Man oh man, my love affair with the bus goes back years. As I write I can see seven of them, all models, sitting on one of our bookshelves. My father was a coal-miner, but for years he changed to transport, and, when I was a little boy, his life was buses.

He worked nights in the James & Sons garage in Ammanford, fueling and cleaning the single and double decker buses, and, if a conductor or driver did not report in of a morning, he had to crew the service. I never wanted to be an engine driver; my dream was to be at the wheel of a Guy Arab double decker.

In fact, my dad arranged it on many an occasion. At night, when the buses turned round near my grandmother's house and then prepared to head down the road a couple of bus-stops to our house, I'd be lifted on to the driver's lap to cover the journey in the closed cab. It was a sacking offence for the drivers, but they didn't seem to mind.

My father fueling a Leyland double decker in James' garage

The South Wales Transport AEC buses took us on shopping trips to Swansea from the terminus near the Derlwyn Arms. If we went to Swansea, it was a 'big shop', something like a suit for a funeral, otherwise we'd go on the lesser journey to Ammanford.

Buses took us to the grammar school every day. I remember one tipping over two miles from the school. No-one was hurt but it blocked the road, so in the following buses we all had a choice: a two-mile walk to school or five miles home. We went home.

Buses took us to Barry or Porthcawl on the Club and Institute annual trip, when over a dozen of them lined up to take the woman and children to the seaside. No-one wanted to go on Twm from Garnant's bus. He was a slow driver, always the last to get to the sea. On the journey I swear the bus, a 29-seater Bedford, was never further than two feet from the hedge or pavement. You could pick daisies as you went.

Once a year, on our holiday, an Ebsworth double decker would take us, as a family, from Carmarthen to Tenby to stay with my grandparents for week. I was allowed to stand all the way, grabbing the rail at the front window upstairs so that I could be first to see the sea and shout "I can see Caldey Island look... over there Mam... over there!"

Gwaun Cae Gurwen was Check Point Charlie. You could get a bus there for anywhere in the world, with connections. Western Welsh passed through the village, as did the United Welsh, the South Wales Transport and James of course. The James buses had a green light hanging in the front so that you could identify them in a fog and the older double deckers had wooden slatted seats, so coal-miners in dirty clothes could sit on them with no bother.

Pitted baths were not built in coal-mines then, and some bus companies were fussy, Miners coming off shift were not encouraged on the Western Welsh buses, which served the longer routes to Carmarthen and Cardiff, because they were 'posh' with plush seats.

When the sap was on the move, buses took us home from dances. They left the Regal Ballroom at a quarter to 12 and there was no point getting interested in a girl who was taking a bus in the opposite direction to you. After the question, "Do you want to dance?", the next one was "Where do you live then?" If she said Tycroes, there was no point having a second dance because that village was not on the Amman Valley route. If she was from Glanamman, Garnant, G.C.G., Brynaman or Cwmllynfell, that was a different kettle of fish. Things could develop as it were.

Oh yes, buses and me, we've been very close. Some years ago, on a New Year's resolution whim, I decided I wanted a bus licence. I got it too, although learning in Skewen was hell. It's all uphill, with double parking everywhere. I even bought half a bus - don't ask which half - an ex-Aberdare Council 1973 Bristol RE single decker. I haven't got it now, but I look back on it fondly.

Me and my son Richard leaning on my bus, the ex-Aberdare Council 1973 Bristol RE.

I even wanted to have a series on television called Return Ticket. Someone could hire the bus, or coach, fill it with their friends and re-visit somewhere that held fond memories for them. I'd drive it of course. Now wouldn't that be something?

Roy

Roy Noble is bringing his famous storytelling skills to a computer near you as part of the BBC First Click Campaign - aimed at encouraging people to take their first steps to getting online. If you know somebody who needs help to get online, call the free BBC First Click advice line on 08000 150950.

I must say that the visit to Pilleth and the Glyndŵr verses Mortimer battle was something I really enjoyed, and computers can add so much to the story, even when you're there. It set me thinking of history and our place in it.

Don't you feel that sometimes you are of another time and place or there are elements and feelings within you that take you back to a world that once was and to characters that were of your ancestral bloodline, whether real or imagined? Dear Ray Gravell, who passed away three years ago, Welshman to the core that he was, was convinced that he was a re-incarnated warrior from Owain Glyndŵr's time. He could relate to the period, he could live it.

As for me, well, I suspect that I'm a mongrel. And yet there are historical periods that hold a solid place in my mind and psyche. Take the Vikings. I'm sure there is something in my background that has a touch of Norwegian fjord about it. When I went on a cruise to Norway last year, I was up at 4am just to catch the thrill of sailing up a fjord, and for a couple of hours I was Kirk Douglas in a scene from that film The Vikings.

