Dudley Bus Station & Castle

This is Dudley, birth place of Duncan Edwards, Footballer. Normally by the time I get here I am running late and don't have time to stand around taking photos but on Monday I didn't have a pick up in Wolverhampton so I got here with time to spare. This shot was the only one to include the Castle so this is the one you get.

The week before I didn't get to Dudley or Wolverhampton, instead I ended up in Leeds. It's a long time since I have been to Leeds and I hope it is a long time before I go back. Sorry Leeds nothing against the place, I am sure it is a fine city with lots of wonderful people but it is an extra 2 hours 30 mins drive each way which makes it a long two days. Even Stagecoach didn't work me that hard.

The Road to Hell........................

Yet an other story from the local paper. The council have managed to get an extra £590 000 out of the Government to pay for “free” bus travel for us over sixties. Central government can be generous when it wants to be. Shame it wasn’t generous on this occasion. Over half a million quid not generous I hear you ask. No, it’s mean, it’s also going to course a reduction in childrens services that are provided by the council and will in time bugger up our local bus services and lead to job losses in an area that has the an extremly high unemployment level as it is. The sum mentioned above is to go towards the cost of next years “free” bus travel. So this year we are still £2 million down.

I am sure Gordon Brown didn’t intend this mess when he came up with the idea of “free” bus travel but it does need sorting out before serious damage is done.

Stagecoach Do Have CCTV on Their Buses and Bus Stations

A footnote to a recent post regarding a story in the Herald Express. The story was about a young pregnant woman who claimed she had been humiliated and devastated when she was first berated by the driver of the bus she was travelling on and then forced to pay £5.00 to clean up after she had been sick on the bus. She had also claimed that she had been so upset that she had left the bus before getting to her destination.

CCTV cameras spotted her actually getting of the bus in Paignton Bus Station, two stops after the alleged incident. She was seen laughing and talking to other people, hardly the action of someone who had just been through the immensely disturbing ordeal she had discribed on the front page of the local paper.

Gone at Last; no sorry.

Look at this picture and look at the header picture. What's missing? Got it in one. Sorry but it is only a temporary gap in the scenery, it will be back in February. One passer by expressed the hope that it had blown away in the recent high winds with Nick Bye desperately hanging on to the tethering rope trying to keep his baby in the Bay. No chance, it was loaded on a trailer to be taken away and spend the winter in a shed somewhere. The balloon not the mayor.

Now if you live in the area and read the local paper (there is a link on this page somewhere) you will have read about the bus driver who charged a pregnant lady £5 after she was sick on his bus. Stagecoach have no policy of charging anyone for being sick on their buses and a driver is most unlikely to try and implement such a policy on his own. If he did I expect he would be joining the growing crowd round the door to the Jobseekers office. For a fiver? I doubt that. I think there has been a little bit of a misunderstanding here that will all be sorted out with the passing of time.

If I hear anymore, that I can publish, I will keep you posted.

Still Alive, just a bit lethargic.

Been an odd ten days, mostly with minor and a couple of major things going wrong. Here are the minor problems. First the cats, who have eaten the same cat food without a word of complaint for months both decided to stage a hunger strike. The local pet store doesn't sell the other kind of dry food I know they will eat so after watching them slowly waste away, starring at me with mournful, accusing eyes for two days I gave up and took a bus ride to Paignton for a 2 kg bag of Science Plan for old cats. Couple of spoonfuls down and they got through it like a couple of demented vacuum cleaners on speed. A result. Then a few hours later, time for next meal they both just walked away and started looking through the phone book for the phone number of the RSPCA. Now they are eating Whiskers with about 4 kg of dry food going mouldy in the cupboard.

Then my partner's phone got bust so a new phone was needed. As he is going to the US of A next year that meant a triband phone. At least the new phone, a Nokia is better than the old Samsung. But there was the setting up the ring tones and transferring the new number back to the old number and all the contacts to be entered. Then the central heating stopped working so the engineer had to come round and make those noises all heating and car repair people make exactly 15 seconds after looking at the offending machine. The hissing sound that is produced by sucking in air through the teeth. I actually know someone who was thrown out of the central heating engineering school because he couldn't make that sound.

Then I was out taking photos and I showed someone how to switch the camera to store the photos in something called RAW. I then went on and took about 40 photos still in RAW. Now taking photos in RAW and processing them on the computer is time consuming, especially when I haven't the vaguest idea how to do the processing. None of the photos was all that special so I ended up deleting them just to save my sanity.

When I go up to the West Midlands I drop off at Oldbury, Dudley, Wolverhampton, Wednesbury and Walsall and on Monday on my way back I pick up at the above in reverse order. Well this Sunday morning I had been talking to an other coach driver and he was telling me he had just come back from a trip to the Lake District. His first pick up had been in Plymouth, then Plympton, Ivybridge, South Brent, Totnes, Paignton, Torquay, Kingskerswell, Newton Abbott and Exeter. Must have taken forever. I had a good snigger at his misfortune, silly me. Now as I am going up to the W Midlands I don't know exactly where I will be picking up until I meet up with a company minibus at Frankley Services on the M5. The driver of the minibus takes some of my passengers and gives me the next day's passenger list. As well as the 5 mentioned above there were two extra, Stafford and Cannock, neither of which I had been to before. So I spent some little time Sunday evening on the coach programming the satnav to these places. The satnav doesn't have batteries but has to be plugged in. Walsall was already in the memory (big mistake). I got to Stafford on time but this meant leaving the hotel before breakfast is served, sad. Then click on Cannock and there on time as well. Click on Walsall. The mad box told me to take the 3rd exit at a roundabout. As I went round the bend I notice a sign A34 Walsall. But on my left was a petrol tanker so no sudden change of plan in that direction. Behind was a 38 tonne HGV and on my right were a line of cars about 3 cms apart all doing 50 mph and heading for the same exit as me so I couldn’t go round the roundabout and take the A34 for Walsall like common sense suggested. No, this little black box was sending me to the Walsall Bye Pass, also known as the M6 and this section of the M6 is the most crowded road in the whole of Western Europe. As it took 5 miles to get there with no way to turn round except go round the roundabout at the motorway I made my next mistake and went onto the M6. 5.6 miles to my turn of. Forty minutes it took. And people round here moan when it takes 15 minutes to get through Kingskerswell.

