SATURDAY'S BUS COVERAGE CONFIRMED

Whilst not exactly the best weather forecast we have heard for a bank holiday it looks as if we'll be able to salvage something from the wreckage of a typical British summer, I know down south they had plenty of hot weather, up North it was more like a week or so and we want our fair share so there. We'll be starting off in Leicester which has seen a lot of changes to the fleets and is usually interesting and seldom produces negative responses when filming, our own video coverage started there in 1998 I think and of course that was predated by still camera days although not all the negs survive from the earliest days as i exchanged and gave away quite a few decades ago, silly me. Talking of which we do still welcome donations of stills negs or cine film which we can put on DVD. The days of cine are long gone but we can inject new life in it and are presently working on three volumes of cine derived material covering the trams of Japan. It's stalled at present penind someone jumping in via Youtube to identify the remaining sequences. I'll hold off loading more until we get past volume one.

This hasn't held up our UK video bus archive work and I'm just taking the clips off our new Shropshire volume covering 1990-97 with shots at Shrewsbury, Ludlow,Telford and Oswestry. Remarkable looking back at how old it now feels nearly a quarter of a century on, I know the many enthusiasts in the region will be wanting too see the brief clips loaded on Youtube tonight which act as trailers for the event. I'm also downloading the list of 'Irish' programmes which Mandy will be picking out of the stock and taking with prints of my Irish stills to the new Dublin Port rally - only a couple of paste tables worth this time but if successful we shall bring the complete stand next year including yours truly! It was very hectic at work today in the lead up to the holiday weekend which is complicated by the fact that our friends in Aberdeen have already had their August holiday weekend at the beginning of the month. After covering Leicester tomorrow I tread cautiously into Northampton which has been the scene of nasty run ins with both security scum and police barrel scrapings.

Last night we had a splended evening at the Horse and Jockey in Chorlton ( great food and beer), Manchester where we met up with Tony O'Mahoney at the Southern Cemetery to relate Mandy's Hardy family tales to actual grave sites of family and provide Tony with more anecdotes for his renowned history and nature tours of the cemetery which boats quite a wide range of birds. Tony also furnished me with an almost complete set of the Catonsville Road Runner magazine which I helped produce for a while back in the early 1970s in my hippy era. Actually I thought they looked a tiny bit better than I remembered and were quite a curiosity looking at them with the benefit of hindsight. Parkfield Free School featured , I taught there for a while, there is no official history of that venture or the roadrunner which hopefully i may be able to persuade Tony to rectify.I was also able to catch up on some of the stories surrounding people who passed through the Brundetts Road community in the era . Strangely some of the organisations of the that time such as collectives left long term headaches for people as the groups split up and left legacies of tangled legal webs around ownerships of properties etc. Well enough rambling, a few more clips to download of Shropshire and then I'll start volume two and post the first on our shop. I may be tempted to offer miserable weather weekend offers on EBay. This means we end up with Shropshire photos tonight.