Just a Man on the Bus

Public transport has become a way of life for me. It's a daily necessity.

And I don't look back on my days as a car owner with fondness.

No road tax to pay, no vehicle insurance, no fuel costs¹, no MOT², no breakdown recovery and repair and no service bills.

Certainly, you get the freedom: the freedom that is the shackles of all those financial commitments. And just when you think you have some extra cash saved for a holiday to the South of France, your gearbox explodes. bang goes the gearbox, bang goes the holiday.

Public transport - in the age of the Internet - is the best place to learn social skills. Forget that social networking shit. Catch a bus or a train.

The vagrants who occupy bus stations across the land, the ones who sit there with their cheap booze, and threadbare clothes: they're the ones who have the real stories, the ones who have led real lives. Just try talking to one, you might be surprised as to what you learn.

Then there are the same people you see, at the same stops, with the same glum faces. Somebody cracks a joke about Tiger Woods losing several advertising deals but landing a multi-million advertising contract with Durex, and the glum faces are replaced with smiles.

The sounds of complaint about the weather are replaced with sounds laughter. More jokes are told.

We mostly ever see each other on the station or on the bus. But we know each other's names. And when we chance upon on one another in a pub, we speak, and are introduced to each others' friends.

Now, this is real social networking.

¹At £1.10 a litre, this makes £4.95 a gallon. In us dollars, I estimate that to be around $8.00 US. It's not cheap.

²The MOT certificate. You don't have one, you can't get insurance, or if you have a certificate and it expires your insurance is invalid. But, of course, it promotes road safety.

Apologies for incoherence. Post skunk post.

Missing A Stop

To say the day had been exhausting would not accurately illustrate the truth. Catching the train home from London, falling asleep and waking up in another country would.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with an unplanned trip to Scotland. But there's something wrong with cockroach infested B & Bs who charge forty-five quid a night.

On an Island - Lord of the Flies

There are parts of the UK that seem similar to the island in Lord of the Flies.

The youth run wild, feral children of the night. No future, no prospects, no education. Just drugs, booze, burglary, prison and early death.

Cheered you up, have I?

Defining Moments: "I'm a grown up now"

We can all remember, with a little gentle coaxing, one of the first times as a child that we felt like we were growing up.

The first one that springs to mind for me was the first time I ever crossed the main road alone. It was a route I'd travelled many times with my mother. And now she was trusting me to go alone. She trusted that I wouldn't end up like a lot of the hedgehogs, foxes and badgers did: squashed and very dead.

Not only did she trust that I would cross the road safely, she was trusting herself; that she had taught me well how to recognise when it was safe to cross the road.

She had taught me not to talk to strangers, accept sweets from them, or go and see puppies with them.

At last, I was an adult. At nine years old. I could cross the road on my own and mum trusted me with that, and all that stuff about strangers.

That stuff with strangers, you know, it changes as we get older. I realised this one night a few years ago.

****

I was sat in a pub when I struck up a conversation with this bloke who had a Marshall Amplification t-shirt on. Figuring he was a guitar player, or a fan of guitars at least, I kicked things off by asking him who the greatest player of all time was.

Unusually, he had the right answer. And I liked that. The answer? "You can't say that there is just one great player. That would be a load of bollocks. There are a lot of players who you could say are a lot better than average bedroom noodler."

Straight away, we were into a friendly, but not serious, conversation about music, which bands did it for us, who shouldn't have died from an OD, and all that other stuff.

Before I knew it we were buying each other beers and chain smoking and he said there was this great band on at a club tonight and that we should go.

It was at that point that I made a quick assessment as to whether I was going to end up dead in a basement after being violently sexually assaulted. It seems sensible to me, to make this kind of assessment, given how much my mum told me about strangers as a kid. And I decided I was okay.

After a quick phone call to say I would be out late (or early depending on how you look at it) we headed for the club. I'd already broken the first two rules: I had spoken to a stranger, accepted the sweets. And now I was breaking the third: I was going to see the puppies.

Turned out it was a good night and a good band. But what it got me thinking is this: At what point does it go from being unsafe to talk to strangers, take stuff from them, and go to a place where you normally would go with them, to being perfectly safe?

When does that happen?

Modern Medical Trepanning. Or Get Out The Electric Drill

"A doctor in Australia used a household drill to bore into a boy's skull and drain it of blood clots as his local hospital lacked the required tools."


Source: BBC News