Tag Archives: replacement bus service

Notes from a Small City

 

Blossom at Wilford

Got up, cooked breakfast, discovered I have ordered the wrong bacon this week, had coffee from the cafetiere (made by No 1 Son, who is a coffee aficionado), sat, redundant, while he and his mother muttered about wedding plans and played with their phones. Nobody holds conversations anymore.

It took 13 minutes to get to the station, as there were no hold-ups and 19 minutes to get back using a longer route as I try to relearn the geography of the area. If I’m being picky, it actually took 19 minutes to get there, but six of them were spent on the drive waiting as Julia discovered a couple of last minute jobs which, of course, took priority over punctuality.

Blossom at Wilford

There are no trains to Norwich due to work on the tracks so it is down to the good old “replacement bus service”.  Today’s “bus” is a luxury coach, so it isn’t too bad.

It is a pleasant morning, with a plentiful, and varied, supply of blossom and a variety of birds, including a pied wagtail, several lustrous blackbirds and the usual magpies and pigeons. It’s he sort of morning that makes you think you should write a poem. Later, I probably will.

I was reading some William Carlos Williams last night. They are quite short poems and I could probably write a lot of poems that length. I just need to have a range of suitable subjects and something interesting to say about them. That might be more difficult. As I’ve said before, there are plenty of words, and they aren’t the problem. Learning to put he right words in the right order is the skill, and that only be learned by laying down a lot of poorly selected words in the wrong order.

Try this for a poem about plums.

Reflected Plums – Victoria

I’d better get on with that now. Half an hour of poetry followed by getting lunch made for Julia before she goes to work in the tea room, and I will have several hours more to write before she returns home.

Ooops!

Nearly forgot to post.

There were just four minutes before midnight when I realised I hadn’t posted and leapt into action. It takes three minutes to write a short title, five words and hit the publish button. Well, it takes about 20 seconds, but the whirring and grinding and slowness of an ancient netbook takes two minutes and forty seconds.

Still, I got it done with a minute to spare and now have time to write a few more words in a more leisurely manner.

I was stitched up by my satnav this morning.

Having checked up on Google on Saturday and found that it takes just under two hours to drive to Ely,  I sat in the car this morning with two hours and ten minutes to make the journey.

We switched the satnav on, put in the postcode for Ely station and set off. The figures started with 88.5 miles, which was about the same as Google showed. About 400 metres later it had recalculated and was showing 106 miles and two hours 15 minutes. It got worse when we hit roadworks near Cambridge.

The trouble seems to be that the satnav doesn’t do minor roads.

The moral is to prepare better, enter the destination the night before to check it, and, if necessary, write a route down using Google and a map. It used to work in the days before satnav.

The station, when we arrived, was choked with buses. Buses in my way, buses stuck in gaps and buses being helped to reverse. It was chaos.

It was a hectic day, but it doesn’t seem so bad now it’s over.