notes on travelling...(domestic, dull) no.1

Well finally I put virtual pen to virtual paper and WRITE something here! Jiminy Cricket, it took me long enough!
my bugbear today...in fact it isn't just a today thing, no transient irritation this...is travelling, more specifically bus travel, or for that matter, any manner of public transport. the thing is it brings out my most misanthropic side, it does, never in my experience of bus travel have I ever sat next to a kindly old lady who offered me a humbug (to which i would answer 'BAH!') and chatted away nicely about her David Austin roses or her time digging for victory or the like, smelling like Imperial Leather soap, Lavender and W.I. sponge cake...oh no! It's always the most unhinged person you could imagine, the seemy looking character with the cataract smogged eye and a sharp tang of urine and antiseptic wafting about them or the muttering man who has spent the last half hour at the bus stop picking the last strands of tobacco out of the discarded dog-ends on the ground...rich pickings to be had thanks to the last hurried 'drag and drop' before boarding the bus. Always will the scariest individual find me tucked away under my hat, hiding behind a book with an impossibly tedious title so no one will want to spark up conversation about it (mistake with 'Teach Yourself Japanese'..."What you wanna learn that for, cruel race, when I was a POW in Changi you learnt all the Japanese you wanted, tsch!!! Never trust 'em, little, little but vicious, like terriers...yap yap yap you birrud b'ridge....cruel race" [somehow these people have been present at EVERY major event of the last 200 years..."when I was scraping Hitlers brain of the bunker wall, i mused, should I confess to being Jack the Ripper?"...]), yet even with these precautions I still seem to attract not the good but exclusively the bad and the ugly (Angel Eyes you done gone found me agin!). Don't get me wrong, I am a true lover of people, of interesting conversation, of meeting new people, even if only as a memorable brief encounter, but I don't wish to be dragged into somone elses paranoia on the way to work! I have more than enough of my own, as the murderer hiding in my wardrobe will tell you.
That and the extortionate fares! I have a dear friend who is a bus driver (albeit purely for the money, not, alas, the love of it) and his wonderfully spiky, bitter tales of grumpy bus driver woe put me off even more...cyclists, beware the London bus, for they will sneak up on you like a prowling lioness and before you know it you'll be fighting off MRSA in a hospital corridor somewhere wondering what a lifetime with the nickname Ironside would be like...you'd never tire of it!...truly there is no joy in his tales, when he speaks of driving a bus the mood could drain the colour and joy out of a Mardi Gras...so that alone is not a good start...and yes, they do see you running, and yes, they will just drive away...usually if you're on crutches or elderly and laden with shopping bags hobbling towards the indicating bus, bag bottoms splitting, tins and nectarines scattering...apparently there WILL be another bus after them so you don't NEED to get theirs...twisted logic on some levels but I can see where he's coming from...as he shut the doors in my face in a blizzard and screeched away wild eyed, laughing like a drain....baffling thing is my bus driver friend is an absolutely breathtakingly lovely chap when he's not driving a bus! curioser and curioser....
So, where does this leave me? Well if I didn't have the bus then I'd probably have to rant about car drivers...it is still raw what with former car now residing in car heaven...so my temporary return to the bus has, on one hand, provided me with plenty of time for musings and reading, I think I mastered the Japanese verb 'to be' during one particularly foul traffic jam post bitter old cruel-race-river-Kwai-POW-Emporer-Hirohito-kicked-me-in-the-shins man, so it frees up 45 minutes more of idle thought time, marvellous...in fact the bus journeys and the charcters encountered on them have finally provided the muse to get me writing this damn self indulgent blog...so whay do I complain?....because I love it!

ptttsccccccccccchhh

return to the bowels of hell please

£69.75 darlin'...sorry, return y'say...£74.93 in that case...

thanks

f*ck off and sit down

ptttsccccccchhhh

*cyclist screams, tibia snaps*

heh heh heh....'appy days!