Mutants, alcoholics and waaaay outta town

I was working out of town today. Waaay out of town and it  required catching the BUS (Oh yes, capitals are very necessary … read on)

Now, I HATE buses. Loathe them and not just for the fact that they make you feel like you ate 15 donuts and then invited a small child to play trampoline of your stomach while simultaneously hitting you over the head with  a brick. On top of the fact that once you’re ten minutes into the journey and feeling like a barely contained nausea whirlpool, there seems to be a tacit agreement that rather than open the windows and circulate a little fresh air, it would be infinitely preferable to sit squashed up together with condensation streaming down the windows and share the fetid and stale odours of BO, urine, sweat, leftover food and drink and numerous other smells to unpleasant to contemplate. It’s an unrivalled olfactory experience.

I could sense that I was being given an opportunity for sensory exploration today so, it shouldn’t have surprised me in the slightest that my driver was a non English-speaking version of Lurch from the Addams Family, with a propensity for taking sharp corners and narrow one-track country roads at a minimum of 60mph and braking violently and swerving into hedges and shallow ditches to avoid colliding into oncoming vehicles. I’d be preared to swear that I saw a woman and her dog leap into the hedge for safety as the bus roared around the corner of an otherwise quiet single track road. A parked vehicle has never made me feel more scared.

As people piled on at the first stop, there was the inevitable bagging of double seats as you pray quietly to yourself that the bus isn’t going to fill up and someone doesn’t want to take the spare seat next to you. But naturally, you find that as the other double seats are taken, options become more limited and new travellers are examining the spare seats and evaluating which of you is going to be the least unpleasant to sit next to and you know …. you just KNOW that you’re coming up on the relatively harmless list and in a very short space of time, you’ll end up with someone plonked next to you. Sometimes you get lucky, and it’s a nice old lady or gent that you can pass the time of day with but you know that more often than not, it’s going to be someone else. I have an uncanny knack of attracting those ‘other’ sorts.

Historically, they’ve included:

• The one who sat across the aisle from me and kept twitching who took umbridge with my looking out the window and appeared to think I was staring AT her. So she started hitting me with her umbrella and then spat on my head. Which was lovely. She got dragged off the bus by her carer and then JUMPED BACK ON to hit me again!
• The drunken man who spent an hour and a half roaring football songs at the top of his lungs, belching out lager fumes and calling me an uptight bitch for not joining in
• The woman with the endlessly screaming baby that puked all over the bus floor. (Imagine the noise and the smell for an hour and a half, while you yourself are fighting the rising tides of nausea)
• The woman who, offended by my large bag on a crowded bus punched me in the stomach and kicked me in the knee.
• The ‘larger’ gentleman who took up a seat and a half so that I was wedged on one hip into a small gap to avoid his excess bulk resting on my lap, while he stuck his elbows in my face because he had to hold the newspaper up to read it.
• The ubiquitous chav or chavette, who always makes for a pleasant companion, especially those with the loud and tinny speakers for their music and my personal favourite:
• The achoholic, who at 8.30 in the morning is swigging gin from a hip flask and isn’t overly cautious about spillages, as you’re praying that you don’t arrive at work soaked head to toe in gin and smelling as if you came in straight from the pub you were in the night before.

Maybe next time, I’ll cycle, or hitch a lift. Or perhaps I’ll just dose myself to the eyeballs with a sedative and sleep all the way there and hope they chuck me off at the right stop. Perhaps if I offer to tie myself to the roof ….?

Tags: Some days I wish I hadn't got out of bed