Yesterday’s posting produced a couple of comments about the Farmers’ Market so rather than respond with another comment it gets its own posting! I went to the market after getting back from the Bournemouth – Winchester run.

The items purchased were:-

From top left, Selsey Prawns. These are prawns but not the same prawns sold by the supermarkets and described as “from the North Atlantic”. Note the longer whiskers and the darker stripes on the body. The flavour of these prawns is stronger and the flesh is much more firm than ‘regular’ prawns. Winkles which were bought live and I than cooked them in water with the same salinity as sea water – 33g salt per litre of water. Honeycomb which I love and is useless from the supermarkets. Supermarket honeycomb is honeycomb which then has honey added which is from a totally different place, or even continent! Why do they do that? And organic corn on the cob from Secretts.

In addition I bought dry cure bacon and ate a cheese straw with wild garlic as my breakfast whilst walking round. Whilst eating the cheese straw with wild garlic I was curious to know what bit of wild garlic was in it. I tasted garlic but the only bit of wild garlic I ever use is the leaves and flowers and that is only during May. The leaves are great in stir frys or just as raw leaves added to a cheese sandwich. The flowers look pretty, and taste good, in a salad. I’ve never known wild garlic produce a bulb worth harvesting. However, I didn’t get back to the stall to ask :-(

My first run this morning was to drive the 06:40 Megabus from Bournemouth to Winchester. At the first stop in Bournemouth a couple got on for London and asked if we stopped anywhere else “The Triangle and then Winchester” (no passengers booked from Ringwood this am) I told them. They wanted to buy something to eat on the trip but there are no shops open at the Triangle. I then told them that if they were very quick I’d stop at a service station on the main road. We got to the service station, I said “Be quick, you’ve got two minutes”, and then realised as the guy got off the bus I’d got a problem. He was a fit looking 30 year old but he walked slower than a snail on tranquilisers :-( He ambled to the forecourt shop and then stood looking at the door before slowly entering. Cars arrived, filled up with fuel, the drivers went in and paid and were out again. Still no sign of my passenger. After 10 minutes I was seriously cross and told his girlfriend that she’d better go and get him and that I’d leave without either of them if they were not back in two more minutes adding “Believe me, I mean it”! She got him complete with two shopping bag fulls of stuff and about 5 seconds to spare.

This was the first time I’ve stopped like that and it will be the last.

I did my first Oxford, Coventry, Birmingham trip yesterday and all went well. A couple of times I wondered if I was still on route because things didn’t look as I’d remembered them and then suddenly something would appear to reassure me! The only bad bit about the trip was the weather, it absolutely tipped down with rain all the way there and during my break. I’d hoped to go for another long walk while I was there but it was just too wet, so I slept a bit and watched part of a movie on my Blackberry.

The running times on the journey seem generous, generous enough to allow a 30 minute service station break and still be on time. If I’d not taken the break it would have meant sitting for 30 minutes at a bus stop (so as not to leave early) which seemed a far less attractive option than stretching my legs and having a latte.

I’m pleased to say that the problems I’ve been having with the blog (no entries appearing) has been fixed at last. My hosting provider had a server failure on the server which held my database, when all the databases had been migrated to a new server mine became corrupt :-( But the good news is that’s fixed, the bad news is that I’ve had a terrible morning.

I had an accident with the bus and two passengers are in hospital. I’d done an early Megabus shuttle run and was ‘spare’, the depot needed a local 5 service covering and asked me to do it. I’d got about 15 passengers on board and was doing approximately 30 mph when a taxi started to pull out of a side road (with stop signs) only a few yards in front of the bus! I could only react instinctively and applied full braking, I couldn’t have pressed the pedal harder, whilst swerving around the vehicle. I avoided the accident but heard a tremendous thud as a passenger hit the floor and slid up to the front of the bus. They didn’t speak or move, I couldn’t open the cab door because they were against it. Another passenger tended to the guy while I called 999. As he lay on the floor and his shirt had come untucked I could see that he was wearing a plastic body/back support. He later told the ambulance crew he’d had spine surgery some weeks before :-( I’m not sure if his back is damaged but he had also had a leg and arm problem. The ambulance crew put these limbs in tubes and then pumped them up. They gave him gas. A lady had hit her chest and was complaing of chest pains, she went off in the same ambulance.

My passengers were the kindest, nicest bunch of people you could wish to meet :-) About half had clearly seen what happened and everyone of them told the Police that the taxi had pulled out in front of me and caused the accident. It had then reversed and driven off very quickly. A witness from outside the bus came to me and offered their details saying they’d seen everything. And, the injured man, as he was being stretchered to the ambulance, told the Police Officer that he’d seen what happened and that it wasn’t the driver’s fault. As soon as the bus could be removed it was taken to our depot where the recordings from the 7 cameras on the bus were downloaded. If anyone studying the video can lip read I hope they wont be offended at what my lips appear to be saying as I braked and swerved.

The Police Officer and I both had a laugh at the taxi registration number taken by one of the passengers, the letters were CUN. We both it agreed it was one letter short of a ‘personal registration” number ;-)

I’ve never driven a Megabus service on which every booked passenger has turned up, there are always no shows. I explained here how Megabus ticketing works so it’s easy to see how much in advance a passenger booked and it’s usually the early bookers with cheap seats who don’t show. The reason for this is that some of them may book a seat on journey for each of several days at £1.00 each. They then travel on the day which is most convenient to them. This is cheaper than waiting until they know which bus they’ll need and booking one more expensive ticket on that service. Some others may have changed circumstances or simply miss the bus.

But recently we’ve seen some strange no show statistics. Last week we had a fully booked (49 seats) on a London to Brighton service – not one passenger showed up!! The return to London was the same, 100% full with bookings but 100% empty on the journey. I had a service on which not one of the first 26 passengers showed up. The question is why? There are a couple of theories, both of which seem to have holes in them to my mind

The first theory is that the bookings are made using stolen/cloned credit cards in order to see if they’ll work. OK, a Megabus seat is a low cost item so it might be a low cost check to see if a card will work. But, all credit card transactions on the Megabus website are processed by WorldPay who are a very big outfit and one I would have expected to notice fraud which appeared to be linked to a specific merchant. The good news is that once WorldPay have accepted the card Megabus get the money so empty seats generated by this way are paid for seats.

The second theory is that some unknown competitor of Megabus may be buying up the low cost seats in order to prevent bona fide passengers getting them. The theory being that if a passenger is never able to get a low cost seat they’ll be less interested in looking for them again and may not use Megabus. Possible, I guess. But buying every seat on a bus means a lot of full price seats will have been purchased as well. Again Megabus receive all the income.

Any other theories out there?