BACK WITH IT WEEBLY HAD A WOBBLY

The site has been quite good of late but last night rushing to get out for a meal everything on it was having problems such as adding the Trafford Park truck DVD to the shop and as you will have noticed doing the blog. Anyway all is well at our end and we had a super meal out with Kath and Keith, Emma and Phil and vowed to repeat it in January. We were up sharp this morning and off down to start our bus filming at Redditch. Despite the rush hour all was fairly good through the traffic, Redditich is a really weird sort of place born of a poorly thought out new town policy and other than a ring road and the old bit of town and market that is left it is a maze of roundabouts and modern ghetto shopping malls. This all makes getting a coffee and cake hard so Mandy just waited until I'd finished but with the second destination as Stourbridge we don't fair much better there, I've never seem any trace of a town centre, there surely must be onme but the traffic just seems to flow around in an endless stream and if you stick with it long enough you get to the station.

On the bus front Redditich is very much all Diamond Rotala services, not an operater I'd enthuse about and some of their buses were frankly both rough looking and rough sounding, just one Stagecoach decker passed through, a few Johnsons from Stratford direction , two or three perhaps minor operators but nothing like the variety it once provided. Stourbridge and the sun was coming out although not particularly welcome, I managed OK and had my first exposure to the new National Express West Midlands red livery.

What an awful colour it is almost crimson looks terrible on film and just what connection has it got with Birmingham . A good bit of variety here and some very frequent services, the 9 to Birmingham with the new buses seemed to run about every 4 minutes very commendable although is that sustainable I wonder. With no cafe in sight we headed back home and encountered Friday afternoon crawling on the M6 back up in Staffs and Cheshire, by now the sun was well out. Temp ranged about 4-5c and little wind but rain expected and turning to snow on high ground for tomorrow Saturday. Home tomorrow then joining my sister Sue and Graham for lunch with some of their family all at Northampton on Sunday.

I'm editing todays film and I'll be posting clips on the 8mm standard cine as time4 permits. A fresh supply of mini dv tapes arrived today so I can keep the momentum up, hopefully there will be more gems as I got stuck in the mundane rubbish on yesterdays session.