A FTER having it lying unused in my wallet for the past five years, I broke new ground in the panoply of pensioners’ perks last week.

For on a short break in Devon, I plied my Northumberland County Council bus pass for the very first time.

We were staying in an old-fashioned seaside hotel in the resort of Ilfracombe, much frequented by coach parties of incredibly elderly folk from all over the country.

There were enough dowager’s humps to remount the Camel Corps, accompanied by the constant rattle of walking sticks and false teeth, and a host of gentlemen sporting trousers with waistbands somewhere around the nipple line.

But for all their physical peculiarities and infirmities, they were a delightfully jolly bunch, who couldn’t wait to get back on the bus to explore the delights of the South-West.

One of the attractions of Ilfracombe from my point of view was that it was home to the Biggest Bare Bottom in Britain, as sported by Verity, the spectacularly hideous pregnant woman fashioned by renowned sculptor Damien Hirst, which bestrides the harbour like some latter day Colossus of Rhodes.

Standing a carefully- calculated 10 inches taller than our very own Angel of the North,Verity, with much of her skin flayed off in Hirst’s peculiar fashion, was an arresting sight, as her exposed innards put several people off their pasties.

Mrs Hextol and I had driven down to Ilfracombe, but via a hugely convoluted route that took in Essex for a family christening and then Cornwall to visit friends, and with more than 1,000 miles already on the clock in under a week, I wasn’t really relishing still more driving before embarking on the 400-mile journey home.

That being said, I really wanted to go to Westward Ho! the mecca of all punctuation pedants as the only place name in Britain and one of the few in the world to end in an exclamation mark.

I knew very little about it, other than it was named after a book by the Victorian novelist Charles Kingsley. I harboured a notion it was an idyllic village somewhere on the moors, populated by cider-swigging rustics in smocks.

However, it seemed I would never get there, as I was heartily sick of driving on narrow roads, and needed a break, and Mrs Hextol didn’t fancy driving either.

Then, over breakfast, we remembered our bus passes, which we had both acquired as soon as we were eligible, but while Mrs Hextol had used hers the odd time, I was still a bus pass virgin.

We had seen a double decker with Westward Ho! stamped on its forehead during our peregrinations around town the previous day, and were determined to step on board.

I wasn’t even sure that bus passes issued in Northumberland were recognised in the Deep South, but there was a bus stop right outside the hotel, so we decided to give it a whirl.

When the bus pulled in, I proffered my pass more in hope than expectation, but the driver accepted it without demur, and we were off. I was like a child again, and tried to make my way upstairs, but Mrs Hextol has something of a phobia about going upstairs on double deckers, as she maintains they sway like tea clippers rounding the Horn, inducing sickness.

Even downstairs, it was good for once to be able to take in the sights of a tourist area without being behind the wheel.

Instead of concentrating on getting in the right lane, avoiding speed cameras and squeezing past stone walls masquerading as hedges, I could drink in vast rural vistas, note the abundance of criminally unpicked blackberries in the hedgerows, and people watch to my heart’s content during the two-hour journey through country lanes and busy towns.

I also came to the realisation that Westward Ho! was a bustling seaside town rather than a bucolic retreat. The double decker stopped right on the seafront, where the beach was awash with scores of surfers swooping along on the crests of waves and every cafe sold scones the size of the Farne Islands smothered in thick cream.

Westward Ho! really was a lovely place, but what made the punctilious epitome of grammatic accuracy special for me was the abundance of notices outside eateries announcing the excellence of the tea’s, coffee’s, chip’s, burger’s and hot dogs’ on sale. Brilliant!