About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Friday, December 22, 2023

B is for Buses - Part II

Not that there was a Part I, but we looked at A-C last time, these are D-M and there will be one or two more in the fullness of time!
 
Funny old day, this morning through to the early afternoon was all a bit of a rush, with banks and technology, technology and banks, bleuh! Then this afternoon/early-evening was very laid-back and lazy, I almost started several different posts, but thought better of it [couldn't be arsed] and did some scanning, not these, these were done with the railway stuff the other day.
 
Then out to dinner, which finds me at half-eleven pleasantly relaxed by good food, good beer and good company, but hopefully alert enough to get this up without too many typos!
 
Like the previous ones, this is a novelty bar of something which doesn't appear to have been chocolate at all? It came in a job-lot, so I'm here to tell you I didn't have to try it, and it's not as much of a playable thing as those Cadbury's ones we saw last time either!

Being as how it's rather two-dimensional, with the interesting artwork on one side only, but it's definitely a bus and a novelty box, so in the tag-list Earthlore goes! Do you think it's all been about tags, or the Lik Be being LB thing? I guess half-a-dozen-odd know? Common-sense and humanity are never strong bedfellows!
 
A lot of Bus companies issue card models of their buses, and the rest of these are of that type of thing, with these being from just before the Bus Wars in Greater Manchester, following the mostly unwanted, and over time, pretty disastrous Tory privatisations of said buses!
 

While these are a private enterprise, I think, from the diversity of Buses/Companies depicted. Published by MA Arts, they are all 4mm scale or designed for OO-gauge model railways, where card models have an honourable history!
 
Dressed-up as postcards, you can see from the stamp-outline and address area, they are extra-large postcards, but wouldn't it have been cool to get one of these from Granny & Granddad in the post?

Marked-up to a City of Oxford Motor Services Ltd., this has the secondary trope of being a timetable aid-memoir, but scale is unknown, probably toward 1:64th if it is specific, it's also quite flimsy, sort of book-cover paper? It's pre-slotted and no cutting or glue is required.

Not that sure if this is MBF by Nimbus, or Nimus for MBF, but I suspect the former, and another scaled to 4mm/OO-gauge. We had these round here for a while as Busy Bee, or Beeline, I can't remember! But they ran a Fleet-Hartley Wintney-Hook-Basingrad route, I think, and used to dive off the roundabout at Fleet Station like Agostini was driving, and late for his tea!

You have to colour these yourself! I've credited them to Merseybus, given the paucity of details, and the fact that three are badged to Merseybus? And I think they are probably also all model-railway scale, I've rather unscaled them rendering them unreproducible, as they are all still in copyright, even if the publishers have all gone?

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