National Express

I took the coach down to Portsmouth on Monday night after work - I think for the first time ever, although I may have travelled back via London from Manchester after visting the universities there as a 17 year old.

Anyway, after only using the train/car for the last 12 years, the journey opened my eyes - not only do you take a number of backstreets to get from Victoria to Putney, pass through Richmond, Kingston and Tolworth, but then also stop in Guildford (another place I used to frequent in my youth), then back on to the A3(M) - and usually direct into Portsmouth, but the coach turns off some 20 miles out of Portsmouth and uses the old London Road.

As we crawled down this road, I saw parts of Portsmouth I had either not visited or seen for years - as children, our summer holidays always began with a trip up this road on the way to Scotland or anywhere else. It was fascinating to see how little place like Cowplain, Purbrook and Widley had changed in the intervening 20 years. They seem to have been frozen in time as the traffic has deserted them entirely. They still have small parades of shops, newsagents, tea houses, and the assorted slightly bizarre specialist shopping experiences you tend to get away from the main shopping areas - caravan showrooms, old-style cake shops, etc... There must be masses of these places, with businesses slowly going bankrupt across the UK as larger roads are being built, shopping centres become ever larger, and supermarkets diversify their product ranges ever further. Whither the spirit of British capitalism? A nation of shopkeepers has become a nation of factory outlet visiting credit card users...