when the tickets when released. I can see now why people go back every year. The downside was seeing the destruction from Cyclone Gabrielle driving into Napier, but this was also our groups catalyst for going down this year. A five-star recommendation from me. A must do.

The Roil Can was another great success. I was pleased that some of us had the sense to put their hoods up when the rain came bucketing down. Stupidity is getting wet and cold and pneumonia at our age leave that to the young. For those who have asked there was a full recovery from the hiccup at the meal. A thanks to all those involved.

It has come to light there is a discussion paper to reduce number issues of Beaded Wheels. This is going to be discussed on 11th/12th August in Nelson at the clubs executive meeting. It has been missed and it has only come to our attention through another branch over the weekend.

On club night this Thursday [at the club rooms], you can come and discuss it in the evening. Graeme will then have clear direction at the executive meeting in ten days later in Nelson.

Chairman Rob.

It is known that the Chairman will visit Europe again, a long break due to Covid etc, to see old friends and bond again with his ‘other half’, the ‘ex-Regal’ Vincent Comet. His time was spent in earlier years with the maritime industry which gave him a wide variety of contacts and access to objects of desire which he retains to this day. Memories abound and are well expressed in the words of a past editor of Punch Magazine, Alan Coren.

‘I shipped aboard a coaler on the Maracaibo run, and I discovered what a Lascar liked to read on the still watches of the equatorial night. My first anthology, a slim volume and privately circulated, consisted of buttocks snipped from “Health and Efficiency” interlaced with Gujarati limericks and reliable Portsmouth telephone numbers.’

‘Two years later , I jumped ship at Dakar, and took up with a Senegalese novelty dancer who had a tin roofed shack down by the harbour and a brother who worked as a roach exterminator in the British Council Library, perhaps not the most idyllic and fruitful period of my life; it was mornings of grilled breadfruit and novelty dancing on the roof overlooking the incredible azure of the harbour… ’