Curiosities of Buses

Three buses leave from just near where my son currently works, down by Greggs factory.   One is the Balaclava, which drops me right outside my door, another is the Kenmure, which I can get as far as Elgin Rd, and then walk home; a third, I now discover, is the Bradford.   Having been thinking about going on a Bradford bus for some time to see where it actually goes, I asked the driver what stop was the closest to my place.  He thought the stop near the roundabout at Stone St would be closest, before the bus heads off into Kaikorai Valley.

So I got on the Bradford bus.  Talk about a roundabout route, but interesting.  It heads along George and Princes Sts in the same direction as the Balaclava and Kenmure, like them turns into Rattray St, but then at Harvey Norman's corner goes straight up McClaggen St, up Serpentine Ave, turns sharp right into Canongate, up Russell, along Arthur, up Rattray, up Ross, into Highgate, which then becomes Kenmure Rd, down Rosebery (I think) into Beaumont, up Napier, into Jubilee, and onto Mailer, where it climbs up to reach the Stone St roundabout.   I got off in Jubilee St, just before Mailer, courtesy of the friendly driver.

And walked up into Elgin Rd.  And found the Kenmure bus reaching the stop I normally get off at just as I approached it, and then found the Balaclava bus reaching my own home stop just as I approached it a few minutes later.  The latter would have been the most direct route, since it leaves outside my son's work and drops me off outside my own house...literally.

The Kenmure route used to be part of the Balaclava route in the old days, and never went into Stanley St, where I used to live.  Now there's a bus stop outside my old house. 


Furthermore, when I was at school, and had to come up the hill for a music lesson at the convent at St Francis Xavier's, I used to get the Maryhill cable car from Mornington.  It would go down the steep hill at Mornington, up Glenpark Ave, and stop outside my current house.   Where, one day, I fell off the cable car because I presumed it was stopping before it was.

I find all this very interesting.  You may not!

Sue Bradford's record

It's hard to feel sorry that Sue Bradford is leaving Parliament - even more so considering it's on the basis of not getting co-leadership of the Greens. I got the impression she started out well, protesting at things that were unjust, but somewhere along the line she seems to have lost a sense of morality. Family First provides the following evidence of her voting on family and moral issues:

She voted for the decriminalisation of prostitution, civil unions and the accompanying relationships bill, euthanasia, anti-smacking law, Care of Children Act, and the failed Electoral Finance Act.

She voted against parental notification for teenage abortion, raising the drinking age, banning street prostitution in Manukau City, and the Marriage amendment (defining marriage as between a man and a woman). She also voted against increasing the penalty for possession of child pornography being increased to 5 years, against P being classified as a class A drug, and would have supported the decriminalisation of marijuana.

Yup, I think it was definitely time for her to go.

PS (2.10.09) In the light of one of the comments to this post, I'm including the link to Chris Trotter's assessment of Sue Bradford and why she didn't really 'fit' into the Green Party. It's probably more positive than I or others might paint her, but he probably knows her a lot better than I do.

The saga continues...

On Sept the 8th, there was a meeting with John Boscawen, Bob McCoskrie, Jim Evans and Larry Baldock on amending s59 of the Crimes Act to decriminalise the use of reasonable force for the purposes of parental correction. (That's the 'anti-smacking' bill for you bods out there wot didn't understand that legal language.0

Madeleine Flanagan wrote on the blog, MandM about the meeting, and gives a short rundown on what each of the speakers said, as well as reminding us of the difficulty Sue Bradford apparently has with everyday, ordinary plainspeaking language. She doesn't do her party any favours, and it would probably be best for them to forcibly retire her as soon as practically possible.

Unless, of course, she can come up with a real solution to the problem of child abuse in this country, something she so far has predictably failed to do.

Incidentally, I hadn't come across the MandM site before - it's run by Matt and Madeleine Flanagan - you can read all about them here. I like their style, and have signed up to the Twitter page to give myself an idea if they're the sort of people I'd like to keep track of (!)