Day 10 - A Spin on the Magic Roundabout
Day 10 – Watford to Northampton
“So, going anywhere nice for your holidays this year…?”
I recognize this one. It's the Hairdresser’s Gambit, a line used by crimpers and cutters throughout history to open up a conversation with a complete stranger. And, as if to confirm it, the speaker promptly starts snipping at my hair. Fortunately, I’m sitting in a hairdresser’s.
“Well, yes,” I reply, trying not to move my head. “Actually, I’m taking two months off work to travel.”
“Really,” says Mark, my usual hairdresser who is clearly impressed. “Where are you off to?” he asks, anticipating me to touch on the exotic joys of India, or journeys through the Outback, or to life on the road through the American Mid West.
“Er… well, I’m travelling... from Land’s End to John O’Groats… by … er, bus.”
The snipping, everything, pauses momentarily. I've come to recognise that too.
“Phew, that doesn’t sound like much of a holiday,” he jokes, bewilderedly.
We talk on as he skillfully snips away at my hair. How long will that take, he asks? Are you just going by bus? And tell me, have you taken leave of your senses?
“Well…” says Mark finally. I feel a summing-up coming on, especially as my haircut also appears to be coming to an end.
“Public transport… well, I can see it's essential, you know. But I’m afraid I just couldn’t do without the comforts of my own car.”
He has a point. Behind the wheel of your own car, you're in complete control. If you want to listen to The Archers, you can. If you tire of The Archers and want to play a thrash metal CD at full volume before winding down the window and yelling at the countryside, well, that's fine too. None of this you can do on a public bus – at least, not without getting up the noses of your fellow travellers.
In theory, bus travel does imply having less freedom to do your own thing, but there's got to be more than just sitting in silence. Hasn't there? Well, maybe not. I’ve tried chatting to my fellow passengers on this trip but I've found that not everyone wants to chat to a crop-headed nutter with a rucksac big enough to cram a body into. This has serious implications for the rest of my journey.
You see, I'm one of the millions of people who spend their working day in an office thronged with ringing phones and with lots of people, quite a number I'd count as friends. After the working day is done, I clamber onto a crowded train and head for home, a house filled with young adults and their friends, a waggity-tailed dog, sundry rabbits, hamsters and guinea pigs, and a wife who doesn't take kindly to me leaving my shoes in the middle of the room. There's always something going on. Questions to be answered, homework to be checked and, inevitably, new 'things' to be costed and payments to be agreed. Tickets to order, bills to be paid, diaries to be coordinated. Frankly, there's hardly time to eat...
But then this trip of mine comes along and all that changes. Home is the same, of course - a little quieter, perhaps, fewer shoes in the middle of the room, that sort of thing - but I am completely on my own, going where I want to go, making decisions which will effect nobody else but me.
Suddenly, I am a man alone. Independent for the first time since I was a student. Utterly free. So. That’s good, then...
Except - when I see a breath-taking sunset, or an insane garden filled with fluorescent gnomes, I find myself instinctively turning around and uttering those four little words "Cor, look at that!"... and there's nobody there to share it with.
When you are around people a lot, and in our house that's pretty much a given, you can't help but get used to sharing things. Not just the usual things like viral infections and underwear and stuff, but real things like thoughts and opinions, propositions and ideas, the sort of thing which can make even the simplest concept – like who's turn is it to clear the table - the subject of a long, explorative, detailed and frequently heated debate. All that has gone. Instead of friends and family, I am constantly surrounded by strangers. And that's a bit weird.
Fortunately, I’m starting to develop the skill of initiating subtle conversation with complete strangers without seriously alarming them. True, I haven’t had to ask someone where I can buy a sharp knife or a bottle of weed killer, and I’m also lucky in being sufficiently eccentric to be able to keep myself amused for most of the time. But when I look around it's interesting to see what my fellow passengers do to pass the time.
If there’s two or more of them, then chatting seems to be the accepted practice, with perhaps a little snogging for extra variety. Drunken arguments are also not uncommon, which is perhaps why many people prefer to keep they heads down and do their own thing. It’s probably just as well that buses don’t have their own in-bus stereo system. You can imagine the arguments -
“If you play that ruddy Mantovani album again, you're going to get hurt!”
“Well, you're not playing that Dangerous Strangers CD, its awful!”
“OK, everyone calm down, let’s just put some Shostakovich on...”
