Time Travel at the Scottish Vintage Bus Museum

Everything’s nostalgia these days!  A thirst, a yearning for the past. You’ll find it in the unlikeliest places: check out Grutas Park in Lithuania which is effectively a Stalin theme park, a sculpture tribute to all things Soviet. One wonders if North Koreans have nostalgia and, if so, in which form is it allowed?

Everything’s nostalgia. You can’t move on Facebook without some down memory lane page inviting your attention. It’s as if the past, though far from perfect, is some kind of escape from an awful present and an ominously foreboding future. It’s like digging your heels into the turf as you are being dragged inexorably toward the cliff-edge in an attempt to stave off the inevitable: Trump in the White House, Nazis on the rise; mad folk driving vehicles into crowds; the consequences of climate change that you know in your heart the scientists are sincere about but you’d rather not believe so you can keep on driving your car without over-much conscience.

Similarly; the past offers us a way out. Wasn’t it all so innocent then? Was it? Hasn’t it all been spoiled now by them? Who are them? Politicians, immigrants, benefit scroungers. Everyone apart from whom it probably is: the even scarier them. Best back with the Bakelite and the Chopper bike, Slade and wearing cloth caps on Blackpool beach. We’ll forget the racial bigotry, the domestic violence, the multiplicity of repressed emotions. The past was a perfect world. Why can’t we return to it? Well, maybe you can….

Lathalmond on a placid summer’s day. The sun's glint splatters off the coos arses and comes to rest in the shade of wee meadows. The softly bantering public can saunter down stony dirt paths toward the arena of the omnibus. One hundred and ninety auld crates that used to trundle the roads of Scotland: Fintry to Inverness; Springburn to Carnwadric; Polton to East Craigs. Black, white and every colour of the rainbow, some still able to splutter to life: most, knackered and weak-kneed, cartoon-visaged mournful like auld mutts sent out to lie in the garden of rest that is a bus museum. Saved from the crusher due to the undying interest of a segment of the public that wishes to be known only to themselves – bus-spotters, lower even than train enthusiasts in the geek league table, higher only than their brethren who pursue an interest in lawn-mowers.

One hundred and ninety buses in the area of a large field in a valley protected from prying eyes by trees of uniform hue, maybe designed for the purpose, for this is a place of innocence and quiet sin. 

Another hangar full of buses and artefact: magazines, DVDs then, on the raised dais of a grassy hill ‘the hidden shed’ which may be there, or not be there at all, and if so, is its purpose certain? Were you to climb this hill and look over this vehicular Brigadoon one would see a play-field of geriatric motor-machines arrayed across and beyond. If this were your idea of heaven then, that’s exactly where you’d be.

It’s a long road that has no turning as the saying goes.