Melton Mowbray

Over the recent months I have spent a lot of time traveling though and waiting for buses at Melton Mowbray. It was just a town before I never really thought much about before. It was just a place I popped to now and again when I needed stores like Argos and alike, but once you start looking there is so much more if you take the time to look. The town has a twice weekly market, a the famous "Ye Olde pork Pie Shop", the home of Stilton Cheese, some beautiful architecture of various styles and relaxing parkland. Here are a few of the many pictures I have captured on my phone:

The Anne of Cleves Public House and beautiful St Mary's Church

Setting up the Market the twice weekly on early on a Tuesday Morning

The Market Square in Melton Mowbray 

Home of the world famous Pork Pie that bares the towns name

One of the small streets leading to the Market Square

Melton Mowbrays refurbished 1930's Art Deco Cinema

Small green near St Mary's Church that seems untouched by the years

The beautifully kept Town Estates park in the center of Melton Mowbray 

Personally I think the town is completely underrated by many that live there and around the town. There far more to see if one just has the time to look. For example the normal church of St. Mary's is stunning in the summer with the light streaming through the stain glass windows and a real testament of faith of the people that built it in 12th to 15th century without the modern building aids of today. Them at the other end of time a 1930's Art Deco Cinema still delighting audiences today as it did when it first opened with it friendly atmosphere that makes seeing a films so much more enjoyable than some faceless multi screen. If you are passing through this market town, do stop and take a look.

Bus Travel (Centrebus)

Having had to use the buses in Rutland and the surrounding counties for the last few months, I thought it would be good to give my opinion of the service they offer the local community and my thoughts on bus travel. 

 

Let's start by saying what they not, they are not the fastest way to get about. They tend to take an age to get from A to B just by the fact they don't take a direct route and they stop all the time. They are not a public service as the majority of routes are run by private companies for profit and profit alone, as subsidies have been with drawn my councils in order to save money.  

The company I use is Centrebus not the biggest bus company in the country but the only one in the Rutland area. Over the years it has grown and taken over most of it family run competitors and now runs there services. Like most peoples impressions of Bus companies I should imagine my views on the company are mixed. The front line staff like the drivers are pleasant and generally helpful but the staff at the customer services side of the company at head office are unhelpful but never rude. 

Surprisingly it is a reliably method of transport on the whole, buses generally turn up within 5 minutes of the alloted time even at a rural bus stop and normally arrive at their destination on time. I wouldn't say you could set your watch by them but they do a good job on our busy roads. On just two occasions I have been delayed over 30 minutes and both of those were due to a breakdown. In both cases replacement buses arrived to take us on our way. They far better than breaking down in a car and waiting for the AA to arrive.

Ticket prices do seem high for short journeys, but I should imagine that is universal in the bus industry, you can pay one way £1.50 to travel 2 miles with a journey time of less than 10 minutes. However the further you travel once you have hit the maximum fare the better the value especially if you use return tickets which have a maximum fare of £6.30. For example you can travel from Nottingham to Peterborough and back with a through return ticket for £6.30, a journey of some 56 miles, which is great value for money.

Of course there are other ticketing options available to you like session tickets but these tend to limit you to a single route or are based on area. The latter aren't much use particular in Rutland. However if you need to use more than one bus there are some great deals out there if you know where to get them from. There a whole series of Network tickets that allow unlimited bus travel on the Centrebus network. These tickets can be brought from a day to a month.  It best to by the one day and three day products on the bus, other tickets such as the weekly and monthly tickets are available through Payzone (not avoid the three day Payzone ticket which is more expensive).

Being able to get a bus when you need one and timetabling is always going to be an issue with bus transport, especially since the demise of local authority subsidies caused by the capping of spending imposed by the Conservative government on councils. This can been seen in the bus timetables with cuts to later services that aren't so popular, although in many case still provide an essential service for those going to and from work, and example of this is the removal of 1830 service between Melton and Oakham, which led me writing letters and emails to the bus company, the County Council and my MP (who was as helpful as he could be).

