That Was The Weekend

So – the weekend. All went well, the drive was OK, and I ended up doing the entire bit from Bracknell to Stafford Services before Herself took the wheel. So the driving stints are getting longer, and the motorway driving is (he said, modestly) pretty much sorted. Next weekend we’re driving to Norfolk, which’ll be fun too. I’m beginning to get into it after all…

Anyway – once Herself was driving it fell to me to navigate, which all went fairly well. As always, we took the wrong turn off the M6, although it’s never too bad a problem – we still end up on the intended M56, it’s just via an A-road instead of direct. One day I’ll get that one right. Maybe. Central Manchester was no problem either – even without a map. I suspect I’m really sad (In Oh, So Many ways) in that I can easily navigate places like that, despite never actually having driven in them. So we got to the hotel and car-park without any mistakes, and all was fine.

We were staying at the Alias, which was OK. There were good bits and bad bits about it, and while I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to people, nor would I say “Oooh, never go there”. It was OK. I’ll probably write more about it later.

Anyway, we had a good time – central Manchester was utterly rigid all weekend with people doing shopping and so on. I’d kind of expected that, so I think I only achieved three “For Fuck’s Sake”s at people all day on Saturday. Which is impressive. But we wandered around most of the centre : Affleck’s Palace, Market Street, Arndale (AKA “The Chav’s Palace Of Earthly Delights”™, Triangle, King Street, and the European markets in Albert Square and St. Ann’s Square.

Meeting up with friends for drinks in a bar called Moon was a grand idea, followed by a meal in Eden on Canal Street.

All in all, a good weekend, and more thoughts about it will probably follow.

We did a lot of talking about some business ideas and so on for 2006, which I’m not going to go into ’til they’ve started coming together – and yes, you will all know about that one when it comes through. But that’s for ’06, and not before.

The drive back was uneventful, but it was definitely good to be home, and to collapse and die a bit last night before the joys of the last week before Christmas.

Delicious

I’m sure there’s a word to describe this feeling :

The sourness and contempt felt when you watch a dickhead talking on his mobile phone while driving his BMW. The humour and amusement when you watch that dickhead swing his BMW one-handed into a parking space too fast, and smash the front end into a bollard.

But I can’t think what the word is.

However, it can be defined in Simpsons-mode as Nelson Muntz pointing and chanting “Ha Ha”.

Passengers

So, fewer people are traveling on buses, according to the Audit Commission. I wish I could say this was a surprise, but it’s really not.

Outside London and the major cities, bus services are notoriously crap at the best of times. When I was in Manchester I used the bus services a lot, and while they were fairly comprehensive, it was still a pain in the arse most of the time. (And particularly so when the company doing them was First Bus, who should be first against the wall when the revolution comes) But since moving to Bracknell, I don’t think I’ve used a bus once. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but just a couple are :

• The service is crap
• The buses themselves are crap
• They’re bloody expensive
• and it’s nigh on impossible to find out what’s running when

So overall it’s not hard to see why I don’t use them.

A perfect case in point comes when you realise that First Bus run the services in Bracknell and Wokingham, but if you look on that site, you’ll find no mention at all of that fact.

When you’ve finally found the route information and timetable, it turns out that Wokingham to Bracknell takes at least twenty minutes by bus, as opposed to five on the train. And what happens when you try to find out how much it’ll cost? You get this. Fucking hell, that’s helpful. Not.

So is it really any surprise that less and less people are travelling by bus? No, not really.