The Ultimate in bus tickets...

It's been a chewy day today. Spent a lot of it tidying the office. Now my idea of tidying is simply changing the places of where everything is kept. Simple. It only takes a few hours to reacquaint myself with old friends. However Mrs DB has a completely different idea of the 'tidying up' experience. Her draconian method involves throwing things out!

We've had several exchanges of opinions during the day and I'd like you to know that I won every one of them. I'd like you to know that but it's not true. I'm going to need a skip!

Then she 'found' my bus ticket collection. It wasn't lost but she 'finds' things when she realises I haven't thrown them out as instructed in the last office invasion. Then I got sidetracked and spent a bit of time reminiscing about the source of some of those tickets.

'Ultimates' were my favourite type of ticket, they were small and brightly coloured so I picked them up wherever I could.

Looking at the selection above I can recall the origins of many of them. The Lincoln Corporation Transport was picked up off the pavement - in Lincoln in 1962 - surprise, surprise. It was a Sunday afternoon and I couldn't get a lift so I walked to the south side of town and this was a trophy! The Newcastle 3d ticket was probably a bus ride to Gosforth and a roundabout on the A1 where I used to hitch hike from.

The Birmingham CT 2d 'Childs' was from Charles Road in Small Heath to Digbeth Bus Station where I probably spent the afternoon bus spotting! The lovely pink Ashton ticket was for a ride on a trolley (I think) from Piccadilly? to Audenshaw Trough where my pal's aunty lived. A 6d ride on the West Riding Auto Co probably took me from Wakefield to Colbro Jawbone Works, a scrapyard at Rothwell where I used to 'rake around', usually nicking radiator badges off derelict scrapped buses. (Oops).

Some of the tickets were removed from the used ticket boxes on scrapped vehicles, sometimes a good poke around an old wrecker would provide very old tickets that had been lost down seats for years. What fun I used to have in the early sixties...

Then I discovered that girls were not soft boys and a whole new hobby started.