Nightbus

Here in London, around midnight, all the tubes and trains stop and a
new force hits
town. The Night Bus, unlike the regular buses that you see during the
day, the drivers
are less friendly, the seats are less clean and the people are less
sober.

I had never set foot on a night bus before my 16th birthday, and it
would seem that no
one under that age ever does. It is an adult enviroment, where club
goers and night
workers brush shoulders with those who just get on to have somewhere
to sleep.
Virtually all the buses run from Trafalgar Square in the heart of the
city, on a saturday
night the pavements all around the square are full of various people
standing about
waiting for various buses to take them back home from their nights
out. You get those
who have had the best of times, London has a lot of clubs and bars and
so there is
ample opportunity to get very drunk very quickly, and those who have
had really shit
times, it's not uncommon to see people sobbing, although it could well
be that they have
just eaten someting off of the hot dog stands, that sell onion covered
death sausages for
over blown prices.

As a bus arrives at the stop you find yourself in a pitched battle to
get on it, elbows are
thrust in to faces and ribs and there is a flurry of limbs as everyone
tries to get on at
once. Whoever said that the British like to queue was only half right,
the queue will last
till the bus arrives then it's every man for himself and fuck you, I
was here first. The art of
getting a good seat is something you learn in time too, remembering
that you have to
deal with a bus driver that really doesn't give two shits if he flies
past your stop or not,
you have to position yourself near a bell, so that you can alert the
driver in plenty of time
that you would like to actually get off, and near the exit doors,
otherwise you'll find that
he's closed them and raced off towards somewhere you never wanted to
go. In my ten
years of Nightbus experience I have fine tuned this process so that I
hardly ever find
myself ten miles away from home.

So now you are on and sat waiting for the bus to leave and you can
have a proper look
at the people round you. More often than not there is always one
person who is so drunk
that they realy look like they could possibly throw up over your shoes
at any given
moment, there is always a large group of 20 something lads who have
been out on the
pull and are returning home on their own after total failure,
compensating for this by
being loud and obnoxious. Always someone that you can GUARANTEE wont
make it
back home because they are already nodding off and wil be so
unconcious that they will
wake up at the terminus and wonder where the fuck they are. There will
be a group of
women on a hen night, intimdating all the men on the bus, because
there is safety in
numbers, and sometimes there is a total and utter wierdo, and you pray
that you haven't
sat next to them, or that they will find someway of picking on you. I
speak from
experience as there have been times when I thought that I was sharing
a double seat
with Jeffrey Dahmer.

To totally avoid trouble you should stare at a fixed point, this is
where you need to be sat
in the window seat, and not look anyone in the eye, drunk people are
total arseholes
and best left to fall asleep and dribble in their own laps till they
either chuck up or get
chucked off. Having said that without the nightbus I would have missed
out on some of
the most entertaining journeys I've ever had, There is nothing like
counting the number
of people who smack their heads against the ceiling accidentally, or
watching people
step over the drunk who is quietly pissing himself in a corner. Hooray
for the Nightbus,
The transport of the damned.