The Hopper fare was introduced in September 2016, allowing bus and tram passengers to take one extra journey for free within 60 minutes of tapping in. Two years later it was extended to allow unlimited journeys within an hour, saving Londoners even more money and enabling some pretty lengthy one-fare journeys. Over a billion Hopper journeys have been taken since... Hopper Challenge 1: Starting from Bus Stop M, escape London by bus for one fare of £1.75 TfL buses cross the Greater London boundary, so all I have to do is catch one before my 60 minutes from Bow elapses. So how to start? Of the buses that serve Bus Stop M the 488 is only going one more stop, the 108 terminates in Stratford and the 276 grinds to a halt around Newham Hospital, so not them. The only solution is to ride a 25 or 425 all the way to Ilford and then pick up a bus to the Home Counties there. 0h00m Board a 25 at Bus Stop M. £1.75 deducted. My hour long-countdown begins. 0h01m We sail through the Bow Roundabout now that the roadworks and lane closures are finished, hurrah. 0h03m We're neck and neck with a 425 along Stratford High Street. At some stops we get all the passengers and it overtakes, then at the next stop it gets all the passengers and we overtake. 0h08m Mass exodus at Stratford bus station. It'd be quicker to get the tube where I'm going, but not cheaper. 0h13m There are multiple sets of roadworks between here and Ilford, mostly related to the addition of segregated cycle lanes. We also have to duck out the way at one point to let an ambulance pass through. If we don't get to Ilford in time I can't use my Hopper and this challenge collapses, plus my journey will cost twice as much. These are not worries you have with a Travelcard. 0h20m We've reached Forest Gate, and so far the 425 driver has overtaken us three times. 0h27m Four times. 0h30m At Little Ilford Lane the traffic's looking really slow going the other way, but we're progressing fine. 0h32m Alight at Ilford Hill and walk round the corner to stop H outside Ilford Station (0h34m) 150 to Chigwell Row, the 167 to Loughton or the 462 to Limes Farm Estate. Grrr, all of these buses are at least 9 minutes away... but in good news that's well inside my time window so I should be fine. However it's worth pointing out that a Hopper connection can totally fail if the second bus doesn't turn up in time, so it's often a fare saving that requires a massive lump of luck on your side. OK, bus two... 0h46m Board a 462 outside Ilford station. £0.00 deducted. After nine years that's my very first Hopper, kerching! 0h56m We've reached the Gants Hill roundabout and are about to head off on a tour of the backstreets. The 462 is a proper twiddlybus, a guided tour of all sorts of Redbridge streets not normally seen. 1h00m As my hour expires I'm on Longwood Gardens near the shops. A magnolia is in full bloom in someone's front garden. 1h02m Technically a Hopper fare is valid for 62 minutes, not 60, in case the clocks on buses aren't quite accurate. But there are no other bus routes here I could switch to anyway. 1h05m Barkingside High Street is busy and takes away most of our passengers. 1h07m Now for a swoosh past Fairlop station and Fairlop Waters Country Park, a scenic diversion the 462's been taking since 2016. 1h14m After threading through Hainault we finally cross the Greater London boundary at the top of Manford Way. The first stop in Essex is just outside Grange Hill station, but I'm continuing to the terminus for extra value for money. 1h21m I've ridden alone with the driver round the loop road on the Limes Farm Estate. The last stop is at Amanda Close, technically only five metres outside the Greater London boundary but that totally counts. I have escaped London using the Hopper fare and spent only £1.75. I'm just 7 miles from home but it's been a 13 mile journey to get here, and I've paid only 14p a mile. Limes Farm is a fascinating place, a large 1960s council estate built for Chigwell Urban District and accessed via a single road. It's both spacious and green but also well past its best, with oddly-shaped flats, one drab Londis and a few intervening attempts at regeneration. It deserves a full blogpost one day but not now, I have one more challenge to tackle on the way home. Hopper Challenge 2: How many buses can I ride in an hour? 24 buses back in 2017 and a City Monitor reporter rode 28, but that was taking advantage of a longer grace period. Originally TfL allowed 70 minutes for one Hopper fare but during the pandemic they cut the buffer from ten minutes to a less generous two so I've only got 62 minutes to try to max out. 0h00m Here we go, a 247 to Barkingside, start the clock. If I stay on to Barkingside High Street there should be lots of buses to switch to. Checks app... bugger, no buses for the next ten minutes. This may be a road served by six different routes but I have unintentionally launched into a bus desert. Well this is rubbish. And I can't go back and start again because my Hopper is valid for another 50 minutes. 