DID SOMEONE REALLY DESIGN NORTHAMPTON BUS STATION

Each time I see one of these new wave of bus stations it beggars belief that someone actually had a toddlers learn how to draw by easy stages kit and it was their 3 year old toddlers first attempt that the jokingly took into work that was selected as the winning design. The list is really too long to go into in detail but the Mansfield one has too tight a turns the Stoke one is just too small and has no room for layovers, Chatham seems to do its job fine but Northampton defies any sense of reality and perhaps the piss poor performance of the architect's young child has resulted in several casualties well at least it did today when a local taxi driven by I can't say but you can guess ploughed into a van through the chicane which is at the exit from the bus station, he was being cut out of his vehicle. Now I'm sure that they drivers of the vehicles were partly to blame, to my mind 10 miles an hour would be as fast as I would want to negotiate that ben but it was interesting to note that the pile of tatty barriers and sand bags opposite the exit must have been in response to some previous mishap, now they are shouting at pedestrians and herding them like cattle at an auction when they should have made the area a shared space and forced the buses, taxis and delivery vans to crawl through safely and why should the pedestrians always be penalised on the road. The accident this afternoon gave the Stagecoach staff there chance to excel and instantly gave vent to their little Hitler complex and shouted and balled at everyone with more panic than the IRA bomb that wrecked the centre of Manchester caused.

What is it about Stagecoach that staff and drivers seem to be such bin end and barrel scrapings, obviously there are many super employees but it isn't these that you remember. Anyway one crash and the centre of the town was at a standstill although thankfully the exit from the bus station cleared the roadblock and most routes could more or less continue although at the bottom by the plusher part of town there was a whole tail back of buses trying to decide what to do for the best. Northampton is home to my sister and family so I suppose I should go a bit easy by really there is little that a nuclear bomb couldn't rearrange very well. They all talk as if it were the east end or was it East Enders, English is a minority language and really just built on the awful place we visited earlier in the day, Leicester. If the nuclear bomb could be carefully placed so as to zap the two places it would indeed be a great economy for I'm sure that they don't come cheap except the Lydlls bombs which are have the price of well know branded ones. I managed to spill the dregs of he tea this morning on the hallway carpet, we though we had it cracked but had to get the cleaner etc out when we got back. I'm now burning the second of the Shropshire archives covering 1998/99. I may even get another volume done later this evening, there certainly doesn't seem to be much on TV unless you are a frustrated child with a Dr Who syndrome.

At Leicester I did get shots of the single decker tramway commemorative bus but the cream deckers escaped still and video as the camera case fell off, I was looking for the retaining screw as it drove off never to be seen again.We got ripped off in a cafe which was run by a type of person that we can't mention but we don't get many in Lower Peover, said they had a toilet then took our money for breakfast and said it was broken, asked for money back but he wasn't playing nicely, ost £5.10 before we even got going, it was a long walk for Mandy but we made it to the safety of Marks & S. When we got home the new models from Oxford diecast were waiting for me, in Stobarts early livery an old DAF and then a slightly less ancient Leyland DAF, I never saw these in advance listing on their site, they are both very nice models and I'm sure they will sell out pretty quickly. We never seem to get surprise bus models just like that!