Today I ventured into Manchester to have my hair done. The visit to the hairdresser’s was fine. Transport was a different matter.
To begin with I needed to visit The Travel Shop, which is just a fancy name for the information office at Oldham bus station. Not long before we went into the first lockdown it was decided that those of us with old biddy bus passes should pay £10 in order to be able to travel on local trams and trains free of charge as well as on local buses. This seemed quite reasonable to me. After all, a couple of trips to Manchester on the tram would cost me more than a tenner. Not that we had much chance to make use of the facility once everything shut down. When the first lockdown restrictions began to be eased we were able to use our bus passes on the trams without any extra charge but now the £10 fee has been introduced.
So I popped into the travel shop to pay my dues so that I could travel to Manchester on the tram without problems. I took Phil’s pass with me to see if I could validate his pass at the same time. The happy chappy behind the counter was clearly a joker. He began by telling me that Phil needed to be there in person and then, as I was about to put Phi’s pass away, informed me that he was joking and that I could sort the passes for all my friends and relations if I chose to do so. What a wag!
Then I walked down to the tram stop, thinking to myself that I was going to arrive in Manchester far too early for my appointment. However, at the tram stop I discovered that there was engineering work going on and that my tram would not go all the way to Manchester. I needed to alight at Central Park and catch a Magic Bus (another joker had clearly decided that a fleet of buses needed a cheery name!) to take me the rest of the way.
I joined a group of happy travellers waiting to see which of the buses, all helpfully labelled “Not In Service”, would be ours. And so I got to see a bit of Greater Manchester hitherto mostly unknown to me and eventually arrived in the city centre, still in plenty of time to do a few pre-planned errands before heading to the hairdresser’s.
The hairdressing salon always used to be a bustling, busy place with stylists dealing with several clients simultaneously, giving instructions to their juniors to complete mundane tasks like shampooing clients, sweeping up, bringing clients cups of coffee and so on. Now stylists, of which I only saw two all afternoon instead of four or five as in the past, did everything and dealt with only one client at a time. One poor little junior did a lot of running around but little that actually gave her hair styling experience! Rather sad! And I wonder how long they will be able to operate in this way and still make money.
Returning home was a further travel adventure. I contemplated going to Piccadilly Station, at the other end of the city centre, to catch a tram to Ashton or a train to Greenfield, a possibly faster journey. but my foolishly chosen sandals were by now squeezing my poor little toes, and trams across the centre to Piccadilly were not running. A brisk walk up the hill to Piccadilly did not appeal to me. So I did the reverse of my Manchester-ward journey, slower than a straight tram ride would have been. This was clearly a mistake as I arrived at Oldham Mumps just in time to see my connecting bus sailing away in the direction of Delph. No more buses going to Delph or even Uppermill, from where I could have walked, even with my toe-squeezing sandals, for one hour!
Under more normal circumstances I would have walked back to the taxi rank and paid an extortionate amount for taxi-ride home. But I had had enough of travelling along in my covid mask and gave in to the temptation to phone my daughter and ask if she was available to play taxi driver for me. Fortunately she owes me a favour or two and so within ten minutes or so there she was, ready drive me home. Thank heavens for helpful offspring!
I quite like going to Manchester but, oh! I find returning home on public transport a real pain! So it goes.
By the way, the passengers on the buses and trams I travelled on today were mostly mask-wearers. In the Arndale Centre and in the shops in the centre there was mix of cautious mask-wearers and carefree, liberated, bare-faced shoppers. Which is pretty much what I was expecting. I fall into the cautious mask-wearer category.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well everyone!
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