0h17m OK, I'm going to catch a 167 in the opposite direction, one stop back north, just to fill the time. 0h24m Sigh, you wait all this time and then three southbound buses come at once. I'll pick the 128 and jump on that for one stop. 0h26m ...and then switch to the 150 that was coming up behind. I would switch again at the next stop but no further buses are due. Let's try again at the Gants Hill roundabout. Sigh, half time and I've only managed four buses so far. 0h37m It's still very gappy, even with eight routes to choose from. So gappy that I've had to catch the next 150 coming along behind. 0h43m Barely quarter of an hour left so I really need this 396. Don't look at me strange when I ding the bell after one stop. 0h44m This is more like it, straight onto the 128 behind. 0h46m And then a 462. Why wasn't I having this much luck earlier? 0h51m And for the last stop into Ilford here's a 179. That's nine buses so far, and four in the last ten minutes. I have time to catch one more and I need it to be a 25 or 425 that'll take me home. 0h55m Come on come on. 0h56m Please turn up before I hit the hour. 0h57m Eek this is getting close. 0h58m Oh thank goodness, a 25 and just in time. It means I managed 10 buses in the hour, which isn't bad after my disastrous opening 20 minutes. 1h01m It turns out I could have sneaked in an extra W19 just before my 62 minutes was up, but I wouldn't have known that for sure at the last stop so it wasn't worth the risk. 1h41m And I'm finally back at Bow Church where I can hop off for a cup of tea. 2h18m The 25 I was on finally pulls in at Holborn Viaduct. This means I could have enjoyed a 2¼hr journey all the way from the outskirts to the City for £1.75, confirming the Hopper's sometimes exceptional value. The Central line does this in 30% of the time but at twice the price. In conclusion I have now used the Hopper and managed to get all the way from Bow to Essex on a single fare. I also used a Hopper to get home and rode ten buses in the process, which isn't a record but is still a very decent bit of card-bashing. If I'd done this seven years ago it would have been proper bloggage but instead it's old news, sorry. And never again.

The major roadworks at the Bow Roundabout are complete and traffic is flowing freely again. Hoo-bloody-rah. It took longer than strictly necessary for all the cones to be removed. They lingered mysteriously on a couple of arms of the roundabout, so for example traffic on Bow Road was still being unnecessarily funnelled into one lane even when traffic arriving from the A12 had the full two lanes available. But with all the cones gone six months of disruption have finally ended, so if traffic snarls up now it's because of rush hours and normal congestion rather than anything self-imposed. Also when I said the roadworks were complete I was lying, they're still working on the expansion joints. This is because the Bow Interchange isn't just a roundabout/flyover/underpass combo, it's also a bridge over the River Lea. The current bridge is now 55 years old so it made sense to use this opportunity to give the metal joints a good once-over, and for practical reasons most of that renovation is being done at the end of the works. A team from a company called BridgeCare turned up with two huge vehicles called Bridge Expansion Joint Units and used shovels, blowtorches and specialist equipment along the length of a curved groove, measuring out the gaps between the two joints with wooden blocks. Previous updates: #0 #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 #10 #11 #12 #13 #14 #15 #16 #17 #18

A selection of thoughts from Sunday 1) I only received 5 birthday cards this year, most of them from people who remember me being born in 1965 (dgD, dGA3, dgDBM). Pictured are some of the 43 cards I received when I was born, all of a very 1960s aesthetic. Number of birthday cards received (age 0) - 43 (age 20) - 23 (age 40) - 16 (age 60) - 5 2) I was hoping to catch a nice early train from Hackney Wick but there weren't any, indeed it turns out on Sundays there never are. The entire Mildmay line between Willesden Junction and Stratford is unserved before 9am on Sundays, with the first westbound train departing Stratford at 0900 and the first eastbound train departing Willesden Junction at 0902. The station with the slowest start is