I wanted to go to Cirencester today, which is a small but lovely town not too far from Swindon. There is a bus service that goes to Cirencester once a day and I can catch it from my regular bus stop instead of going to bus station. However, the service has no time table printed on the bus stop so I only knew about it as I saw it passing by a few weeks ago. The destination displayed on the bus was exactly that: Cirencester. Only when I got there I found out the bus was actually going to Cirencester College that is outside of Cirencester.

Never mind, I thought, I’ll now need to take a bus to Cirencester and I’ll be fine. There were loads of buses there but no time table whatsoever. It looks like Wiltshire, the part of England where I live is notorious for having no or incomplete timetables because I never came accross this problem when I lived in Reading.

The area was full of young people but I didn’t want to speak with them. I’d feel like an idiot. So I got my mobile out and checked how to get to Cirencester from where I was and Google map suggested bus number C5, that was meant to leave in just 4 minutes. The sign displayed on the bus was Swindon, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t go through Cirencester first. It didn’t come to my mind to ask the driver and I don’t have to buy tickets as I have disabled bus pass so I just got in. After a few minutes journey I realised we’re heading straight to Swindon! Exciting, isn’t it? So I had a trip to Cirencester College and back.

That wouldn’t happen to my late mum because she always asked about literally everything. Even if she had instructions available written down for whatever she needed, she would ignore them and look for a chance to ask questions instead.

Obviously that’s not always the right approach as people are sometimes misinformed or, in rare cases, malicious, but that never put her off of that approach.

Moreover, she was getting annoyed with me for looking for information in books, online, on maps and in written instructions. I was getting annoyed with her for relying on strangers with pretty much everything.

Obviously the best thing would be to rely on information from both those sources and I sometimes speak to people if I want to find out something. It’s just an irony though that today I didn’t and I ended up having a trip to Cirencester College and back.