Journalism – James Chapple

Speed Kings

For all the trials, tribulations and tearing my hair out, I don’t half get to do some cool things courtesy of my job.

I’ve visited Auschwitz, I’ve seen one of my favourite bands Ash play… in Ash and I’ve set a hot lap at the Top Gear test track.

So it was with no second invitation I gamely joined colleague Tom Smurthwaite at Mercedes-Benz World to meet a rather special guest – that’s him at the top, the bloke in the white top looking 7,373,245x cooler than us two numpties.

Yes, on Thursday, we got to spend an afternoon at Brooklands – and a few fraught minutes with former McLaren driver, three times F1 champion and all round nice bloke Lewis Hamilton.

Lewis thrashed us around the Brooklands test track while we tried to lob a few questions in his direction – and keep our lunches down. Easier said than done.

So what, I hear you ask, did we establish? Well, Lewis has been impressed with new Mercedes teammate Valtteri Bottas’s performance, he’s looking forward to the new season and the 2017 rule changes, and our little sortie at Brooklands, when Lewis was (so far as we were concerned) absolutely nailing it, was the small matter of ‘about 5%’ of what he experiences in F1. Eeesh.

“Any plans to move here [Surrey]?” quipped Tom.

“Nope. It’s the weather – it’s freakin’ cold! Maybe in the future though, when things settle down,” said Lewis.

You heard it here first.

We also had a quick nose round Mercedes-Benz World itself, which is a pretty incredible place too. Besides all the track experiences, the centre is, well, as shrine to all things Mercedes, on and off the track. It’s free all year round so you can drop in when you like. They even show the races live on Sundays in the building’s two cinemas – again, completely free.

There’s even an exploded F1 car – 3,200 components carefully and meticulously strung up from the rafters. It took three months to make. If you’re an F1 fan, it’s kind of awe-inspiring, it must be said.

You can see our full video package from Brooklands over at Get Surrey.

Top Oh Dear

Okay, that’s official the worst headline I’ve ever written. But nevermind.

This week, me, and my Get Surrey colleagues Michael Pearson and Georgina Townshend, were revealed as the new hosts of Top Gear.

Yes, really.

Well, actually, no – not really. Let me explain.

Top Gear has long been shot at Dunsfold Park, just a few minutes drive down the road from our office in Guildford. We loosely cover developments on the show, particlarly filming of the new-look shot post Clarkson, Hammond and May.

And after a bit of badgering, the team down at Dunsfold Park were kind enough to invite us down to experience a bit of the Top Gear magic for ourselves, namely, an Ariel Atom driving experience for Michael while Georgie went out for a spin with The Stig.

Me? Well the honour fell to me to set a laptime on behalf of Get Surrey and become, for one lap only, the star in a reasonably priced car.

On what Clarkson and co might call a ‘mildly moist’ track, my instructor guided me round a practice lap in the track’s Kia Cee’d and with just that single lap under my belt, I gave it the beans.

The result – a stirling, dare I say it so myself, 1:52:17 on what my instructor later upgrated to a ‘very wet’ track. Not bad, not bad at all.

Get Surrey; slower than Jonathan Ross and Nick Robinson, but faster than Louie Spence. Bonza.

You can watch Get Surrey’s full episode of Top Gear here.

Ash… in Ash

I wrote a little ditty about this earlier this year – essentially, a man from the newspaper patch area I cover won a competition to bring the band Ash to his back garden… in the Surrey village of Ash. It was one of the most fun mornings I can recall, and a real treat for me as a big Ash fan.

So here are some of the pics I took that morning that have been lurking on my phone for quite some time, and a few courtesy of one of our photographers.

Dalai Lama, Aldershot

It doesn’t matter where you work as a journalist, each and every local news patch has its quirks responsible for all manner of weird and wonderful goings on – in my case, Aldershot.

This year, Buddhist spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, paid Aldershot its second visit in just three years, ostensibly to open the town’s long-awaited Buddhist Community Centre.

Aldershot has long been home to a largely Buddhist Nepalese and Gurkha community, a relationship built on decades of militaristic cooperation. The town still houses the Queen’s Own Gurkha Logistic Regiment, with thousands of its recuits having fought alongside British soldiers in conflict zones all around the world. They are a credit to Nepal, to the British Army, and to Aldershot.

