There have been a number of interesting new bus services registered recently, some in competition with others, some to cater for new oft-asked links, and some to cater for demands following the introduction of free off-peak bus travel in England for the elderly and disabled. I’ve picked two English ones, which I feel warrant adding to my journal.

Stagecoach Cambridge have registered a new Service 8 to link central Cambridge, Newmarket Road, Fen Ditton, Horningsea, and Waterbeach, starting on Tuesday 27th May – see here for the announcement. At the moment, this link is also catered for by Whippets Service 196, which runs weekday peaks and one return shopping hours journey only. Stagecoach will run two peak time journeys, and an hourly off-peak service, but these have been carefully timed to avoid overlapping with the 196 (so it would seem). The 8 is timed to provide two buses an hour to Cambridge from Waterbeach, with Services 9 and citi2 providing the other journeys. Before the 196 was won on tender by Whippet from Cambridgeshire CC, the service was provided by Cambus years ago as 150, so not too much old ground.

Secondly, and maybe a little bit out of my usual scope, but this one has been already mentioned before (see ‘Meet Dennis’ thread!) Transdev Harrogate & District have introduced a new Service X54 from York to Harrogate, entirely commercially, with two new low-floor buses. Now, the service (which has it’s own webpage) has only been around for a week (started Monday 28th April), and their marketing manager Paul H has been keeping me informed of it’s progress so far.

Monday - First (proper (after 0930)) journey from Harrogate left with 35… first journey from York carried 23…
Tuesday - first came in from York full… first from Harrogate had to leave 18 at Knaresborough…
Wednesday - we’ve so far duplicated two journeys out of Harrogate…

Of it’s success, Paul says “At the moment we're thinking maybe it's a mixture of the novelty factor of the English National travel concession scheme passes AND the new service together with some pretty good marketing (of course…), but the weather's been pretty mixed this week and its still carried loads.” So, this weekend may well prove to be very interesting…

It’s a fairly nice day in Royston today – 20 degrees when we went out earlier to Tesco. We took the old digibox back, as we’ve gone through several recently (all seem to have a hard drive problem), and also returned the DVD recorder. The latter had been barely used, but seemed to like going back in time by an hour or ten. After returning the pair, and selecting a new Thomson digibox (with larger built-in hard drive amongst other goodies) and shopping for the week, we were still six pounds up on when we left the house! (Sometimes it’s good to buy things before a price crash… especially if the items also crash…)

Anyway, while browsing the milk aisle, this woman came up to us, and we started talking. Turned out she appeared to feel oppressed over her own sexuality, and she’d only told this to a handful of her closest friends (fearing the worst from religious friends if she told the rest of them!).  She initially completed us on how we looked, somewhat good-looking femme/masculine* she thought at the beginning, but I think she was trying not to use labels, and she was all very polite about it all. Very nice person, who (as we were walking away) came back, and thanked us for giving her acceptance today.

Right, got to get on with this Forum move… here goes nothing, we’ve stocked up on cold and sparklings! Feel free to keep refreshing this page, to see how it goes!

(* I can’t spell the word that she did use, and the spell checker doesn’t seem to find it either).

The ABF board move is now complete... took a total of 21 minutes!