Camden Road whose first Sunday train arrives at 0922, and I wonder if that's the latest timetabled start on any day on any TfL line. 3) Sunday was an unseasonably springlike day for early March, at 18°C the warmest 9th March since 2014. The warmest 9th March on record was in 1948 with 23.9°C recorded at Wealdstone, that's 75°F. While I was researching this online I also found the weather forecast for the day I was born ("England and Wales will be sunny and rather warm this afternoon, but frost and some fog patches will return tonight in midland and eastern districts"). The temperature was -5°C at Kew when I was born, rising to 10°C in the afternoon, and my Dad would have cycled through fog to see me at the hospital. The Met Office has a nerdily detailed archive of weather forecasts and data records for the whole country here. 4) To enjoy the weather I walked the Croxley Boundary Walk, a 6.3 mile waymarked circuit around the village where I grew up. It's a fantastically varied walk for somewhere so close to London (canal towpath, country lane, fields, village green, river valley, chalk stream, woods, disused railway, moorland) and well signed throughout. On the way round I spotted several signs of spring (catkins, snowdrops, daffodils, crocuses, celandines, flowering cherries, budding trees, nest-building, butterflies, bees collecting blossom, emerging bluebell stalks), also a fox, several swans, a heron and a pair of red kites. I previously walked the Croxley Boundary Walk on 9th March 2014, and blogged about it then so I won't again, but do enjoy a few photos and yes I do recommend it. 5) On the way round the Croxley Boundary Walk there's a lovely path that climbs across a large field from the edge of Whippendell Woods. I was shocked to discover there's now a plan to turn this field into 600 houses, unexcitingly titled 'Land north of Little Green Lane', which would extend the village's built-up area by 5%. Thankfully the top end of the field would survive, reworked as Rousebarn Country Park, but the whole plan's brazenly speculative and very poorly connected to the rest of the village. Whatever the government's definition of 'grey belt' is, this definitely isn't it. 6) I've had plans for a while to see if I could get a mention on the radio on the occasion of my 60th birthday. In the event one of my target shows turned out to be pre-recorded, one was doing an International Women's Day special, one doesn't really do dedications any more, one I wasn't listening to at the crucial moment, one I forgot about until it was too late and the one email I did send made no ripples whatsoever. If anyone sent in a message on my behalf and I missed it do let me know, else I'll have to wait another ten years. 7) BestMate and BestMate'sOtherHalf took me out for a meal in the West End and we started off with cocktails. We thought we'd try the Cellar Door, the speakeasy bar squished into a former gents toilet off Aldwych, which Londonist described as "a mirrored microcosm", Time Out as "a tiny basement" and Secret London as "lav-ley". It seems it only picks up after 9pm, pre-cabaret, so it was pretty much dead. Also they were probably the slowest cocktails I've ever had, sluggishly confected, so the atmosphere really didn't match the setting. 8) For my birthday meal we went to London's oldest restaurant which is Rules in Covent Garden, established 1798. It's a classical warren adorned by Georgian portraits, seemingly with a regular clientele of ruddy couples, shire buddies and old money. The food's extremely traditional, all meat, game and oysters, although not so staid that they won't stick a candle in some ice cream and bring it to your table. For my main I was totally set on steak and kidney pudding until I saw they were doing a proper Sunday roast, then couldn't resist crumble and custard for dessert. BestMate has kindly shielded me from the overall bill. Also we had the table next to the really famous one, the one where M's seen dining in Spectre and which brings all the James Bond fans to the pass. 9) While I was out, Radio 4 broadcast a half-hour documentary by a blogger who rides buses and writes about them, in this case the new V1 nightbus from Manchester to Leigh. It was dead thoughtful of them to schedule something so on point on the occasion of my birthday. Incidentally if you're waiting for me to report back on the number 60 bus route, I'm planning to make that the first trip I do with my 60+ Oyster card when it arrives, which it hasn't yet so you'll need to be patient. 10) I may have overdone it, I had to lie down at one point. But if what you want for a milestone birthday is a memorable day then Sunday certainly delivered.