Cat Dies Due To Lack of Cash

Lack of cash sinks council's Tor Bay fast ferry plan
From the Herald Express
Saturday, October 17, 2009, 07:00

PLANS for a fast ferry service across Tor Bay have been put on the back burner by the cash-strapped council which now says it is not a priority.

Proposals were unveiled in 2007 for the half-hourly sea shuttle service between Torquay and Brixham.

Bus operator Stagecoach trialled the passenger service last summer, and said more than 30,000 used the catamaran in a month.

But the scheme could cost £5million, including improvements to the jetty at both ends and the cost of the boat itself.

Torbay deputy mayor Cllr Chris Lewis said the scheme was not on the council's priority list and informal approach was recently made to the Regional Development Agency for cash backing but the answer was no.


So everyone will have to either catch the Western Lady (30mins, ten times a day) or the number 12 (40mins, 98 times a day)

Blog Action Day is on Thursday

Blog Action Day is when bloggers around the world write something on their blog to make us all go out and do something to help Save The Planet.

This is my contribution.

Personally I think the people living on this planet a couple of generations from now are screwed. Now adays there are just too many of us wanting more and more and still have almost no regard for what is going to happen by the time the more serious effects of climate change take place. Why should we, we'll all be dead. Scientist are predicting a 90 cm rise in sea levels by the end of the century. 90 cm is 3 feet in imperial measure. When I stand any where along the sea front in Torquay at high tide it doesn't look like an other 3 feet will actually come over the sea wall so why will it bother me and why should I be bothered if it does in 90 years. They can always build the wall a bit higher.

The same scientists are predicting wilder weather with hotter summers and stormier winters. I can manager that.

I read in the papers that China and India both have booming economies and the populations there, almost one third of the world’ people are finally about to join the First World. The First World has so much food that a noticeable percent gets thrown away in the garbage every week, The First World wants, and in many places has two or three cars parked outside the front door. And, if one of those cars is old enough the government will pay you to throw it away and buy a new one. I’m guilty myself (one a smaller scale). I bought a cheap mobile phone but didn’t like it. So I went out and bought an other mobile phone. It’s too easy to do.

The First World uses enormous amounts of power to run the various electrical goods we can no longer manage with out. This computer for instance. The fridge, the two freezers, the washing machine, the toaster, the microwave, the oven, the electric kettle, the central heating system, the Hi Fi system, the portable CD player I don’t use because I have an iPod and an iPod Shuffle, the TV, the DVD player the V+ Box the phone and it’s answering machine, the mobile phones and their chargers, the printer, the computer sound system, the vacuum cleaner the electric grass cutter, the electric shower, the shaving light and finally the eclectic toothbrush. Sorry nearly forgot, the camera uses batteries. Oh yeah, the electric door bell. And two bedside radios, one has only FM and had to be replaced with digital. 60 years ago when I was a young child the only electrical goods we had in our house in Manchester were a wireless and ten light bulbs. The Third World is going to want that lot and all the new goodies coming on line everyday.

The First World is run by elected politicians who wish to stay in power, that is get re elected so they aren’t going to try and pass measures to curb the above excesses in their own populations because they wont get re elected. And they have no power or even the cheek to say to Third World countries around the world “No sorry. We’ve had all the fun and will continue to do so but you have to stay in the Dark Ages for the sake of the human race.”( And a whole lot of animals and plants as well.)

So it isn’t lack of knowledge about climate change that will screw us and a whole lot of animals and plants but a lack of interest. One example, a bit of an interest of mine at the moment. The government here in the UK decide to provide free bus travel to the over 60s. They promised that it would be funded out of government money and neither the councils running the scheme at local level nor the bus companies would end up any better or worse off. My local council is already down by millions and the local bus company also complain they aren’t getting enough, they appealed to government to get more money than the council gave then. Central government refuse to acknowledge that there is a problem in the way money is allocated to local councils so we are still short.

Short enough to have to start making cuts in council services and make people redundant so they can pay the bus companies the money due to them for carrying all us lucky over 60s for free. Soon the council will have made all the cuts they can and if they make any more staff redundant the councillors themselves will have to go out and collect the rubbish bins . So they will have to tell the bus company there is only half the money they asked for. So what will the bus company do? It will cut bus services, it has no other choice. Less buses equals more cars on the roads. More cars on the roads, more greenhouse gases to reflect all that heat back to earth.

Is that what central government want or have they even bothered to work it out. I go for a lack of bother myself. In how many other areas and in how many other governments and big commercial institutions is the same lack of bother evident? Is it hardly surprising that so many ordinary people in the street while expressing concern about climate change feel there isn’t much that can be, or will be, done to save the planet.

This is why we are screwed.

PS The planet will still be here in a couple of thousand years when climate change has done its worst and the weather starts to settle down again. It will be seriously short of many of the animals and plants that used to grace it but don't worry Charles Darwin will wave his magic wand and in time (millions of years) all will be restored.