From Land’s End to John O’Groats by bus.At 9.37 am on a Wednesday morning in September, Mark Mason boards the number 21 bus at Land’s End in Cornwall. The bus travels through various villages, picking up shoppers. One of them, a woman in her sixties, tells her friend that last night she watched ‘Wine and Dine’ on Channel Four. The programme, her friend corrects her, is actually called ‘Come to Dine’. At 11.03 am the bus arrives at its destination, Penzance, where everyone disembarks to go about their business. Everyone, that is, except Mason. He crosses to the other side of the bus station, and 17 minutes later catches the number 83 to St Ives. By tonight he will be in Redruth, home (he learns over dinner in a local pub) to Britain’s first lift, installed in 1842 to save copper miners an hour’s climb.The day has seen Mason complete the first five of the 78 local bus rides that will, over the next fortnight, carry him all the way to John O’Groats in Scotland. Move Along Please is his account of the 1200-mile journey, during which he realises that your home country is often the one you know least. Combining the same mix of observation and trivia with which his Walk the Lines captured London, Mason creates a paint-by-bus-numbers portrait of Britain. We learn that the phrase ‘Peeping Tom’ originated in Coventry (Tom was the only man to see Lady Godiva’s naked ride through the city)… that a medieval spelling mistake gave the Duke of Devonshire a chunk of Derbyshire… and that Loch Ness could hold the water from all the lakes in England and Wales combined. Amusing, informative and wistful by terms, this is the story of Britain in 78 bus journeys.

Move Along, Please: Land’s End to John O’Groats by Local Bus PDF

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