remote cards

There is a great loop of a road, running parallel to the railway bridge, with a side street cutting off from there to another part of the loop, a strange off shoot caused by the one way system. This side stretch is unassuming, there is a shop for house hold stuff, fire places that kind of thing. Next to that a motor bike shop. Then on the corner, leading to the major roads again, is a church. On the other side of the road, there is a red brick building, an old factory. For years it stood empty, going to waste, the ground beside it a parking lot turned to wild bushes and weeds, really over grown. In the last year they finally did something with it. They cleared out the car park, put in a new gate system for entry. They scrubbed they building up and its now some esoteric arm of local government or something that works from there. Beside that there used to be a tool hire company, but ironically as they renovated the old factory the tool hire shut up this branch, moved it somewhere else. In the summer, mornings like this, at the back of 7am, when its nice and sunny, you find odd crowds forming. Random cars and taxis pulling out of the building work traffic, and people climb out with suitcases. They used to do in front of the old factory, gather there in the summer, rain or shine, huddled. But now they’ve moved down, so they don’t block the building, built a new bus shelter for them. And at the right time, the coaches pull up, long distance luxury things, that’ll take these people on their summer holidays. A lot of the people there seem to be older, grey, though not always. It seems such an old fashioned idea, going on holiday by coach. In these days of “cheap flights” that make the whole world so accessible. But there are still these people who get on a bus, and travel for 100s of miles. When I was a kid, when of the first holidays we did as a family was the South of France. Catching a coach like this and driving all the way down to somewhere like Dover, getting in a hovercraft, going across the Channel, getting another bus and driving all the way through France. I remember the stops on the way down during the scorching daylight, the endless white stones of graveyards. On the way back home, hitting Paris at some absurd time in the morning, and bleary eyed we all climbed from the bus, stepping over my brother’s body, sprawled and asleep in the aisle, so that we could touch the Eiffel tower at something like 3am before getting back on board. People still do that.

Labels: bus, coach, holiday, memories, paisley