Elaine and Roy Noble

You see, they say that the Nobles, us as a family, came to this country with the Normans, but the Normans were really re-settled Vikings from the north. On the cruise ship there was a man from Garnant who had the same feelings as me .He even had a Viking finger, diagnosed by the doctor. When he held his hand up, his middle finger always dropped, the sinews were gone. It was well known, his doctor said. Nordic finger, lots of Vikings had it. He couldn't do press-ups, his dropped middle finger was always in the way.

Then again, if I'm really a Celt, some of those came from the Halstadt region of southern Germany region, and I've had some good times in the Black Forest and Bavaria, let me tell you. That's why, if I was invited to a fancy dress party in Aberdare some years ago, I always tended to end up as a Viking or a Bavarian in lederhosen, hence the attached photographs. There was a definite calling to do that.

Roy Noble in lederhosen

Mind you, I was also quite well known as quite a convincing Henry VIII, but I put that down to the Noble name, my girth and my deep down longing to live in a house with a tower.

I still hold that yearning. It doesn't have to be a castle, just a nice detached abode... but with one corner forming a tower. One day, perhaps.

Roy

Roy Noble is bringing his famous storytelling skills to a computer near you as part of the BBC First Click Campaign - aimed at encouraging people to take their first steps to getting online. If you know somebody who needs help to get online, call the free BBC First Click advice line on 08000 150950.

Not that I was ever a gifted rugby player. I was, and still am, your definitive 'Second Team' man... or maybe the third team, if the blood flow wasn't reaching the Commonwealth regions of the body in any given week.

Mind you, my old college, Cardiff Training College, or UWIC as it is now, was a strong PE college with a great tradition in rugby football. Players such as Clive Rowlands, Dewi Bebb and David Nash, all Welsh internationals, had preceded us and, years later, the likes of Gareth Edwards, JJ Williams and Ryan Jones were to grace the college teams.

I was not a PE student, and the vice principal, Mr Eric Thomas, an upstanding gentleman in every way, did have problems with two sub-species of the student body: girls and non-PE types. In fact, he took us lesser mortals of the male wing aside and pleaded with us not to make the place untidy and unkempt. Considering Thomas Gilmour Nimrod and myself, he had a point.

In fact, I was only to be chosen for the college rugby teams three times in the three years that I was there, on all occasions for the Third team may I add, and that was because there was a nasty bout of gastro-enteritis in the college and they were choosing anyone who could stay away from a toilet for at least four hours.

Oddly enough, they were so short one week, I was made captain, and I scored a try. I've still got the blades of grass in a box at home now, just to prove it. It was in the winter of 1963, a winter so cold we could walk across, and play rugby, on a frozen solid Roath Lake for well over a month.

For all my failings on the fields of battle, the students, God bless them, did elect me student president in our third year and I rewarded them at a conference of college student delegates at Manchester in 1963. It was the year of 'The Big Experiment'.

It had been decided to allow girls to visit the boys' rooms, and vice versa, twice a week, for an hour and a half on a Wednesday evening and for two hours on a Sunday afternoon, on both occasions after a heavy meal.

At the conference in Manchester, the delegate for Trinity College, Carmarthen, of all places, had spoken from the platform on the subject of the experimental visiting. He pleaded: "We in Carmarthen think it's all too much, all this visiting. We can't take it, so I move a resolution that we reduce the hours or stop it altogether."

I was a galvanised coiled spring and I was on my feet in a flash with a counter resolution: "I move that the experiment is continued, Mr Chairman, with a a view to future assessment and a possible expansion." It was carried in a wild wave of enthusiasm, with whoops and cries of delight all around the conference hall. I was a hero, in Manchester... and back in Cardiff Training College.

Roy

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It's funny to think of a funeral as a fine one or a good one, but this has been important in the Welsh psyche for many, many decades. Of course, in the old days, when I was young, there was a definite format and structured style and arrangement.

Immediately, on a death, curtains were drawn in the house and, out of sympathy, in all the adjoining houses in the street. Relatives would visit with their condolences and if other family members, or friends that they were not talking to, arrived while they were there, then they went out through the back door and the new visitors would come in at the front door.

On the day of the funeral, the preacher would call at the house for the first service and if, in his oration, he had not managed to get everyone crying, or weeping or wailing, then he hadn't done his job.

Men gathered on the road outside the house and a hymn was sung before the funeral moved off. Men would walk in front of the hearse, many in bowler hats and with a strong air of mothballs about them, as the overcoats had their first trip out of the wardrobe for a couple of years, and the mourners would travel in the accompanying undertakers' car. It was always only men that attended funerals, whether it was a woman who had died or not.

At the graveside another hymn was sung and then, many mourners would return to the house for 'ham on plates' and refreshments. It was a great lifting of the spirit and a joyous lightening of the air when the curtains were, at last, opened.

