On The Buses, Not Starring Reg Varney
Part Two - All Over The Place
Never mind the buses.
Getting to Wolverton was no problem, I rang for a taxi and hey presto - there it was. Obviously the whole process wasn't quite as magical as I just made it sound, but there you go, that's artistic licence for you. Sorry if I just destroyed the illusion for you, but anyway, I'm now on a bus. The number 2, to be precise and it's making its way out of Wolverton and into Greenleys. Now, this bus goes as far as Newport Pagnell, but seeing as Newport Pagnell isn't part of the New City of Milton Keynes, I'll be needing to get off at Giffard Park. The route itself is an odd one, it starts off in the north-west of the town, moves down towards Central Milton Keynes and then goes back up towards the north-east - if you drew the route for the number 2 on a map of Milton Keynes, it'd probably resemble a really grotesque grin. Mind you, nothing of interest happened on this bus - it's far too early for that sort of thing anyway. I was surprised at how many people were using the bus at this time of day, however. Of course, I could say how slow the journey was and how rude the driver was, but that'd be a complete lie - the truth is far less interesting, as the journey's completely uneventful. Not only that, but I find myself at Giffard Park a couple of minutes early! This isn't the bus service I was expecting, if things carry on like this, I'm in for a nice easy(ish) day. 19 estates out of the way, and it's only quarter past seven in the morning. Textbook.
#9 Bus.
By 7:35, I'm on the number 9 heading towards Bletchley Bus Station, accompanied by a handful of schoolkids (odd that), and already I'm revisiting places I've already done. In fact, by the time we reach The Point I've only added Great Linford and Neath Hill to the list. However, after that I'm heading south for the first time and ticking off the estates at a hell of a rate... at least until the bus gets stuck behind an obviously hopelessly lost council pick-up truck driving around Shenley Lodge at something approaching, but certainly not exceeding, 5mph. Once we get past him, we're on our way again and by the time I reach Bletchley, I've racked up 30 estates already. There's nothing to this bus travel lark, y'know, I'll get to 100 before you know it and be home in time for lunch. At least that's the opinion of a couple of people I've texted with a progress report, mind you it's a bit different when you're sitting in an office getting text messages from some idiot on a bus.
The haunted bus stop.
Water Eaton's a bit of a pain, quite frankly. Because of its location right at the southernmost tip of Milton Keynes, I need to hop on the number 5 for a couple of minutes, jump off again and catch the very next 5 heading in the other direction. It's a bit fiddly, truth be told, but anyway at 8:35, I'm getting off at Drayton Road. Right on schedule. Who was it said the bus network wasn't all that great? Oh yeah, it was me. Anyway, I see the bus stop on the other side of the road and do what any good commuter would do - I cross the road and wait there patiently. Yes I looked both ways before crossing - I laughed at Alvin Stardust's adverts back when I was a kid, but I must still have taken in his words of wisdom, so mission accomplished Mr Stardust. After a couple of minutes, one of the local residents comes up to me and informs me that, despite the bus-sized parking bay and the post with the bus stop sign on it, this stop's been abandoned and I need to make my way over to the other side of the roundabout quick smart. I'd like to thank that bloke for letting me know, I could've been standing there for ages and not been any the wiser. This did, however, mean a brisk walk down the road (and also more than a little dependence on the bus stop not being too far off) was required if I was to stay on track. I could drag out the tension for you by stopping the article here and telling you to tune in next time...
This paragraph is mainly here to fill space.
...but I got to the bus stop in plenty of time. You see, if I'd done that as a cliffhanger you'd have felt really short-changed by the time you found out how the situation resolved itself, so it's a good job I didn't do it. So anyway, the bus turns up and wouldn't you know it, it's the same driver who dropped me off a few minutes earlier! It's a small world we live in and no mistake. The upshot of all this is that I'm now on my way back to Wolverton, and this time the market might be open. That's the downside of all this you see, no time to stop and admire the scenery, even if it is only Milton Keynes, and repeated visits to vast swathes of the town. On the bright side, the bus ticket has already paid for itself quite comfortably, and to be honest ?3 for an unlimited day's travel is a damned good deal when you consider it costs well over a quid just to travel between Central Milton Keynes and Bletchley. I'm getting side-tracked here, though, so I'll get back to the travelling stuff, after all it's the reason you're reading this. At least I hope it is, if you're expecting cookery tips, you're in for a hell of a disappointment.
Combovers and tumbling passengers.
