Local Goings-on - Isle of Thanet Gazette February 18th 2005

Seriously, passengers are happy on the Loop

Doreen Foreman has been around all my life. Her daughter, Maggie, went to school with my elder sister, Judith, and everyone has stayed friends. She makes me laugh. Doreen is my own personal clap-o-meter as far as this column goes. (Snorts of disapproval for dancing on tables and getting drunk. The thumbs-up for anything involving a charity). When we last met, she told me she'd once prepared a letter to the paper complaining about my table-top antics and suggesting I wrote about something more sensible. Maggie stopped her sending it, saying it was "rude". Shame, as I'm quite sure I'd have enjoyed it immensely. So this column is for Doreen - who quite often despairs of me and thinks I would be better employed turning my attentions to matters of local interest and import - namely The Loop. For the uninitiated (which until recently, included me) this is our new local bus service, which as the name suggests, continuously circles the island in both directions, providing a bus at ten-minute intervals to all the major stops. Well not quite all of them, according to Doreen, who wants to know why there isn't one at the St Peter's Road entrance to the hospital where so many people need to go for blood tests; and a reader from Westgate who enquires why it doesn't go there at all! I have also received tales of a pile-up of empty Loops, Loops you cannot get on for screaming school-children and Loops without sufficient wheelchair access. So - taking my role as intrepid reporter seriously for you all, I queued up in Ramsgate in the cold, camera and dictaphone in hand, hoping for a set of suitably disgruntled passengers and maybe a small riot and bought my £2 day-rider ticket which would take me all the way round the route as many times as I liked till nightfall. I hadn't been on a local bus for years. It's rather fun - a bit like riding a bicycle - since you see things you don't usually notice and can peer nosily into other people's gardens and windows as you rumble past. There were seven of us aboard as we went past Waitrose, three more got on down the road and by the time we had waited at the harbour for a bit, the bus was almost full. Everyone looked perfectly pleased. Steve Chatfield told me he uses the Loop every day to take him back up the hill and save his knees. He thought it was great. "The best thing to happen to transport locally." Peter Johnson, the driver, with whom I held an impromptu interview when stopped at Cecil Square, confirmed that the passengers seem "very happy with it." What about these dreadful school kids, I asked, without admitting I was the mother of one of them. The school-run was "a bit chaotic" Peter agreed, which I suspect, having heard the gleeful accounts from my son of small boys hanging out of windows, was a polite way of putting it. My sister, who had come along for the ride, suggested a separate service for them perhaps called Edu-Loop, along with a more comprehensive hospital route - Medi-Loop. But by then it was lunchtime so we dropped out of the loop altogether and into the pub. Sorry Doreen, but we did. You'll be pleased to know I didn't dance on the tables.....