Last night we went to dinner at Hotel du Vin in Winchester. It’s about a £25 each way taxi ride from our home in Southampton so we took the bus (I can’t go out to dinner and not drink!) the journey takes about 45 minutes and it’s a pleasant enough ride. The bill for two starters, two mains, one desert and one bottle of wine came to £110 which I considered a bit hefty. It is after all a Bistro meaning no table cloths, informal atmosphere etc. The food was OK but not good enough for the price and I hate it when you have to pay extra for potatoes and each veg chosen. Here’s a sample menu and pricing. The wine mark up is pretty hefty, £35 for a bottle of Morgon. To be fair it was perhaps the best bottle of Morgon I’ve ever had but it shouldn’t have been 35 quid.

And so to the trip home by Bluestar number 1. The bus came along spot on time and wasn’t very busy for the first 20 minutes but then began to fill up with ‘kids’ heading into Southampton for a late night out. They’d already been drinking and were noisy but pretty soon half of them had lit cigarettes and the bus was filled with a smoke fog the likes of which can’t have been seen on a bus since the 1950’s. Then one of the girls started vomiting over herself, anyone near her, the seat and the aisle! Enough, enough we’re getting off now, bugger whether the bus is at a stop or not! And so we had to get a taxi the rest of the way.

I know I’m a bus driver but I’ve never done late shifts. Is that behaviour ‘normal’ for a bus running after 10:00pm? If that’s the sort of bus I had to drive I’d be doing something else to earn a crust.

I know it wont make a damn bit of difference but at least we feel we are making a protest – Big Brother will not be watched in this house. This has nothing to do with the actual Big Brother programme but to another reality TV show where contestants try to ‘Win a kidney’. The link is that they’re both made by the same company, Endemol, of which someone else wrote “I always thought “Endemol” sounded like a cream you might use to relieve an itching anus”. After the initial feeling of disgust I wondered for a moment if they had a valid point in saying it was being done to highlight the lack of kidney donors. But search as I might I can’t find anything to say they’re donating the profits from the program and the thousands of Euros generated by the premium rate voting lines to anything related to kidney disease, nor for that matter are they donating them anywhere other than into company (directors) pockets. This company has made the programme for one reason only, profit.

Tonight we’re going out to dinner at Hotel du Vin in Winchester. A couple of days ago the telephone rang during the evening and when I answered it it was the Hotel du Vin calling to check that we’d be there! I rather curtly told them that since I’d made a booking with them I would be there. What made me quite cross about the call was that it could have spoiled a surprise evening for my wife. In this case she knew we were going but if she hadn’t and they’d let her know about the ‘surprise’ I’d have been very angry ….. and wouldn’t have gone!