The difficulty of being out and about!

Today I went to the hairdresser's. Time for a new look, chop a few inches off and see how it goes, you know the kind of thing. My hairdresser was so pleased with her own work that she took pictures of it! How odd is that? Not odd that she should take pictures of her own work but that it turned out to be my head of hair! 

Anyway, I had to get up rather earlier than usual, with a couple of results: one expected and one unexpected. The expected one was having to pay for my public transport because I was travelling before 9.30, after which time I can travel free with my old biddy bus pass. Shock! Horror! £3.90 on the bus from the corner of our road to the tram stop in Oldham and £3.50 on the tram to Manchester. How do people pay these fares every day? 

Yes, of course I know you can buy saver tickets that allow you to travel all day on the bus for not much more than I paid for one bus ride, but that doesn't always work on our bus route. The service is provided by one bus company during the day and by another after 6.00 in the evening. The route was put out to tender some time last year and that was the result. The law of unforeseen consequences, however, leads to people buying a saver ticket from one company in the morning and then discovering that they cannot use it on that very same bus route after 6.00 pm. So, if they return home from work after that time they have to pay all over again! Nonsense! I have seen young people reduced almost to tears by intransigent bus drivers who play a power game of threatening not to let them travel and them "magnanimously" accepting their saver ticket at the last moment. Quite sadistic! 

There is another little matter I wonder about. If I travel on that bus from my daughter's house to our house, it costs me £3.80. Travelling from our house to Oldham on the same bus, i.e. continuing its full-length route, costs £3.90. So, in the admittedly unlikely event that someone might want to travel on that route from my daughter's house to Oldham, however much would it cost???!!! Yes, I know, the answer is to buy a saver ticket! But still, the cost of public transport here is exorbitant! 

Okay, the other consequence of my getting up earlier than usual, the unexpected result, was more of a sartorial matter. I got dressed in the semi-dark and arrived at the bus stop, with only minutes to spare, to discover that the supposedly brown tights I had put on were, in fact, purple. Not a major problem, except that they clashed horribly with the red shoes I was wearing!!! Cue for a lot of comments about the silliness of women and their fashion demands! However, it really was not on! No time to go back home and change! I had to buy a pair of brown tights in Manchester and go and change in the loo at M & S before getting on with the rest of my day. 

I always have something to read on public transport. Some people rely on the ubiquitous Metro, the free newspaper, but I find its mix of celebrity gossip and terminally sad or would-be uplifting stories mostly unpalatable. So I make sure I have a book or my kindle. Now, on the subject of books on the go, the other day I was listening to Open Book, a radio programme about ... wait for it ... books! I heard one of the speakers talk about having to be "time-clever" in order to read at least some of the many books she wanted to read. Audio books came into the discussion as a possible solution. Mariella Frostrup talked about listening to loads of stuff on audio books when she used to drive often to Scotland. I fully agreed with her. I used to do the same driving across Greater Manchester to work. 

Then another speaker went on to say how useful audio books are when she walks the dog! Nooooo! No! No! No! 

Walking is not a time to listen to audio books, or even music for that matter. I know someone who has a device that enables her to listen to her iPod while she swims, a kind of extra waterproof container into which she puts her iPod so that it does not get wet. I can almost understand that; swimming up and down the same indoor swimming pool can be a bit tedious. Swimming in an open air pool is a different matter, in my opinion. And Phil listens to the radio in the bath. This too is understandable although it is hard to listen to the radio in the shower - far too noisy! 

But out walking, part of the pleasure is seeing the world around you, enjoying the peace and quiet, reflecting on this and that. And if you are walking the dog, surely part of the fun, one purpose of the exercise, is interacting with man's best friend. 

Walking is not a boring activity from which you need distraction!