Route number 5 seems, to me anyway, to be MK Metro's favourite. It goes right through the town from top to bottom and spends the vast majority of the time on the grid roads, which makes it lot faster than the other routes. They're also incredibly regular, if you miss one, another one turns up almost straight away. Initially, nothing interesting happens on the bus as it trundles towards Wolverton, but it's not too long before the easily-amused gods of irony point their fingers at an elderly man standing near the front of the bus. As the bus starts negotiating a roundabout, he completely loses his balance and goes crashing to the floor - and the ironic thing here is that this happens just a few seconds after we'd pulled away from the bus stop at... the hospital. Luckily, he seems fine afterwards, if a smidgen surprised and embarrassed in equal measures, so that's OK. A couple of minutes later, another bloke sits down in front of me. Now, I'm no fan of combovers, but this bloke's clearly put the effort into his and by golly it shows. There's some immaculate workmanship on display here and no mistake. Not a single hair is out of place (mind you, there may only have been one on display in the first place, you never can tell), and from a distance it'd look like a perfectly coiffured... combover. On other days, I may never have noticed it, but on days like this you take whatever excitement you can get. It's also on this route that my iPod starts to display a mischievous sense of humour - I'd set it to play random tracks, and as we headed towards Rooksley and Heelands it decides to play Talking Heads' Road To Nowhere. Bit harsh, I reckon, but as it's a good song I'll let it off. Later on, it also plays Public Image Ltd's Seattle - the first two lines are "Don't like the look of this old town, what goes up must come down". Sometimes I think my iPod has a bleaker outlook on life than I do. Still, at least it doesn't have the Style Council's Come To Milton Keynes on its playlist, but that's more than likely because I don't like the Style Council.
Abandoned railway stations and other stories.
I only notice one other thing of interest before I'm back in Wolverton again, and that's as we're going through New Bradwell. Up until 1964, there was a railway line going from Wolverton to Newport Pagnell, and in between the two it also stopped at New Bradwell and Great Linford. As we pass over a bridge, I can still see the abandoned platform that used to be New Bradwell station and the track's still there too, sort of - it's been converted into a redway. Seems daft really that the line closed when it did, if they'd delayed the closure a few more years it would've been within the boundary of the bright, shiny New City and seeing as there's absolutely no rail access in the entire eastern side of the town, somebody might've had the bright idea to keep it open instead. Just a thought mind you, it would've added another two stations to my list, but I could've lived with that. When you consider that London's got around 275 Underground stations, seven seems perfectly manageable. After that, Wolverton beckons and I finally get to see the market in all its glory. Oh dear. Underwhelmed would be one word I'd use to describe it, just a small handful of stalls selling loaves of bread and other selected bric-a-brac. I hope I've caught it on a bad day, but in the meantime I need a drink, it's thirsty work sitting on buses for over three hours you know. Unimpressed by the market, I wander into the Agora Centre and... oh. The shopkeepers do their best with what they have, but when the building itself is as dark and dingy as this there's not a lot you can do to brighten the place up.
You can never see too much of Bletchley.
Anyway, I've got my drink (remember that?) and next on the list for me is the 23 to Bletchley. This is the route I've had the most previous experience of, and it's shaped my opinions of the transport network. It only runs every 20 minutes, and I've had many occasions in the past where the bus has turned up horrendously late or not even bothered to appear at all. To put it mildly, if any route needed some tender loving care, it's this one, and as a result I'm actually expecting this one to run late. It doesn't disappoint, strolling up to the bus stop two minutes behind schedule. Actually, come to think of it I've got a feeling there's something called a "five minute rule" that allows buses to get away with turning up five minutes either side of the advertised time. It's sneaky, but I'm pretty sure it's a genuine rule and I think that means the bus technically isn't late. As for the journey itself, it was pretty uneventful really. I reached the halfway point of the estate count just before 10:00 (pretty sure it was Stantonbury, but after three and a half hours the estates start to blur into one), but apart from that I only noticed two things about the journey. One was that the drivers changed over at Milton Keynes Bus Station - honestly, it's not that long a journey, if your passengers can handle it so should you! Maybe I'm missing something here, but it does look decidedly odd, especially as we've only been travelling for about 20 minutes. The other thing I noticed was an old bloke who got on near the end of the journey. He was immaculately dressed, but as soon as he spoke (and blimey he was loud, although not in a rude way) I heard the voice of Worzel Gummidge. Very strange. Ah well, never mind, I'm in Bletchley now and I've got a few minutes to kill.
Out in the sticks.
When I first moved into Milton Keynes fifteen years ago, I lived in Caldecotte. In those days, there was only a couple of houses there rather than the estate that's there now. The lake was still there, but it was a muddy old trek to get there, in fact I can honestly say I can remember when all that was fields. Now, the reason I'm going on about the "good" old days is because the bus that served the area back then was the 19. It went to the City Centre - eventually - but in the meantime, it meandered about all over the place, visiting most of the estates in the south-eastern corner of the town before ending up at the shops. The route still exists pretty much as it was, but it's now known as the number 8, and today this bad boy's taking me to Westcroft. It's not a very exciting run, but it does get a shedload of estates off the list and that's good enough for me, so once again I'm heading out of Bletchley. This time, instead of heading straight for Central Milton Keynes, it's the scenic route and it has to be said, for a man-made lake Caldecotte Lake looks the business, especially on a glorious sunny day, it's just a shame that after that it's wall to wall houses until we leave Wavendon Gate. Honestly, you don't know the meaning of the phrase "going all around the houses" until you've experienced the number 8 bus. Walnut Tree, Browns Wood, Old Farm Park, Wavendon Gate, all these places seem to merge together after a while. Actually Browns Wood and Old Farm Park really do merge together, but that's beside the point. Nothing of interest really happened on this particular route, although once again, the drivers changed over at the Bus Station (no stamina, these guys), and while we were behind another bus at Milton Keynes Central railway station, I noticed the advert on the back of it. A couple of pandas saying "Carsharing is the only time we get together!" That can't be right, surely. After all, you never see zookeepers appearing on the news saying things like "Well, of course the best way to get pandas together so they can mate is to plonk a Renault 5 in the panda enclosure and put the seats back for them." However, I don't work in a zoo, so for all I know they may have found a new method that works, and it'd certainly explain where all the Renault 5s have gone. Anyway, imagine my surprise when we pulled into Westcroft District Centre a full eight minutes ahead of schedule. So far, the buses have genuinely surprised me. If they've been late, it's only been by a couple of minutes or so, and as things stand my plans are working out beautifully. Of course, that does mean that if something's likely to go wrong now, it's going to go wrong big time, but I don't care right now, it's lunchtime and I fancy a KFC. The buses can wait for an hour.
