Initially the service hit a snag. It comes from Norwich and the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital and does a loop of the village before heading off again. The buses are double decker and the first stop if you are heading in the Norwich direction and the last stop if you are coming from Norwich is opposite our Memorial Playing Field.
The roads around there are quite narrow and at weekends when there is sport on the park there isn't enough car parking so vehicles are parked on the grass verge, much to the annoyance of local residents and people trying to get past.
The new bus service (the Pink Line number 11), began on a Sunday and just couldn't get through much to the annoyance of the bus drivers. The trustees of the playing field had written to groups using the park to ask them not to park on the immediate vicinity but the message didn't seem to get through.
Apparently on the second weekend of the service, things were much better. I know this because I had a chat with a delightful lady who lives in one of the bungalows next to the bus stop and just happens to read my blogs, having become a member after our chat.
Allow me a digression here. I currently have over 650 signed up to my blogs but would love to have more. Please pass on details to friends and family. Digression over and back to parking.
Parking in that area at weekends has always been a problem.
Pat told me that sometimes she gets cars parked across her gates and politely asks the drivers not to do it but they say they will only be a couple of minutes as if that makes it ok.
I may have mentioned before that I had a rather unsavoury incident one afternoon in that area. A large 4x4 was parked on the path, leaving virtually no room to get through. It would have been impossible to get a buggy or a wheelchair past. I was determined not to go into the road as it was at the start of a blind bend.
So I pushed my way through, coming into contact with the side of the car as I did so. At that moment the car owner came out of the local shop and shouted abuse at me and told me that if I hadn't been so impatient he would have moved the vehicle as if I knew he was in the shop and was happy to wait to get past on the path. He also accused me of scraping his car, which was absolute nonsense . But if I had it would have been his fault for blocking the pavement.
I remember an incident many years ago when I was living with my parents. I drove to visit a friend and parked my car on the road outside his house. I was aware of a chap doing something with his car and some parts on the road. When I went to leave I forgot about these parts and backed over them, breaking most of them. He was quite annoyed and at first I offered to replace them. But then I thought about the situation and realised he shouldn't have left the parts on the road and they could have damaged my tyres. I conveyed this to him and didn't hear another thing. Isn't it funny how these small things come back to you over 45 years later?
But back to Pat and the new bus service. I asked her if she minded having buses stopping outside her door and people waiting there.
"Not at all dear. It's nice to see people and so convenient to have the bus there.," She then told me that she enjoyed reading The Metro Newspaper which comes free on buses. She particularly enjoyed doing the crossword.
Now when she sees a bus there she can pop out and get a copy.
My new bloggette said she loves living in Hethersett and had been here since the late 1970s.
"It's the only place I've ever been homesick for," she said adding that she had spent two years living in Melbourne, Australia.
"It was a lovely place and the people were really nice but I just wanted to get back to Hethersett," she said.
I asked her what it was that she loved about the village and she just couldn't put it into words and it is this indefinable something that makes our village special. I refer to it as our beating heart. We aren't the prettiest village but we do have a heart and some wonderful people.
But back to the bus journey. The buses run every half hour. I sat with my notepad (I always use an electronic one on my mobile phone nowadays) at the front on the top deck.
There was only a handful of people on but numbers increased as we got to the centre of the village. We are now pretty well served by buses. The single decker number 15 goes through the village and out onto the main road and gets pretty full. Then we have the number 6 and the number 13 which picks up along the main road. That in effect means we have seven or eight buses an hour, although at times they seem to get cancelled or just don't turn up. At least with modern technology there's an app to monitor exactly where they are ( when it works of course).
My bus got to the hospital within 15 minutes and into Norwich in about 35, not much slower than the number 15. The direct buses on the main road take about 20 minutes to get into Norwich.
I stayed on the bus past the castle and cathedral and onto Sprowston which is a suburb of Norwich. I then walked back into Norwich for what I always do in the city - a read in the Forum library and chips on the market.
Then did the return journey on the Pink Line and came home and wrote it all up for my next edition of Hethersett Herald. One of the other benefits of the new service is it stops at the back of the University of East Anglia grounds which is ideal for a walk round the university broad and refreshments in the cafe/restaurant.
In the interests of the environment it means we can now take the bus to the UEA rather than use the car. For those who don't know the area, we live in South Norfolk which is north of North Suffolk but in the South. Now you will be confused. We are about six miles from Norwch, about three miles from the University and about the same distance from the hospital. In the other direction we are about three miles from the wonderful market town of Wymondham.
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After I have written and published my daily blog on Facebook I copy it onto my website at www.peterowensteward.weebly.com.
On this site you can read all my blogs going back to number one. There are now over 1200 of them. On the website they are filed in order by months. This makes them easier to read. As I copy them across I have to put them into paragraphs and change the size of the type and stop the text being justified. As I do this I have noticed a number of literals and spelling errors, so I must apologise for this and in my defence say that to write this much every day I have to work very fast and sometimes mistakes creap inass I don't reed thru em as closely ass I shud.
Talking about type. I often have a discussion with writing people about whether to justify or not. I have mentioned before my editorship of the Norfolk Ancestor, the magazine of the Norfolk Family History Society. It now has a new editor who is taking it to the next level.
He likes to justify type, whereas I prefer what is known as ragged. This blog is ragged with lines of different length. If the paragraphs were justified they would look more like a block of text and would all be the same length.
The thing I don't like about justified text is it brings irregular spacing to words so that it looks like there are more gaps between letters.
But it's one of those things that is just a personal choice. One of the things I do with my Hethersett Herald magazine is to cut out hyphenation at the end of lines. I didn't use to do this until one of my readers who is dyslexic told me hyphenation made it difficult to read.