“Hang on, you said I could play my Clint Biggles compilation…”
Fortunately, many seem to have their own in-head stereo systems though you always get some burk with the volume turned up to the nosebleedingly-dangerous, pestering everyone with the tinny and repetitive hi-hat beat of... what is it? Snoop Dogg? Black Sabbath? McFly? Maddening.
Then there's the mobile phone. Now, here’s something you can’t do when you are driving, unless you are a complete prat. Sitting on a bus means you can phone and text to your heart’s content. Some people take to this with more enthusiasm and less discretion than others, however.
BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson once observed how people sitting on a London bus today are likely to hear people talking to each other in all manner of exotic foreign languages like Japanese, Russian, Arabic, or French – but bemoaned the fact that their telephone habits seemed to have affected us Brit’s, too. “One of the many social changes that have happened in my lifetime is that the British, who once used to whisper for fear of disturbing everyone else, now shout the most intimate details of their lives down the phone," he complains.
He may have a point. I’m sure I’m not the only person to have been distracted from a book’s storyline because of someone else’s private telephone conversation – “Right. And what type of ammunition does that take, then….”
Modern phones allow you to surf the net as you travel, though in America some school buses also have on-board wireless internet. This has proved really popular with the kids because it allows them to complete their homework whilst actually on the bus to school – a concept the Japanese motor industry would probably recognize as ‘just in time’. In Britain, bus operators are also catching on, and this means you’re able to knock out a stroppy email complaining about the lateness of your bus - in real time.
“I am writing to complain about the timekeeping of the number 32, which is now approaching the General Hospital when in fact it should already be well past Acacia Gardens. It's disgraceful. And…whoa! Did the driver have to go over that bump quite so quickly…”
One of the other things you can do on a bus but not in a car is read a newspaper, though this is something which fewer and fewer of us are choosing to do. One reason we are losing the newspaper habit might be that more people now drive to work instead of going by bus, which makes the local newspaper industry’s reliance on motor advertising, to the extent of running motoring supplements each week, all the more ironic. Haven’t they noticed that for every reader they convert from bus user into car owner they lose, on average, one reader?
Then there’s the Nintendo, a child’s toy which the company are desperately trying to sell as a cool, brain-training accessory for the modern commuter. I’ve seen a few on the London Underground where I’ve no doubt such things are tolerated, but rarely elsewhere. Anyway, I’d prefer to wait for the invention of 3D goggles. Can you imagine battling hand-to-hand with cyborgs and zombies on the top deck, blasting purple-skinned swamp monsters on the back seats, in real time and in, apparently, real life. That should liven up the morning commute.
You don’t get to choose your fellow passengers and some car drivers might balk at the possibility of finding ones’ self sitting next to a dribbling monster in a track suit with home-made tattoos all over his hands and a gun-shaped carrier bag on his lap. But before you assume that everyone who travels by bus is either criminal, smelly or unhinged, consider this.
In October 2009, a woman named Montse Ventura was travelling on her usual bus in Barcelona when the lady sitting opposite leant forward and told her to go to her doctor and ask to have tests for acromegaly, a disorder resulting from an excess of growth hormone due to a pituitary gland tumour. The lady helpfully wrote it all down on a piece of paper along with the names of two clinical tests and told her to have them done soon because if she waited until she next felt ill and visited the doctor it might already be too late.
As it happened, Montse was due a routine check-up so she duly handed over the piece of paper and asked for those tests, too. The results immediately rang alarm bells and she was soon undergoing life-saving surgery to remove a tiny tumour from her pituitary gland.
Montse was deeply fortunate to be travelling that day with an endocrinologist who recognised her symptoms. As random acts of kindness go, this one's an absolute corker and it demonstrates that you should never dismiss your fellow passengers as mostly loonies.
Watford had seemed rather dismal when I arrived last night, but this morning I find a town centre with a much brighter and more optimistic air and frankly I rather like it. I wander through its pedestrianised streets in sunshine dappled by broad-leafed trees to find my bus to Aylesbury. It's a double decker but with only three of us this morning there's plenty of room to spread out and enjoy the views from the top deck.
It's never occurred to me before, but the double decker bus is an almost uniquely British institution. None of our European neighbours have adopted them and those few countries which have – Hong Kong, for example – were mostly British colonies using our cast-offs. No wonder foreign tourists stop and point at them.
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| An early 'knife board' bus |
The double decker bus wasn't exactly designed, though – it sort of evolved. Its starting point was George Shillibeer's original horse-drawn omnibus which was described at the time as ‘in the shape of a van, with windows on each side, and one at the end’. It was never George's intention to carry passengers on the roof, but most people would already have been familiar with the old-fashioned stage coach which had seats on top so the idea wasn't completely mad. In fact, passengers who were unable to find space inside a crowded 1830's bus would often sit alongside the driver and it became increasingly common to see driver and passengers sharing the same lofty perch at the front. Operators then realised that they could increase their vehicle’s capacity at minimal costs by fixing a few seats to the roof.
