THE WEEKEND IN KENT - WET

other than Portsmouth quite a local flavour to my first selection from Herne Bay yesterday

Well that another hectic weekend behind us, the trip down to Kent on Saturday morning went well and I was set up filming at Chatham just after 9am. I must say that Chatham as ever proved to be a very friendly place with every driver ( bar 1) waving and thumbs up, stopping, posing and chatting to various degrees. Several reports of my visit preceded our Herne Bay rally attendance on Sunday. After Chatham where the warmth of the welcome made up for bus interest save for Nu Venture titans. In Canterbury we may as well have been on a different planet. The most unfriendly ( except some notable good drivers) place you could imagine, in a year it had really gone off the boil and it drizzled continuously. One woman driver gave me a slagging off, couldn't I find something better to do with my time. Anyway I eventually accumulated an hours film, but it took some doing. Road rage was rife amongst Stagecoach drivers, some most unprofessional driving attitudes as the encountered drivers getting into the bus station, even if they were in the right, one fingered signs don't do much for the company image and it wasn't a single instance. The roads in East Kent are worse than Romanian, and we thought Cheshire was bad, sometime its easy to think all the South East is affluent but this corner of the country has its share of deprivation and certainly the seaside towns often look well down at heel. We called at Sandwich and had a break down tender arrive to tow a Wright bodied Dart away which was entertaining, almost as much as our cream tea. The weather eventually faired up in the evening and we went for dinner at the Monument pub in Whitstable which was very nice indeed. The running day was dogged by bad weather, blocked drains caused flooding in the depot and even when it left off it remained cloudy for the rest o the day, photography was a challenge to say the least. A great variety of buses in service although not so much purely local content and it was not so easy to get nice mixes of East Kent buses or M&D together like I managed in 2007. Met lots of friends old and new and took the opportunity of spreading knowledge of our range in the region. We had a good days trading although sales of photos was very disappointing especially given the enormous range of Kent material we had on offer, the rare customer had a choice of dome very juicy old M&D views. The trip back was a nightmare, over 5 hours, M25 at a standstill for much of the time, gave up getting on to M1 and carried on round to the M40 and back up past Oxford etc

One thing certain to wind me up is people wanting to haggle over DVDs from our EBay shop, they already save a bundle, how tight can you get!

My book is almost ready for the printer, the cover fully done, last check through tomorrow