Last year was the “year of the bus”. Hands up, who knew that. I found out because I spent quite a lot of 2014 on the bus, sitting on the top deck, pensively. You have to sit on the top deck, obviously, and sitting there is conducive to applied reverie; moreover, circumstances have arranged themselves so that my bus journeys have been rather more emotionally charged than my Tube journeys. It is a matter of the destinations from which, or to which, one is travelling.
Anyway, there I was, sitting about three rows back from the front on the top deck, when the bus pulled up in such a way that the stop’s sign was right by my eyes and I saw the round bit of the Transport for London roundel had been modified so that it said above the crossbar “Year of the” and “2014” below it; the crossbar itself said “bus”. I’ve got a picture of it if you don’t believe me.
I must say most of the celebrations passed me by, what with one thing and another. Where, I wondered, were the road-based-non-fixed-wheel-public-transport-themed parties? Why were the buses not wearing funny hats or blowing streamers? I suppose the long cavalcade of 13s, 113s and 82s that arrives at Gloucester Place after a 20-minute wait could be interpreted as a conga line of buses but there is something not particularly festive about their mood when they travel like this. And was this a nationwide appreciation of buses or was it solely London-based? Did bus stops in rural Britain also claim that 2014 was the year of the bus, prompting, one presumes, a miserable prospective bus user to say that, yes, she was very much looking forward to getting on a bus some time in 2014?
Now, having taken a bus back from the Royal Free Hospital after seeing the latest instalment of a particularly unwelcome family drama, I notice that the bus stops no longer proclaim the year of the bus. I suppose a part of me had either expected or hoped for the authorities not to have bothered changing the signs back again. “Hey, this was such a success – why don’t we make every year the year of the bus?” (Alternatively: “No one seems to have noticed it was the year of the bus. Ingrates. They seem to have thought, instead, that it was the year of the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. Let’s just change the ‘2014’ to ‘2015’ and hope that this time someone makes a bit more of a fuss.”)
Either way, I miss my year of the bus. It was also the year of many other unpleasant things, as far as I was concerned, but 2015 is already beginning to look like it will make 2014 seem to have been the last year of a golden age. “Year of the bus” certainly beats “year of the eviction” by some measure; as it does “year of the death”.
I suppose it is because I’d rather not focus on these things that I return to the theme of the bus. After all, this column has a long and proud history of bus-related moments. It began, as I recall, with the story of my prosecution for fare evasion on a bendy bus; and the only stinky review that the book cobbled together from these columns got made particularly scathing reference to what I had to say about rail replacement buses (I wrote they had a shifty, provisional air to them, as if they had been naughty buses in a previous life; I thought that was rather good. Still, no accounting for reviewers, eh?).
Since then, brute economics has dictated that I spend a lot more time on buses than I used to. They are the mode of transport for those who have little say in the matter. I recently had to soothe a new Romanian arrival to the country who was having a hard time, on the 82, distinguishing between Finchley and the Finchley Road. With no common language between us, I had to use the simplest English: “When this bus dies, that means you are in Finchley.”
Buses also present one of the sharper shocks and harsher realities to which the recently separated are subject. They are always a bit sad; now their sadness is brought into much sharper relief. I have recently learned of the collapse of two friends’ marriages that I had assumed were rock-solid; I fear that they will be becoming considerably more familiar with this mode of transport than hitherto. (My advice is to keep your Oyster topped up and also to make sure you have an umbrella on your person, for you will be rained on, you can depend on it.)
It would appear that it is not so much the year of the bus I have been celebrating, if that is the word. I am actually three-quarters of the way into the decade of the bus.
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