It was the Economic Conveyance Company of London which seems to have been the first to offer a true double decker in 1847. They introduced a bus with a clerestory, a raised central section of roof which included windows to allow more light into the interior, and onto this they fitted bench seats. To encourage their use, fares were half those charged for a seat inside though even with this financial incentive the double decker wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea - though you’d probably need one after a short ride as there were no safety features except for a 3- inch high rail to brace your boots against.
These early double deckers become known as ‘knifeboards’ because the top-hatted gentlemen sitting back to back along the middle of their roofs bore a comic resemblance to black-handled knives in a knife block. And it was always gentlemen – this was no place for a lady, due to the need to clamber up a set of vertical metal steps on the back of the bus, which was never going to be easy in a long skirt, and the shameful view you’d be offering the world of one’s ankles. It took another decade before ‘decency boards’ were fitted so that ladies lower limbs were shielded from public gaze. These also reduced the numbers of passengers falling off.
My own double decker feels relatively safe and comfortable as we trundle through the outskirts of Watford and under London’s thundering orbital motorway the M25. At last - it feels like I'm finally breaking free of London and, as if on cue, a field of Jersey cows promptly hoves into view, their roadside meadow quickly giving way to a rustic farmyard, then a red-roofed village of timber-framed buildings and old, sun-warmed brick. Honestly, you couldn't have scripted it better. This is all so unexpectedly green and gentle that I'd be happy to linger, but we are soon arriving in Hemel Hempstead via one of the most improbable roundabouts I've ever seen.
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| Hemel's 'Magic Roundabout. Which way...? |
Known locally as the ‘Magic Roundabout’ - presumably because you feel you've been eating magic mushrooms when you use it – I've never seen anything quite like it. Six roads meet at the Magic Roundabout and at the end of each road is a mini-roundabout. This means to get onto the roundabout, you first have to negotiate a mini-roundabout. With me so far? Good, because this is where it gets complicated.
Once you reach your mini-roundabout, you are presented with a choice. You can either turn left and take the roundabout in a clockwise direction, as demanded by the Highway Code, driving examiners and every single police force in the country. Or bizarrely you can choose to turn right and tackle the big roundabout in an anti-clockwise direction, against all your natural instincts and the careful teachings of every nerve-frayed driving instructor in the UK. It's very odd, and very counter-intuitive.
The roundabout is overlooked by a cluster of modern office blocks which presumably give their employees a superb view of the carnage below. I can't imagine they get much work done.
The nearby centre of Hemel Hempstead has a pleasing late-1950's feel about it, with some rather fetching post-war public buildings. Hemel's history is written here in its architecture; this is a town developed almost from scratch after the Second World War to provide housing for Londoners bombed out of their homes during the Blitz.
Hemel Hempstead has always enjoyed a uniquely central position in the country’s transport system. It lies directly across the shortest route between the capital and the industrial Midlands and has been passed through first by a roman road, then a major turnpike in the 1760's, the Grand Junction Canal in 1795 and then the London and Birmingham railway in 1837. Its geographical position also led to the government deciding to route the M1 motorway just to the east of the town, ensuring that Hemel enjoyed a central position on the country's motorway network, too.
We cross the Grand Junction Canal on the road out of Hemel Hempstead, then almost immediately pass under the West Coast mainline, then back again, crossing and re-crossing the canal and the railway as we head towards Aylesbury. The impression that this is a countryside oft travelled through grows stronger every minute. It's somehow different to London's southern border, just as green and tree-lined but more spacious somehow, the sky bigger and the roads wider. It's almost as if it has been designed specifically for travellers.
We pass through the pretty Chiltern towns of Berkhamsted and Tring before disappearing into Aylesbury's subterranean bus station, an underground chamber lined with sewerage pipes and greasy air conditioning ducts, dimly lit and hidden from public gaze beneath a sprawling shopping mall. I venture outside and find a busy, attractive market place with a clock tower and bustling streets beyond, and you wonder how on earth someone could have looked on this pleasing scene and said “You know, what this place really needs is a bland windowless shopping mall”, to which his mate no doubt replied “Yeah. And I tell you what, we could stick a bus station in among the drains underneath it...”
