Around 25 years ago my parent retired to a village in Norfolk. They chose their location based upon services within the village accessible by foot, transport connections and larger towns in driving distance. Their logic was that at some point, they may not be able to drive so a village store was vital plus a post office, doctor, dentist and chemist. They found such a village and up sticks out of London.

This, of course, was well before Amazon and grocery deliveries via the internet. Fortunately, both my parent are adept at online purchasing and drives to the nearby town weekly to purchase groceries all but stopped during 2020 and now they have weekly Tesco deliveries.

Over the last 25 years the village has seen many changes. The Barclays Bank branch shut quite a while ago and is now a residential building. The village store deteriorated so that you could just about buy a newspaper but was then taken over by Co-op and is now a much better facility.

The chemist remains although apparently the doctors surgery will not allow patients to obtain their mediation online and insist on old people dragging themselves to the surgery to get a prescription whilst at the same time spreading themselves over multiple surgeries in the area so it is impossible to get a swift appointment. Waits are generally two weeks.

In the meantime, progress in the village has seen at least two developments of new homes, bringing in new life and a younger demographic. The two pubs seems to be doing a roaring trade and the fish and chip shop and Chinese takeaway have received a boost in sales.

As for the rest of the village, it now has a bakery that provides something better than the standard processed loaf from the general store plus cakes, pastries and savoury snacks.

There are other retail units. There is a hairdresser and a proper butcher plus a beauty salon with London prices that I have not seen actually open. There is a small hardware store that appears only to exist because of its position on the village square  and resistance from the local council to allow the resident to retire and turn his shop into living space.

There have been a few attempts to open cafes but these charge town prices for lattes and cappuccinos where the demographic of the village will not pay these prices regularly and the concept of popping in for a cup of tea of coffee whilst on the way back from the general store with the daily paper could build a regular trade albeit at a lower cost per cup seems not to appeal to the various café startups. Needless to say none have survived.

When my parent moved into the village, there were various bus services, some running weekly, some on occasional days but none at the weekend or at least not Sunday. There is a small local rail station where numerous trains pass through and only two per day stop at inconvenient times unless you are to or from school in larger villages or towns. It is so inconvenient as to be practically useless. I have tried to make use of the limited service but it takes a ridiculous amount of planning to hook up with the one train that it is reasonable to catch so I have given up and now alight at a small town where I am collected by my Dad in his car.

With my London attitude I couldn’t comprehend a bus that only ran once a week and the fact that, if you missed it, you were stuck if you couldn’t call someone to rescue you or call a taxi from some far flung place at goodness knows what cost to pick you up.

Imagine my surprise when, this Christmas, I noticed a flurry of new bus stops in the village. My parent, still being car mobile, hadn’t even noticed and apparently had not received anything from the parish council or bus companies to announce the new service. The service provides a ridiculously complicated matrix of times, destinations and routes that depend on the day of the week. The idea that a bus might run from A to B, following the same route on every day seems to be a wild notion confined to cities. It really is a case of “if there is an R in the month and a bone in your leg, you can get a bus from the middle of the route to one or other of the destinations but not both and possibly only for half the route then on a random day in the week the bus goes in a completely different direction to a random local town but not to the normal destinations.

I determined to test the new service over the Christmas vacation and thus set off at 9.30 am to catch a bus from the end of the road, where there was only a bus stop on one side of the road and where the bus seemed to pass by twice, having done a circuit of the village. The bus arrived exactly on time although from the direction that we were going towards, making me wonder if it was a service going the other way. My Dad was on high alert to rescue me from whatever village I found myself in if there was no possibility or a return journey that day.

The driver confirmed that he did indeed return that way and would stop there despite the lack of a physical bus stop. He went off around the village and picked up half a dozen locals for the trip of some 9.5 miles to a nearby town with a Tesco, a Morrisons, Superdrug, Boots and Costa.

The bus driver stopped at a random place to pick up a chap using a walking frame who clearly would not have been able to get to one of the designated bus stops. This seemed mad and wonderful to this Londoner who isn’t allowed to get off a bus other than at a proper stop even if the bus is caught in an accident tailback and where the average speed of a bus is 10 mph on a good day.

We arrived on time and had around two hours to shop which is either far too short to have lunch and return or too long and involved hanging around at the bus station for 30 minutes. At least there was a shelter but with no sides so wrap up warm!

As the bus fired up to return, the driver should have gone to a far flung stop then returned to the bus station to pick up us returning passengers. Strangely he invited us all on board and declared that, as he hadn’t picked up anyone at the isolated stop, he wouldn’t bother go back there. God help you if you were waiting at the far flung stop to take a one-way trip to my parents village because you would be out of luck for at least two days. Bonkers!

We all did appreciate getting on the bus early and sitting in the warm for ten minutes.

Off we went and we arrived back in the village exactly on time. At one stop a lady got on, took the circuit of the village and got off exactly one stop away from where she got on. Clearly she would have had difficulties walking that short distance so the scenic route around the village was preferable. I did wonder how she got down to the village in the first place. Maybe she had been sitting on a bench in the village square from 9.45 to 12.45 waiting for the bus back? Or in the pub? Who knows as there aren’t any cafes to sit in.

The bus driver was smashing; he was professional and caring. I asked him if he would be allowed to stop at a certain point (right next to a railway station that strangely doesn’t have a bus stop) and he said he would stop anywhere that was safe. This is a great idea but I would be wary of expecting the bus to stop and pick me up from said railway station if it were a different driver.

I am considering retiring in the next couple of years and moving to this village. The lack of public transport has always been a huge negative. I haven’t driven for maybe ten years as parking in London is an expensive and tedious business and I’ve embraced the joys of public transport but if you are used to living somewhere where the next bus is only five minutes away, rural bus services take a lot of organisation to get the only bus on any given day. Perhaps the bus companies assume that retired people have nothing better to do than scan timetables and leave 15 minutes early?

Given the influx of new blood into the village is of the car-owning, school-run variety, I wonder if sheer numbers of residents obliges the local councils to provide services? I cannot see many of the new residents using the bus and this was confirmed by the demographic of my fellow passengers this week.

What other services might become available now the village is growing? An actual doctor that spends actual time in the actual surgery? A post office that is not at the rear of a dog food shop. A café that does not expect pensioners to pay £3.50 for a cup of tea every day when passing to get the papers? I am seriously considering opening a small café with tea at £1 per cup to evaluate the theory. Or perhaps I will charge the incomers £4.50 for a flat white and subsidise the pensioners with free tea.