Unblogged things I did in March 1965 I wasn't around at the start of March 1965, I was lurking embryonically ready to make a grand appearance. Even when I did emerge I had no linguistic ability, no long-term memory nor any recognition of what on earth was going on, plus there were no blogs or the internet I could have recorded things on anyway. But my Mum had just started keeping a diary, perhaps in recognition of the enormous changes a first child would mean in her life, which allows me to bring you this (heavily edited) account of my earliest days. The first nine days are in her own words, the rest of the month I've paraphrased. Cast of characters Mon 1: Rather cold but nice bright morning. Got all my washing and ironing done nice and early. Had a quick clean round downstairs. Sat and almost finished one dress in afternoon. Watched TV and knitted in evening. [Monday was always washday in the 60s, even when you were nine months pregnant] [I wonder if that dress was baby sized and meant for me had I been a girl] [likely candidates for programmes watched included Date With Doonican, Bewitched and Perry Mason] Tue 2: Letter from dgGM and dgGF, they hope to come this weekend. Did the net curtains and some woolies. Cleaned all the windows inside. Very cold wind today. Went to the shops in the afternoon, then wrote a letter to dgGM. Watched TV in the evening. dgD has another cold coming. [My mum had taken to spring cleaning with a vengeance, either because this was normal back then or because she realised she wouldn't be getting much cleaning done imminently] [temperatures would fall to -7°C that evening, the coldest night of the winter] [wow, the joys of receiving a letter and writing back the same day, safe in the knowledge it would arrive almost immediately] [likely candidates for programmes watched included Compact and The Danny Kaye Show] Wed 3: Had a quick clean round. Went to dGA1 in the morning. Went to clinic everything alright. Lost 4ozs this week. Was home before 2.45. Sat and finished rompers. In bed early as both tired. [My auntie lived a few miles away so I suspect my pregnant mum rode round on her scooter, a very mid-60s form of transport] [I can just picture the Sirdar knitting pattern for those rompers] Thu 4: Card from dgGM to say dgA2 was coming out of hospital. Snowing very hard this morning. Didn't get up for church. Swept snow away in front and at back. dgD went to Cubs. I watched TV and knitted. [I'm not sure why my mum would have been off to church, Ash Wednesday was yesterday] [I found this newsreel from 4th March 1965 showing heavy snow in Trafalgar Square and train derailments] [My Dad wasn't in the Cubs, he helped out] [likely candidates for programmes watched included Top of the Form, Top of the Pops and Dr Kildare] Fri 5: Up early for milkman. Down the shops early, went to library. Did a quick clean round. Snow going slowly. dgDBM came round for evening. dgGM and dgGF arrived at 8.30. Stayed up talking late. [Paying the milkman required getting up early on a Friday, even I remember that] [My Dad's BestMate wasn't my godfather yet but it was already clear he was going to be] [My grandparents lived on the other side of Hertfordshire so that would have been quite a journey on a Friday evening after work] Sat 6: dgGM did my washing and all got dry. dgGF and dgD went into Watford in the afternoon. Sat and talked rest of afternoon and evening. Did watch TV as well. [This was well before washing machines so laundry was a big thing] [Watford FC were playing away at Colchester that afternoon so I know nobody sneaked off to the football] [likely candidates for programmes watched included Dixon of Dock Green and The Black and White Minstrel Show] Sun 7: dgGF swept the chimney with help from dgD. Gave the room a spring clean. dgGM washed our carpet. dgGM2 and dgGF2 called in. dgD cleared the shed. dgGM and dgGF left 6.15 to go home. [There's a heck of a lot of serious cleaning going on. Was the entire 1960s like this or was everyone just treading water waiting for me to arrive?] [seriously bad timing here from my grandparents, having to travel 20 miles home just before the event they were really looking forward to was about to happen] Mon 8: More or less spring cleaned all rooms upstairs. Did a little bit of washing. dgD home at six, felt alright. By 