Big Andy

Andy's Page (written by his dad)

We called him Andrew.
To the rest of the world he was known as Big Andy, and that is how he will always be remembered

Big Andy isn't with us any more.
He was killed in a road accident on 17th February 2000, the night before he was due to fly to Thailand on one of his photographic expeditions.

You can download my diary, 'A Journey to Thailand' which tells a little bit about why he was going, why we went instead, and relates our adventures in Thailand. (Updated March 2004)

Click here for the download as a zipped word file (about 30KB)
Click here for the download as a PDF Acrobat file (about 250 Kb)

Andy lived in Forest Fields in Nottingham, they said when he died he left an Andy shaped hole in the Forest.

Last year we planted a tree for Andy in the Road Peace section of the National Memorial Arboretum near Alrewas, we will go back to see how much it has grown: eventually there will be a big Andy tree in this new forest, which will still be there, long after we have gone

More stuff down here

Genevieve, Finn & Barney
visiting Andy's tree

Some of the monks came from
Birmingham to the planting ceremony

February 2004
See how much our tree has grown.

2005

This year we went in July, near to Andy's birthday, and just before Sarah set sail* for Canada.

The tree is now taller than Jean & Sarah: I guess next time we go it will have outgrown me.

It was wonderful to see how the whole arboretum is developing

*OK, she is flying, but setting sail has a much more adventurous ring about it when emigrating.

'What a difference a (few) day(s) makes' - August 2005 - only a couple of weeks later, but it might have been another planet.

Jean, Catherine, Gen & myself went to the annual Road Peace Ceremony, and it rained - very hard. Gen had on her usual voluminous trousers, that got so heavy with the wet, she could hardly walk.

In spite of the weather it was a really good occasion. Everybody wrote their loved one's name on a paper oak leaf, which were all buried near the Road peace plaque

We didn't get to see Andy's tree in 2006, and in November of that year I very nearly had my own tree in Road Peace when I had a very bad car accident ~ which is another story.

Suffice to say I wasn't fit enough to walk down to the tree until just after Christmas 2007, and what a change we saw, both to Andy's tree which as you can see now towers over me, and to the Arboretum itself which has grown enormously, with many more memorial gardens, and the stunning & thought provoking new memorial opened by HM The Queen last October commemorating members of the armed services killed in combat since WWII.

It was a cold and blustery day ~ walking down to the tree was comparatively easy, but going back to the visitor's centre in the face of a gale was quite hard work.

In fact there were just the three of us there, and I had no tripod, but its surprising what you can do with Photoshop!

Andy grasped modern technology by the throat (like everything else he did) and would have been quite familiar with this little image manipulation trick.

He was also the first person in the family to understand websites and how to build them.
I think he would be quite chuffed that I have (nearly) caught up with him

His own website no longer has its own URL, but here it is just as he left it, even down to address, telephone number & email address, all of which of course no longer apply. The only change is that a navigation button has been aded to get you back here.

Please email us if you want to get in touch.

Click on the cartoon to go to Andy's website