We called him Andrew, but 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 Roadpeace Wood at 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

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.

Jean, Catherine, Gen & myself went to the annual Roadpeace Ceremony, and it rained - very hard, but 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 Roadpeace 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 Roadpeace 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. Click the photographer cartoon at bottom of the page.

2010

I realised I haven't updated this page for a while, and in the meantime the tree has grown so much that we appear small and insignificant next to it.

It really is an Andy sized tree now

Keep going

Roadpeace 2011

Once again monks from our Temple, (now just up the road in in Kings Bromley) came to the annual Roadpeace service. They lead a procession from the Chapel down to the wood, where they chanted the Mangalasutta and The Blessing For All Beings

Here are some of the photographs of the monks. They have been reduced in size & quality to fit this web page.
If you would like copies of the full sized ones, please email me