the means of escape (part 1)

Despite the unsettling smell (dead animals, probably from the abattoir on Monks Road) and the general nasty grimy feel of bus stations everywhere (except the replacement one they built in Edinburgh but give it a few more years and it'll be as manky as the rest) there was a palpable sense of adventure in my air today when, for the first time ever, I stepped off a public service bus in Lincoln after first stepping onto it in Woodhall Spa.

Buses never really featured as a popular form of local public transport during the twelve years I spent in the area; childs from outlying villages would be transported to the primary school in the village by school buses and my seven years of secondary schooling in Horncastle featured daily conveyancing by means of Woodhall's only known escape-bus, a once-daily (twice on market days) service run by Appleby's Travel which ran the eight-mile route from Kirkstead Bridge to Horncastle market square via Roughton and the little road alongside the school on West Street. For the person determined to travel further there were additional services available from Horncastle to exciting locations such as Louth, Skegness and Lincolnshire but direct travel from Woodhall was distinctly limited. Once when I and some colleagues travelled to London for a Bob-gig we had to be given a lift to Boston to get the National Express to King's Cross and there were occasionally buses and coaches from the village to other places though they were generally chartered vehicles for school trips. I was most surprised to be informed by my parents of the strange new hourly services to Boston and Lincoln in the years since I moved away. Last year when popping Lincolnshirewards to collect parents to travel to Stansted to meet my sister to fly to Munich Nicky and I managed to travel all the way down by public transport (though not without a couple of changes and mis-haps and delays of several hours) including the Lincoln-Woodhall bus (which took less time than it takes to drive in a car even though we detoured through Nocton) but I had never bus-ly arrived until today.

Once or twice (for some reason) I can remember getting the train to or from Metheringham (the nearest station) though this still required car-travel from Metheringham to house. Most journeys to Lincoln involved being driven there by parents in the car every sixth or seventh Saturday to buy things to replenish the freezer and get whatever other things people required which could not be obtained in either the village or the nearby Horncastle; though everyday items were available it was only the larger food-shops of Lincoln which could supply rarer things such as the original (and nice) recipe chcocolate-flavour Crusha milkshake syrup (before the pissed around with the order of Potassium Sorbate and Potassium Citrate in the ingredients in 1996 and buggered the taste forever), audio cassettes (technically available in Woolworths in Horncastle but only if you were happy to listen to the top twenty singles), books (I can remember happily sniggering all the way home after getting Long Dark Tea-Time and attempting to explain why someone with a disease whereby they know what Dustin Hoffman is going to say a second or two before he says it was preventing me from breathing), school trousers, shirts and shoes (nice wide Pork Pie style for my junior shovel-feet) and anything else which exceeded the level of sophistication provided by nearby towns.

Sadly the music shop where I bought my guitar (and the others I looked around in) disappeared shortly before the turn of the century (having no chequebook or debit card I had to withdraw the cash from the building society then walk through the town feeling extremely suspicious), the second-hand record shops where I purchased the odd bit of Marillion on vinyl for the excellent sleeves have all gone,
the strange junk shop where some colleagues once bought a speaker for their PA which consisted of a crudely-made wooden box onto which the shiny plastic Fender logo from an amp had been crudely glued is no more and the bicycle museum was removed shortly after we visited on a school trip from primary school but the town is much the same shape as it always was and a few favoured shops (J. Birkett for your strange electronic-surplus needs and Readers' Rest near the top of Steep Hill for top-quality second-hand books (though not, the gits, on Wednesday afternoons)) are still present along with more inexplicable presences such as the god-bothering chippy. Although a fairly limited destination compared to my current home city Lincoln was at least far superior to the equidistant-from-home Boston, the equivalent weekend-shopping destination of choice for many neighbours and peers. Although it was within easy cycling-distance the sheer mentalism of Lincolnshire's driving population (the county was the road traffic fatality capital of England for several years running) made cycling along the long, straight fen roads distinctly risky to the extent that hitching was almost safer (though after walking the eighteen miles to and from the city once or twice when no-one would give me a lift I stopped trying) and driving was the favoured technique when we started to get our licences and fancied wasting time and money at the weekend.