Waiting time between connecting buses can be appalling. The people responsible for drawing up the timetables on seem to consider journeys from A to B, rather than journeys from A to C via B. This is a big issue for example a journey between Oakham and Grantham, there being no direct bus, takes nearly 2 hours because of at worse a waiting time of 50 minutes plus at Melton. If the waiting time was just a mere 10 minutes that journey time is reduced to about 1 hour fifteen minutes even in the Grantham rush hour. Another problem is the bus station at Oakham where all the buses seem to leave and arrive on the hour. Although there aren't that many buses using it but there is enough to cause a bus jam at the bus station meaning buses don't always leave or arrive at the right bus stop. This needs looking at and it is a problem that could have a better solution than is currently implemented.

Centrebus buses are clean although they are a little uncomfortable on the country roads. The suspension tends to be hard and so are the seats which doesn't make for a good combination. It not so much the bus company that is at fault here it is the design of the buses themselves and is true of both the newer and older buses they use. In the summer the buses could do with air conditioning like you find on buses in continental Europe as they can get warm and stuffy especially when they are not moving or moving slowly through town.

One nice thing about bus travel is that it is relaxing. They not much you can do on a bus other than read, listen to music or play on your phone. It just breaks up the working day and lets you unwind. What I do with the long waits between buses is look around the shops or maybe have a coffee in one of the many coffee shops and small cafes in Melton. This helps make the waiting a pleasant experience  rather than a core.

In general the bus service for a rural area is very good in Rutland especially if you compare it to the services offered to rural communities in the Grantham area for example. There are some oddities which don't seem to make sense, like the empty tourist bus which runs around Rutland Water everyday all year long. To me it would make better sense to just run the service at weekends and during the summer and put the money to better use on the main services. There is no direct service from Oakham to either Leicester or Grantham, two major employment areas where people can find work. Finally there is a set of late buses that people don't seem to be using, these need looking into if to find out if they are a good use money to provide subsidised services.

Beutiful Weather

This year it actually feels like summer after the disappointing summers of recent years. The sun has been high in the skies and the temperatures have been raising in to the upper twenties and better still it has been like that for day after day for a while now and with it have come stunning sunsets.

It just what I think we all need to banish away the winter blues and the wet spring that followed to drown our spirits. I know the girls are enjoying it and seeing the sun is enough to make most people smile. Feels like it hasn't been like this for years. Let's hope it carries on and on.

Just one of those days

In life you have good days and bad. Some that remember and some that you would rather forget. The feelings of both types of days tend to stick with you as do the reasons for those feelings. Sometimes it can be happy events and sometimes events of great loss. For whatever reasons we have days we remember more than most and more often and not those feelings are about things or people that matter to us in some way.

For me this time of year is full of those feelings and although I can think of some happy events the one that sticks out in my mind is of the later kind. Although I could talk about it here, maybe this isn't the place or the time, except to say it was something that hurt and changed my life and loss I will never forget or stop regretting. It was one of those changing points in life where you find yourself lost on a road you never believed or expected you would be on, and in my case one I didn't want to go down. You wished you said something and did more than you did. The affect of this change in direction was like being hit by a bus and being left asking question after question about what went on before and to which I still don't have complete answers.

So why am I writing this, well I'm not sure it just one of those days I guess, one that was important and where I lost something special that can't be replaced. Just one of those days.

Start of the Holidays

Always find this a strange time of the year for many reasons, some of them personal and not so good and some of more to do with work not so bad, but despite my mixed feelings it is the start of the summer holiday for many children around the country. For them it is a happy time of the year and full of freedom and fun, especially so in the countryside.

Living here means are free to roam and have fun were it is relatively safe from the pressures of city or town life and moving here is the one thing in life I won't regret, because I believe, although city life can be fun for adults, it is not the place to naturally bring up children. Children need room to grow and discover things for themselves, not to be told that it not safe to move out of sight of your front door even with their friends. They also need to understand the world and where things come from and have time to slow down in this modern world. Life outside the city gives them this opportunity outside their door step to leave the laptop screen, tablet, or games machine and see the real world.

For me it means, no more buses to work and maybe a chance that I can write some posts for the blog for a change. It defiantly needs it and it has suffered in recent years so some post would be sure to improve it. 

I hope you enjoy the summer and if you are in a city just take the time to take children out to the countryside and let them run free. All children deserve that and not the life that living in large estates of houses in cities and towns that many of us have contend with.