Random Writings

If you’re a regular passenger on the railways, you’ll probably have seen adverts for PlusBus, which is a scheme that allows you to purchase discounted bus tickets if you need to continue your rail journey by bus. It’s a great idea but has suffered somewhat from implementation issues. PlusBus is run by a consortium of bus companies (most of whom also own train companies) but as a consequence the railway staff aren’t always very clued up about it.

The biggest problem with it is actually buying the ticket in the first place. Most self-service ticket machines can’t currently sell a PlusBus ticket, which isn’t much help if you travel from an unmanned station. When I lived out at Waterbeach I would buy an ordinary return ticket to Cambridge and then upgrade to PlusBus at Cambridge station, but if there was a huge queue at the booking office it wasn’t worth it. My worst PlusBus experience was one time I tried to go to Leicester. I wanted to buy a ticket in advance, with both Cambridge and Leicester Plusbus upgrades, so that when the tickets arrived in the post I could get the bus to Cambridge station, train to Leicester and the bus to the university. At that stage no online ticketing company would sell you a PlusBus. I had to ring about five different people at different train companies before I finally found someone who could sell me a ticket.

Today, PlusBus has come back into my attention. I had a hire car to drop off this morning at Hertz, which is by the railway station, and then needed to get to work on the bus. Because I have to take two buses to do this, I’d need a Stagecoach Dayrider ticket, which now costs £3.30. However, since I’m going to London this evening, I went into the station and asked the booking clerk for a return to London with a Cambridge PlusBus. He said I could only have a PlusBus for arriving in Cambridge, and not for departing from it. I told him this wasn’t true, and I’d done it before. He went off and referred to a colleague, before returning to sell me the ticket. After I’d paid, I realised that he’d forgotten to give me a railcard discount on my PlusBus, so I’d paid £2.70 for it instead of £1.80. Oh well, but still better than £3.30! Interestingly, the PlusBus ticket covers a much bigger area than the Dayrider (more or less equivalent to the £5.00 Dayrider Plus ticket) so if you have a railcard, it’s actually cheaper to buy a single ticket to Shelford (the next station south of Cambridge) and a PlusBus (total cost £3.30) than it is to get a Dayrider Plus.

One other thing - each PlusBus ticket is only valid for 24 hours, so if you buy a period return and want to use the buses on both days you travel you need to buy two PlusBus tickets, one for each day.

However, all this prompted me to look at PlusBus’s website again, and to discover that the tickets can finally be bought online. Unfortunately, only two providers can do it. One is Qjump who charge a booking fee depending on how you pay and how you collect your tickets, details here. The other is First Transpennine Express, who operate trains in northern England, but whose website is powered by Qjump. Happily, Transpennine’s website will sell you a ticket for any part of the country and doesn’t charge a booking fee. I shall be using them a lot more in the future! Nothing like making it easy, is there?

Cambridge is a rotten place to own a car. It has traffic congestion, pedestrianised zones, byzantine one-way-systems, limited parking, expensive car parks and is generally laid out to be got around on foot or bike. As a result, I haven’t bought a car but have instead relied on hiring one when I need one.

Car hire need not be expensive, but it requires a certain amount of knowledge and technique to get the best deal. I’m going to describe a few the techniques I use to get a good deal. Read the rest of this entry »

Mobile broadband is great, and I bought one of the early Vodafone USB modems, a Huawei E270, when I first moved to Cambridge. My contract on this has now expired, and I’ve moved over to 3, who seem to have better coverage than Vodafone even if the network is more congested. Anyway, I thought I’d try and get the old Vodafone modem unlocked, because I can think of various circumstances in which it might be useful to have access to other networks. Read the rest of this entry »

A sofa has been on the to-do list since I first arrived in Cambridge. I’ve considered various options, but none of them were quite satisfactory. Most sofas are too big to get into a narrowboat, and those that come in sections were still sufficiently large that I was concerned that they would dominate the cabin. Also, I like to be able to clear the floor so that I can get six people round the dining table, or when I have a lot of people staying onboard and sleeping on the floor.

So, this weekend a plan finally came together involving a lot inexpert carpentry and an evolving design.
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When I was a little boy, my greenfingered Mum would drag me round the garden centre. I was always fascinated by the hoses, fittings, sprinklers and other such things - the plants were so boring! Anyway, I’ve constructed myself a rather Heath Robinson arrangement for watering the growbags on the boat’s roof with river water.
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Yesterday afternoon I went across town to get some firewood. I haven’t actually lit the fire all that recently because the weather’s been mild, but I probably should do as the fire helps to reduce the humidity inside the boat. Anyway, I biked off to the south side of town where a lady from church had a job lot of logs to get rid of. When I arrived, it turned out that these were old fruit trees that had sat nicely under a tarpaulain for three years, so were beautifully dry and seasoned. I’d brought my long-handled axe (a birthday present, thanks Mum & Dad!) and a splitting wedge and mallet, and was pleased to discover that the wedge made short work of breaking up the logs and then it was easy to cut them into convenient chunks with the axe. It’s also extremely satisfying!
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I come from a fairly green-fingered family. My mum is an enthusiastic gardener and her parents were also very keen. Perhaps its because I’m getting a bit older, perhaps it’s because I have my own space to work with, but I’m slowly getting into the whole gardening thing.

Last year I tried growing baby plum tomatoes (a variety called “Rosada”) in pots on the foredeck - and they did really well, despite a certain amount of neglect during my absence! This year, with the boat in the much more public environment of Midsummer Common, I decided to be a bit more ambitious.

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Last week I was in Glencoe with some friends, enjoying myself away from the office and the horrors of Visual C++ and Matlab. The idea was to try and get some winter climbing in, but knowing the caprices of Scottish weather, I was always a bit dubious as to how much we’d actually get done. We’d arranged to stay in an independent hostel which was friendly, adequately comfortable and not too expensive.
I took the train up to Edinburgh last Saturday and stayed with Miles and Ciorstaidh, and then Miles and I drove on up to Glencoe the following day. But first we had to get a car… Read the rest of this entry »

A small thing, but nice to have - coathooks for me to hang my wet jackets up somewhere where they don’t drip all over the wooden floor, and for guests to hang their coats by the door when they come in. These rather nifty brass ones fold out of the way when not in use, so they shouldn’t catch on anything inadvertantly. They’re made by Nauticalia, but I got mine from Marinestore who had them on special offer at the time.

Outdoor gear is quite tricky to buy. You can go into a smart shop and spend a lot of money and come out with a lot of wizzy technical gear, but how much better is it than what you can get more cheaply? Conversely, if you get something cheap, will it actually perform, or will it let you down when you need it?

This post is a general public service aimed at recommending a few products I’ve tried and found to be worth having. Read the rest of this entry »