The sight of a relatively new looking if not actual bus (Gemini 2) decker broken down on an A19 roundabout at peak time seemed to sum up their current woes. Trailing an Enviro400 belching out thick black smoke as it slowly and yet noisily made its way along a long sweeping estate road was equally unimpressive. You have to laugh when you realize the damn thing was in the long abandoned premium service branding. The Gemini 2 of course was also similarly wrongly branded. An express brand, just not the express route it had failed to complete.

I certainly did a double take when I realized there are still some cotswold stone liveried Wright single Deckers running about out there, somewhere in the far south. An oddity, I thought, a forgotten accident, a spare trainer pressed back into service maybe. Then I saw another, and a third. I can hardly believe someone has taken the conscious decision to make some zsmall part of the Empire a sick joke, a reminder of when Arriva was a pioneer, going its own way. Do they assume these areas are so remote their passengers know nothing of what occurs in the next valley? Or maybe the carrier pigeon transmitting the repaint order got shot by a farmer! Utterly bizarre.