It’s always the way. You wait ages for one great tale about bus memorabilia…

Having heard mention of my serial purchases, a listener to Radio Devon’s lunchtime phone-in called the BBC to say he had an old Western National bus stop which was of “no further use” to him.

Naturally, as a man with a thriving need, I called him back and arranged to take a look.

He used to work as a docker in the 1960s, it turned out, loading ships at Millbay Docks in Plymouth with their cargo of scrap metal for export.

“One day a crate came in with this on top, and I thought it looked interesting.”

Thank goodness for people like him. As I said in the piece he’d heard, it’s a tragedy that we so rarely take an interest in the commonplace. The objects that make up our modern street scene are the furniture of our outdoor lives – we see them, read them, touch them - inadvertently we bond with them every day. Yet it takes keen eyes to spot these things changing, and a keen hand to make a rescue.

And so commonplace becomes rarity, and you find yourself in a stranger’s garage staring at a little survivor that so encapsulates its time. A survivor only because it looked interesting.

There’s something eerie about it all.

“That would have gone to Spain”, he said as I reached for my wallet.

And yet, here it is, some 40 years since it last saw a bus, still in Plymouth. And tomorrow, when the postman arrives, it’ll be united with one of its North Devon cousins.

“I’m glad it’s obviously going to a good home.”