no loo Inverness to Edinburgh

"Stagecoach trains its entire staff in the importance of customer care and does not tolerate incidents such as the one you have described in your letter." So they welcomely wrote on 25 May 2007, concerning a jobsworth driver who was stuck in a queue on a sliproad at the Forth bridge and refused to let passengers off before reaching the stop, even though some were desperate for a pee which they had to take behind a junction box as soon as they got off. By that time the situation on that bus had got aggressive. I should think so.

Now that Stagecoach and Citylink have become half-merged, can we rely on the same principle to be brought out again? Yesterday, they put an ordinary Stagecoach express bus such as you see around Fife, with no toilet, onto an Inverness to Edinburgh Citylink service lasting 3 1/2 hours. Its driver was very good about it, full marks to him, when I asserted the right to get off for a pee at Broxden, the coach stop site on the edge of Perth - which itself has no loo. But what position are Citylink going to take on the driver of the connecting Glasgow coach, who refused to allow me to use his onboard toilet? "Absolutely not, no way, as soon as I'm loaded up I'm away." Peeing in the bushes instead meant climbing over a fence and squeezing under some very thorny vegetation, obviously without time to waste. An older passenger with limited mobility might find this too hard to do, yet is even more likely to need the loo. There was no other way to get out of sight, at least not without taking a long walk away from the coaches who might then go without them. They will be entitled by the facts of biology to go right where they are, the indecency will be Citylink's fault not theirs, won't it? I challenge Citylink to find any way to say otherwise, and next time we write any diversity feedbacks for the police we should put this to them too. This point needs committally forcing, to make the bus companies work properly.

Clamber into the bushes I did, promptly, in front of this driver. He knew it meant no chance to wash my hands, I suppose Citylink expects its other passengers to be happy with that? If his ego seriously expected me to continue my journey without going, he was delusional, with a delusion of authority over biology. No it was not established at any sod's order that I would hold on. If y' gotta go y' gotta go, asserted.

Sometimes it is part of autism, its metabolic and digestive issues, to need the loo more frequently. The willingness now found, of the operator of the longest trunk coach service through the middle of Scotland, to do this, puts a barrier between the aspie communities of the Central Belt and the north.

Maurice Frank