6.30 thought I might be in labour. dgA3 called in with my birthday present. Neighbour came round and kept time. Went to hospital just after 10. dgD came home having been told it wouldn't be yet. Given something to make me sleep but by 1.30 getting more pains. Taken to delivery ward by 2.30. Given an injection don't remember much else. [A pivotal day that started with cleaning and ended in labour] [how suddenly my parents' lives changed, from a normal day at work to here comes a child in half an hour flat] [good timing from my auntie to bring my Mum a birthday present just before she went to hospital] [how typical that my Dad got sent home from hospital just before everything really kicked off] Tue 9: About five was told to push. Used mask till just before the end and then I watched dg being born. Most wonderful feeling. dgD was told to ring at 6 so didn't make it in on time. dg arrived 6.4am. Was put in a two bed ward, much better. Had flowers from dg, dgGM/dgGF and telegram from family friend. dgD brought my birthday cards in when he came to see us. He held dg for a second, and came again in evening. 7lb 12oz. Black hair and brown eyes. All his skin peeling. [I don't know what you did on your 30th birthday but my Mum spent hers in hospital on heavy drugs, screaming in agony and giving birth to me] [we didn't have a phone at home so my Dad had to ring the hospital from a phone box outside the library, which isn't how it would happen these days with vastly improved telecommunications] [I was born four minutes after his phone call while he was cycling in] [I didn't really send my mum some flowers, my Dad bought them on my behalf (and accidentally left the shop without paying for them)] [my Mum really appreciated having one present to open in hospital, my auntie tells me] [technically I was her biggest 30th birthday present, obviously] [it's sad how little contact my parents had with me on my first day] [a birthweight of 3½kg is average today and I think was above average back then] [I bet you don't have this level of detail about your first day on the planet] Wed 10: Apparently I refused to take to breastfeeding so had to go on the bottle, which I can see my Mum was extremely disappointed about. Sorry about that. Back at home a lot of post was arriving. Thu 11: I was laid down in a different room to my recuperating Mum so she didn't see me much. On the plus side that meant she didn't have to change my first nappy, a sister did that for her. Fri 12: Had my name registered by the local registrar. Mum was still having an uncomfortable time of things and needed help to sleep. Sat 13: Still in hospital. My Mum dressed me and changed my nappy for the first time. I still had dry skin so a nurse oiled me. Sun 14: My long-distance grandparents came to see me for the first time. Visiting time was stretched from half an hour to an hour. They were thrilled to see me. Mon 15: Mum changed my nappy and I promptly filled the clean one. Sorry Mum. Tue 16: Mum now feeling a lot better. Finally allowed home a week after I was born. I was taken home in my godfather's two-seater sports car, clutched in my Mum's arms. Visited my Auntie's house on the way back. Neighbours started popping in to see me. I slept all the way through from midnight to 7am - well done me. Wed 17: A nurse came round to check my umbilical cord, which came off later in the afternoon. Mum was back doing the washing again. Thu 18: My grandmother and another auntie came round, which finally allowed Mum to get her hair done. Fri 19: Visits from my auntie, cousin, neighbour and health visitor. My auntie bought me a little nylon suit and my Mum some flowers. I slept through til 5am again. Sat 20: The first day in my life that no health professional saw me, I was solely in the loving care of my parents. I also got to experience sleeping in my new pram. Sun 21: Went on my first outing... to my grandparents down the road. Stayed to dinner and tea, which my Mum appreciated not having to make. Mon 22: A lot of my Mum's diary is now all about sleeping and feed times, so perhaps best leave it there. But how absolutely fascinating to have a window into my earliest days, and all the chaos and emotion and joy and pain and I brought. Thanks Mum, from your 60 year-old son on the day after what would have been your 90th birthday.