One fellow I heard about from Cwmgors had a real love of funerals and he would look in the paper for details of one he might fancy. It was not unusual for him to go to three or four funerals a week. He'd often go back to the house for food as well, because the family was usually confused enough to believe he was a long forgotten cousin from 'the other side' of the family, so no-one asked close questions.

There can be confusion, because I, recently, went to the wrong post-funeral refreshments. I was on my first pint in the pub's gathering before I realised.

There can be great levity at such occasions too. I remember being at one funeral in Seven Sisters when, on the return from the cemetery, one fellow was stating that it was becoming a regular event for him. It was like having a Debenture Ticket at the Crematorium. He also said to his mate ”Iorrie, you're not looking too well to me, is it really worth you taking the walk back from the cemetery now?”

Roy

Roy Noble is bringing his famous storytelling skills to a computer near you as part of the BBC First Click Campaign - aimed at encouraging people to take their first steps to getting online. If you know somebody who needs help to get online, call the free BBC First Click advice line on 08000 150950.

Roy Noble with Jon Dee and Radio Wales colleague Kathryn Martin

His great gift was beyond just astrology. He had an impressive retentive memory and his reservoir of facts was beyond compare. When he came in to relate his cosmic surveying, it was the interlude of 'This day in history' that fired the imagination and interest. He always had so much more title-tattle to add to the subject.

For instance, did you know that the Battle of Waterloo was a very close run thing. It was touch and go until the Prussians arrived around about four o'clock of an afternoon to join in the fray. They were led by General Blucher, who was widely regarded as being off his head and was convinced, allegedly, that he had given birth to an elephant.

Further, would we have won if Napoleon had not had haemorrhoids? He was on pain killing drugs and had need of a lie-down during the fighting.

All these facts are an example of how Jon and I batted the points back and forth. It was a great shame that we changed the slot, and stopped having astrology on the programme. Jon was a great broadcaster, an author of several books and a man of lateral, colourful thinking. He will be deeply missed.

Roy

Roy Noble is bringing his famous storytelling skills to a computer near you as part of the BBC First Click Campaign - aimed at encouraging people to take their first steps to getting online. If you know somebody who needs help to get online, call the free BBC First Click advice line on 08000 150950.

Our annual visit to an autumnal European capital city with Aberdare Rotary Club went superbly well. Vienna in November last year was very imperial but very 'parky', so this year we went for the falling leaves of October.

Now, I don't mind cut-price airlines. In fact, I've always found them very efficient and courteous, but is interesting to see people trying to rush, but not blatantly so, to the aircraft to get a good seat. There is definitely an art to walking quickly across the tarmac and holding your elbows out in an arch to make yourself bigger so that anyone trying to pass you will have to curve in a wide detour.

The coach driver who picked us up at Schönefeld Airport seemed very German in word and deed and he complained a lot about nuisance inefficient countries who were a burden on the EU and about too many immigrants. All the more amazing when he said he was from Albania.

Berlin turned out to be very impressive. A great deal had been been changed and built since unification and, even though the war damage was originally extensive, some of the famed landmarks were still there or had been rebuilt. The Brandenburg Gate still had that definite dramatic historical air that marked the great divide of East and West.

Checkpoint Charlie is now little more than a shed in the middle of the main road but it is such a magnet for tourists that the German authorities are thinking of re-opening Checkpoints Alpha and Bravo to meet demand. Of course the Berlin Wall, still there in a few tourist-attracting spots, holds its own poignancy of past division and death for many who tried to cross it.

The Reichstag is back to its brooding height and presence and the many museums on Museum Island are testament to German culture and art. Our visit to Potsdam, with memories of films like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, with scenes of the famous bridge where spies were exchanged and the great house where the famed Potsdam Conference took place, all added to the ever-present feeling that you were walking in the steps of great historical moments.

As for the repast, well, we generally went native and ate German. We couldn't quite face the typical Berlin delicacy... pigs trotters, sauerkraut and potato mash, but the drink was very local. "Ein bier" was a frequent cry in the bierkellers.

My one disappointment was failing to find a touch of 1930s decadence. I was dying to enmesh myself in the entertainment of Cabaret in the company of a modern day Liza Minelli, just to test my resolve really. I mean, how can you, with a chapel deacon's clarity and purity, decry sin when you haven't encountered it at close quarters? Maybe next time, for the German capital city is back on song and worth a second visit.

The journey back was uneventful, except for the noise and whine from my suitcase as I rolled it down the road. Had that noise manifested itself at the airport, my suitcase would have been blown up for security's sake. As it turned out, it was only my beard clipper. For some reason it had turned itself on.

Thinking back, it was a close shave.

Roy

Roy Noble is bringing his famous storytelling skills to a computer near you as part of the BBC First Click campaign - aimed at encouraging people to take their first steps to getting online. If you know somebody who needs help to get online, call the free BBC First Click advice line on 08000 150950.