The Drugs Don’t Work

Yesterday was spent driving home and today has been dull and rainy (typical Bank Holiday weekend weather) so I’m posting a final catch up blip from our time away down south.
Henry Cole is a TV programme maker and presenter, with content mainly about motorcycles, classic cars and related ephemera. In other words, just the sort of programmes I like! I’d seen he was doing a limited “in conversation with” tour at the end of May, mainly in the south. But the event on Friday was only half an hour away from our hotel, so I took advantage of that coincidence and booked a couple of tickets.
Presided over by Steve Parrish, it was a very interesting - and humorous - evening. What a lot of people don’t know when they watch the programmes is that Henry had a very privileged upbringing - he was at Eton with Boris Johnson and David Cameron - but left under a cloud and, as he freely admits, became a heroin addict. He was only rescued by the intervention of his best friend Guy, who persuaded him to seek help - as Guy himself had done six months earlier. Both of them have been clean for many years but when Henry was signing my copy of his book, we got chatting about the drugs we do all take nowadays. The ones to control our diabetes, high blood pressure and other age related problems. Apparently, I’m a bit of a lightweight, only being on three tablets a day! Henry is pointing out where his blood sugar monitoring device is attached, as he is Type 1!
He was a really nice guy and happy to chat to everyone patiently waiting for an autograph. And after the next person stepped up, I found myself sort of stuck in a corner with Guy who spotted my Eric Clapton t-shirt and started telling me about the times he was on his tour crew. We then moved on to a discussion about classic bikes and cars and how rubbish electric cars can be if you live in the sticks!
I do love it when you meet a “celeb” and find out that they’re just as down to earth as you or I.