Day 2 - Canterbury to Camden

We left the llamas and oast houses of east Kent for the Medway towns. The signs of spring are so much more advanced here. The daffodils are fading but the magnolia and cherry blossom are gorgeous. Canterbury to Faversham, Sittingbourne, Maidstone, Chatham and Rochester. Apart from the last two, from the perspective of the bus and bus stations, they are indistinguishable. As we drank a cappuchino during the morning, Manju said, “Its 10.20 this must be Maidstone”. There seems to have been a planning tendency to combine bus stations with shopping malls and they are all the same. But we hadn’t seen anything yet. Our bus drivers were all unerringly helpful and knowledgeable but quite unable to understand why we didn’t just catch a train into London from the various rail stations we passed. Then after the splendid bridge over the Medway, we hit Bluewater. At least it sits in a kind of crater so it doesn’t dominate the landscape like the Trafford Centre outside Manchester, but it is ghastly. Visiting this place seemed to be the only way to connect the Kent buses with the London ones.

Our journey on was incredibly efficient but boring. Bluewater to Woolwich by the 96, Woolwich to Elephant and Castle on the 53 and finally the168 to Camden Town. From the bus the landscape was unchanging until we got to Greenwich and Blackheath - urban sprawl for ever. And the atmosphere of the bus is different. They are crowded. You have no relationship with the bus driver because all he or she does is nod at your pass. You get off at a door half way down the bus so the idea of thanking the driver seems ridiculous. All the announcements are pre-recorded. If the bus is a bit crowded, the bus driver obviously presses a button and a disembodied voice tells you to move down the bus. And the people are either sullenly silent or - mainly youngsters - noisy and aggressive.

The media are back in touch. So far this trip has been very different from last time when we were met and followed the whole time by journalists and camera men. Since that trip we have both done various radio and TV interviews in our local areas and were interviewed together by Jenni Murray for Womans Hour on Boxing Day. Manju is regularly recognised in the streets of Bolton and has become a star of the Womens Institute circuit. As I walked up the red carpet to the Vivienne Westwood exhibition at the Millenium Gallery in July in Sheffield, one of the camera men said: “Aren’t you the bus lady”. But this time the media interest is muted. Manju’s local paper are using this blog to record our diary and we shall be met in Manchester by local TV and radio. But Manchester is a long way off …..