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| Aylesbury's subterranean bus station |
I can't get out of Aylesbury's fume-filled bus station quickly enough and luckily I don't have long to wait. My bus to Milton Keynes soon rolls in and I'm mildly astonished to find it has soft leather seats, an unexpected touch of luxury in what is, in all honesty, a very ordinary single decker.
We are soon out of the town with the countryside stretching out in all directions. Somehow, I didn’t quite expect it all to look as attractive as this. I even renew my acquaintance with the Routemaster as we pass one parked up in a lay-by, clearly one of the 1,000 or more that have survived into preservation. This one is living out its graceful retirement as a wedding coach and is dressed up in white ribbons and bows and a destination board which reads ‘Sandy and Julian’s Wedding’.
It's a brief re-acquaintance, though, as our driver is really pressing on. But for how much longer? Our bus' automatic gearbox appears to be randomly changing up from 5th to 3rd at high speed causing everything to shake and the engine to emit an ear-piercing howl. Each gear change seems lumpier than the last and we passengers begin exchanging worried looks. Nice leather seats, though.
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| Wing's elegant Police station. Pimms, anyone...? |
We pass through the village of Wing which boasts an elegant detached half-timbered villa surrounded by mature trees and hedges which turns out to be the village Police Station of all things. It looks like the kind of place where instead of ‘refs’ in the canteen the officers probably enjoy cucumber sandwiches on the lawn. Then its into prosperous-looking Leighton Buzzard with its thatched pubs, half-timbered houses and meandering narrow streets.
Luckily, the gearbox doesn't expire in a hail of hot shrapnel and our bus eventually rattles into Milton Keynes, my second New Town of the day. This one looks like a vast business park with islands of tall, anonymous buildings adrift in a sea of tarmac and shrubbery. It's strangely unsettling, a bit like the set for an episode of Doctor Who but scarier.
This is a town of separations – people from traffic, living space from work space, pavements from roads. Keeping people away from traffic is logical enough, but here the degree of separation seems so extreme that people appear banished to the margins, to the very edges of the undergrowth. Forcing people to walk in dank, graffiti-smeared underpasses while motorists above them bask in the full blaze of the sun is difficult enough to justify during daylight, but at night...
The centre of Milton Keynes is built on the American grid system, but Manhatten this ain't. No busy streets, no hordes of office workers or shoppers, just lines and lines of trees and parked cars. I wander around for a while and although the grid systems means its difficult to get lost, I still find it all rather impenetrable.
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| Milton Keynes ex-bus station. Photo: Diamond Geezer |
Oddly, my bus drops me off outside of the railway station rather than the nearby bus station so I go to take a look and find a smart bus station empty and obviously abandoned, apart for a huge staff canteen filled with bored-looking bus drivers tucking in to their egg and chips and mugs of tea.
There are some heroic touches, though. Right outside of the railway station is a vast open piazza, partly grassed and flanked by tall buildings and lined with huge empty flagpoles. It feels like it was designed for major public events, yet it’s lunchtime on a warm sunny day and I seem to be the only person there. Right at the centre is a squat stone sculpture of two frightened people huddled together as if against an icy wind. Curiously, it is based on a poem by the Scottish poet Robert Burns who died centuries before Milton Keynes was even thought of. I could find absolutely no evidence of a connection between the two. Mind you, a terrified couple trembling randomly in an urban desert... OK, I can see that.
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| Milton Keynes inspired by Rabbie Burns |
My next bus can’t come soon enough and thankfully I'm soon on my way to Northampton. More crossings of the canal and the West Coast mainline, with brief stretches along the ferociously busy A5, before we are in an altogether gentler world of farmland and rough stone cottages, of trees and flowery hedgerows, and of twisting roads tracing ancient field boundaries. I had no idea Northamptonshire was so lovely.
We soon roll into Northampton, once the home of a vast shoe industry which today seems little more than a cottage industry. It’s much-pedestrianised town centre also has a vague feeling of reduced circumstances about it, though with its fine cobbled Market Square and broad streets of fine buildings it is far from unattractive.
The same cannot be said for its bus station which is of mind-boggling ugliness. From the outside Greyfriars bus station resembles a bomb-hardened bunker and to exit it you have to trudge through what feels like a greasy drain to a flight of sick-spattered concrete stairs. Its truly awful. If this had been designed specifically to discourage people from using buses, it would be a triumph.
I hurry out of the station and make my way through Northampton’s back streets to my hotel. I can barely cope with the fact that I've got to go back there in the morning.
Map courtesy of those awfully nice people at Google
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