Woodhill Garden Centre and Trumpton Fire Station.
See that? In the time it's taken for you to get from the last paragraph to this one, a whole hour's gone by. I'd tell you all about my lunch, but I wouldn't want to bore you even more, so for those of you keeping track of how things are progressing, I've done over 75 estates and my next chariot has the number 22 on the front of it. It may sound like a piece of cake, but it's going to be slow work from hereon in. I've done most of the estates I aimed for, it's really just a question of sorting out the ones in the western edge of town and then the original villages of Woughton, Woolstone and Milton Keynes. After that, it's the railway stations and I can go home. That's the plan, at any rate. So, anyway, the bus I'm on now is doing the business for me, taking out almost all of the rest of the west. I don't normally venture round this way, but you can tell how new this bit is - while Coffee Hall and Netherfield are starting to show their age in places (well, comparatively speaking anyway), the houses round here are far more inviting - even HMP Woodhill looks like a garden centre from the outside! I kid you not, if there was a pile of grow-bags next to the entrance with a sign above them saying "BUY ONE GET ONE FREE" I wouldn't have been the least bit surprised. I suspect that the number of plants and shrubs for sale inside would be minimal though, so on we go and before long we're in Grange Farm with its what-was-the-architect-smoking homes. Some of the houses are really impressive, but they're a bit odd to say the least. Mind you, that's nothing compared to Trumpton Fire Station in Great Holm. What a fantastic building! If you show a small kid an office block, chances are he or she won't want to work there when they grow up. Show them the fire station in Great Holm and I bet the first thing they think is "Yes, I want to work there!" purely on the look of the building. It does the job, and it also looks friendly. It also looks utterly ridiculous, but I like it and that's good enough for me.
Just 17A.
Anyway, after Great Holm, it's all been there, done that right through to Kents Hill, aside from a slight detour round the Open University (counted as an estate in its own right because, well, that's what the map does), and this is where it potentially gets tricky. You see, from here, I need to walk from Kents Hill to Middleton, with Monkston in-between, the reason being that I need to catch the 17A if I'm to have any chance of getting Milton Keynes village crossed off the list. As I mentioned earlier, I'd like to tick the village off the list because it's the original (and some would say best) Milton Keynes - unfortunately, as I also mentioned before it's a pig to get to if you're using public transport. Middleton has been built up around the village over the years, and Milton Keynes itself only occupies the centre of the grid square. It's the 17A or bust, basically. It doesn't help that the bus drops me off 7 minutes behind schedule, but a brisk walk never did anyone any harm, well, not unless you're walking across a minefield and anyway, there aren't too many of those in Milton Keynes - this is a modern thinking New City after all. Mind you, eighteen minutes from here to there's cutting it fine, but it's actually going well - with a couple of minutes to go I'm just heading into Middleton, so I check the route map. I knew I'd need it at some point, and this is as good a time as any to check where the bus stop is... except... it's not there. That's interesting. I'm at the right junction, I'm sure of it, but the bus stop that exists on the map doesn't appear to be there in real life. Now, just for a second I'm thinking, "Well, that's peed on my breakfast", but there's always a Plan B. Admittedly, I came up with Plan B after Plan A was shot down in flames, but never mind that, it's a good plan and it'll work. It does mean pegging it down Standing Way to the bus stop over the roundabout - it's on the same route and that's good enough for me. With seconds to spare before the bus is due to arrive, I make it. I decide I'm a genius and while I'm congratulating myself I check the timetable at the bus stop. Oh. That's odd. Says here the 17 stops here, not the 17A. That can't be right, so I check the route map. Yep, look, there's the 17A route, going past Broughton and then going down towards Midd... oh. That's not the 17A after the roundabout, that's the 17. As my plans have rather depended on getting the 17A at Middleton, it's rather galling to discover that not only does it not go where I thought it would thanks to my map-misreading, but that the next 17 (which will go through the estates I was expecting, honest guvnor) is due for almost another hour. If I told you that'd thrown my plans down the toilet and flushed, would you believe me? I've changed my mind, I'm not a genius anymore, I'm a pillock who's stranded himself in Middleton. Arse.
Reproduced with awfully kind permission from MeltingPot Media. ©2007 Simon Darnell.