But this relationship has not been without tension, most notably Joanna Lumley’s 2008 Gurkha Justice Campaign seeking greater settlement rights for ex-Gurkha soldiers who have served the Crown, her father having been a Gurkha himself. The result was the arrival of thousands of Gurkha families in Rushmoor borough, an influx many residents believe the borough was not adequately prepared for. I’m not going to tackle the complex ins and outs of this debate here though.

I can only stress it was an honour to cover the Dalai Lama’s visit to the EBB Stadium on Monday where he addressed thousands of supporters.

Cambridge Military Hospital

My job opens a lot of doors, in this instance, doors that first opened in the 1870s and shut permanently in the 1990s.

Grainger Plc is currently transforming a swathe of former military land in Aldershot into the vast 3,850-home ‘Wellesley’ development.

The development is named after the Duke of Cambridge, Arthur Wellesley, who has long been immortalised in Aldershot where a bronze statue of the duke astride his faithful horse Copenhagen watches over the town.

At the heart of the Wellesley development is the famous Cambridge Military Hospital, which opened in 1879 and finally closed in the mid-1990s.

It is as iconic a building as Aldershot will ever boast and canny as ever, Grainger are making the Cambridge a centrepiece of Wellesley – likely to be transformed into desirable flats and apartments.

On Monday, the Aldershot News & Mail was given a rare tour of the now dilapidated hospital ahead of its renovation. You can read my more formal take on that here (images courtesy of my friend and far superior photographer Sophie Garrett).

Below are a few of the pictures I took.

#AshWednesday 2.0

Earlier this year, I considered myself pretty bloody lucky to land myself a ticket for Ash’s comeback show in London on February 18 (that’s Ash Wednesday, if you hadn’t already guessed).

Little did I expect, three months later, to spend my Wednesday morning in someone’s back garden (in the Surrey village of Ash) watching Ash perform their hits Girl From Mars and Shining Light in front of barely 30 people.

It was a suitably surreal experience. So rather than explain it all over again, here’s my write up for Get Surrey.

Holocaust Memorial Day

Shortly after I started my job here in Guildford, I was offered the opportunity to accompany a couple of hundred teenagers from across Surrey on a trip to the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland with the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET).

Nick Clegg came along too. It was an extremely unusual and moving day, one that will stick with me for the rest of my life, as I’m sure the experience of visiting Auschwitz does for all who set foot there.

I was perhaps only three or four months into my job by the time the trip came around and I still look back at this piece with a degree of pride, if only for somehow managing to collect myself and my thoughts before regurgitating them in a vaguely coherent manner.

Disclaimer: Yes, I know Krakow isn’t the capital of Poland. Junior reporters make mistakes.

Before I wrote this post, I had perhaps cast an eye over this article once since it was published back in October 2012. It’s somewhat strange to read it more than two years later, and arguably, two years wiser.

Today (January 27) is Holocaust Memorial Day. It’s some 70 years since the liberation of the indescribably vast Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland, and 75 years since the town of Oswiecin – then, ironically, something of a beacon of inter-faith tolerance – was so cruelly cemented into the history books.

We’ve all seen pictures of the various Nazi death camps. They are, thankfully, a part of our common conscience in 2015. At best, they serve as a reminder of an atrocity the world simply cannot allow to be repeated. At worst, they hark back to an atrocity the horrors of which echo to this day, having since been repeated in Congo, Armenia, and at Srebrenica during the Bosnian War, among others.

But nothing, absolutely nothing I’ve ever seen, compares with gazing out of one of the central guard towers at Birkenau, the biggest of all the Nazi death camps. It is simply breathtaking. You can’t process it there and then. The fact I can recall it so vividly more than two years later is perhaps an indication of the time is has taken, and continues to take, me to rationalise it.

Fortunately, Times journo Hugo Rifkind has managed to do so in a far more succinct and eloquent manner so I heartily suggest reading his post for the HET, which was published on Sunday (January 25).

The letters game

Dear Sir,

In my postbag of January 1, I found this tale of woe.

Sadly, I wasn’t granted right of reply as the sender decided to hide behind a rather hackneyed pseudonym. I feel in the interests of balance, it should be republished forthwith.

Regards,

James (idiot reporter).