day 5 Leicester to Oxford

Its good to know that the internet cafe has not come and gone without our noticing. We found one in Oxford so we are able to enter our blog without bothering our hosts to give us access to their computers.
Snow everywhere when we woke up but no problem with the roads. We were worried about today because it depended on getting three X buses (presumably short for express) as nobody seemed to be clear about whether they could be regarded as local buses. Manju rang Stagecoach who said yes. The PTE rang Stagecoach who said no. In any case, we climbed nervously on to the X5 at Leicester and presented our passes. The driver said we would have to pay ....... but he was only joking. Great bus to Northampton. There we had 30 minutes to wait and it was freezing and the bus station was pretty miserable. No services of any kind and no staff as far as we could see. EXCEPT in the ladies toilet we found a source of heat - a little radiator in the Nappy Room - so we draped ourselves around this for a while. X4 to Milton Keynes arrived on time and almost immediately we boarded the X5 to Oxford. At Buckingham, a friend of Manju's, Al, joined us till Oxford. They hadn't seen each other for two years but he had found out about our journey from the BBC website and wanted to be part of the action. We have interviewed him with our camcorder. This whole bus journey only took three and a half hours.

We are still carrying the camcorder lent to Manju by BBC North West Tonight. A courier collected our last tape in Richmond and that formed the basis of a clip which you can see at bbc.co.uk/nwt. One clip is called Manju's Mission and one Manju's Jaunt. After they had used our tape they asked if I would do more of the filming because they want more pictures of Manju as she is the north west resident. This means I have been commenting during the day with the camera and yesterday the blog was very short because I had already said it all. For example, we did a lovely interview with a driver at Leicester bus station. Sally told us about her pleasure at her job and that many OAPs are using the pass to do longer journeys than they normally would. I will try to make sure the blog doesn't suffer because of my broadcasting ambitions in future.

We are now going to get the tourist bus because neither of us know Oxford very well. And then to our hosts for the night.