Recalling a packed five day trip to southern England which will go down as one of the highlights of the summer of 2018.
Tempus is fugiting all right. The thermostat has switched on the central heating for the last two mornings as northern England accustoms itself once more to the summers we know and love (wet, windy and cold). At the same time, we’ve been home a week from our little jaunt round the country and I have not written it up.
My excuse is that the time has been occupied by other things, especially matters financial as the company accounts deadline looms. Also been working on transport matters (aka trying to earn a bit of living still), and trying to make some progress on my next novel – though whether 2,500 words in a week counts as real progress is a matter for debate.
So, the trip: the centrepiece was last Saturday, when we went to Imberbus. We took the opportunity of being in the south to make a visit to Chichester for the theatre festival and also managed a quick trip to Hove for lunch.
We stopped en route each way in Warwickshire (three to three and a half hours driving is about our limit for one day these days), so Walton Hall is a good staging post. In between all this, we also managed visits to Petworth House ad to Salisbury Cathedral.
It proved to be a delightfully social weekend as well, as we managed two lunches and two dinners with friends, whilst the event at Imber provided another ideal opportunity to catch up with bus industry friends and acquaintances.
The theatre visits were to the new production of the musical Me and My Girl which was just finishing its run, and to Copenhagen, Michael Frayn’s fascinating three-hander that centres on a 1941 meeting between the physicists Werner Heisenberg and Neils Bohr. Two very contrasting pieces, both fascinating in their own way, not only as entertaining shows, but also as mirrors on today’s world and what we have become.
I’ve written a longer piece about the musical and hope to add one about Michael Frayn’s play shortly.
From Chichester, we travelled across to Warminster in Somerset on the Saturday morning, checking into an historic town centre pub before heading off to the Imber event.
Imber is a village on Salisbury Plain that was requisitioned during the Second World War as part of the US Army’s training grounds for the run-up to D-Day in June 1944. It has never been given back, and remains inside the British Army’s training area, parts of which are opened up a few days each year to the public.
On one of those days, every year since 2009, a bus service is operated from Warminster to various locations inside the training area, including the wonderfully named Brazen Bottom, New Zealand Farm Camp and Imber itself, also linking with other villages such as Market Lavington and Chitterne. A specially designed timetable means that all destinations can be reached from the others by interchanging at Gore Cross.
The routes – a properly constituted, licensed local bus service – are operated for the most part by vintage London ‘Routemaster’ buses, fully staffed by traditional conductors and with properly set destination blinds. Modern ‘New Routemasters’ from London offer the required accessibility component.
All receipts on the day are donated to local charities, and it brings hundreds of visitors into the area – not usually a tourist hotspot – to view the beautiful countryside and the outstanding views that are to be had.
When I was still with the UK Bus Awards, we were delighted to be able to offer the organisers a special commendation at the 2017 ceremony for their work placing local buses at the heart of the community. It was really good to see it all in practice, and to see that their commendation was richly deserved – it was altogether a delightful occasion.