Last Saturday I went for a wander to Ely and Cambridge, after reading Corn Dolls, a detective thriller set on the Fens. The author, Patrick Lennon, really sold the area and like Christopher Moore's portrayals of San Francisco, the location is almost a character in its own right. Unfortunately, the transport in that part of Cambridgeshire is so dire that you can really on soak up the atmosphere with a car. So, yet more social exclusionism hitting home.

Despite being confined to the city limits, I can say that Ely is quite a pleasant city and feels nicely balanced with neither too much deprrivation and unlike Chichester (another cathedral city) the population don't appear to be snobbish about its status, despite it being well-and-true middle-of-the-road England. Bet the salaries are crap in general though.

Having arrived, I munched a burger from the growler stand in the market, known simply as "The Business", I can thoroughly recommend it - one of the best burgers I've had a while, or maybe it was just that I was a bit cold. The meat was...well, meaty, which was a pleasant surprise, aand the bacon was a large, lean lump.

I fell in love with the cathedral which is about as picture-book as it could be (and free to enter too). Some pictures of the cathedral ltseelf and a couple of shots of the stained glass are below.

Its a shame about the lack of transport though. Getting around middle England is near-nigh impossible without a car and its at times like these where the non-driver really does feel (and IS) a second-class citizen of this country.

A Titan-ic admission of guilt

I have managed to get through over three years of writing this blog without telling the world at large that I'm a transport nerd, especially when that transport concerns me directly - so any London centric news interests me. I'm not a fully fledged anorak, but I'm fairly close. Keen readers may have spotted that I tend to include stories about transport which interest me.

Well here's a nice couple of pictures I took while on my way home from work. I was passing, on a detour, Barking bus garage, when I spotted this little beauty parked outside, with its nose, sadly, facing the street, so there was no way I was going to get a frontward view. Here's a couple of sideways shots of London Titan T1, the first ever Titan to enter London service back in 1979. The bus was done up in full 70s paint job with 'multi-ride' labelling on the front. Attention to detail also includes the RD garage code on the side. Hornchurch garage (RomforD) no longer exists and this bus would have been transferred to nearly NS (North Street, Romford). For London bus nerds of 30 or 40-something vintage, this is a wonderfully evocative animal. I remember how excited I was, aged 10, when the first Metrobuses appeared on one of my local routes, the 90B from Kew Gardens to Yeading (as was then). I'd never heard anything like them, the they did make the future seem a brighter place.
A lot of people were upset when the last Routemaster was withdrawn from regular service use. I was pretty sad, but the Titans, Metros and even Fleetlines were my generation's London buses when the last Titan went, more or less unremarked, this was a sad moment for me. I can't get so an excited over an ALX400 or President, competent machines though they are.