The Love Bus

The spectre of death or serious injury seems to be following me though it remains thankfully inaccurate in its smiting. Last night on coming home there was a long line of buses along the Essex Road, it being taped off due to what the local yellow crime signs would refer to as a “serious incident”.

The Essex Road is a busy thoroughfare and the avenue of many routes and I hope the offending party was not the 73 or the 38 – known to some as the Sex Bus and the Love Bus respectively. I imagine the name derives from the fact that they both cross through Soho on their routes northward – a location from where many a romantic night begins but while the 38 sales serenely through Bloomsbury and Holborn on route to Islington the 73 takes a grittier route home through along the unlovely (or for that matter unsexy) Marylebone Road before passing through Kings Cross where love sells alongside the fast food and amusement arcades.

The 38 was one of the routes that converted to the infamous bendy bus as the much loved Routemaster was phased out, though it has to be admitted that the routemaster was loved in the looking at rather than the travelling on. The Idiot Child Mayor has vowed to restore a version of the Routemaster and for that alone he may be remembered. You cannot call yourself a Londoner until you have mistimed jumping on or off the open platform. It taught me what a groin strain is.

The 38 is now a wheelchair friendly and worse family friendly bus with double seats facing each other. In one of those sat a family of four today. The Yummy Mummy and Dilf with two bored little girls they semed determined to stir up into a frenzy with over loud observations on every passing matter. Ducks!!! Big fucking deal. The parents seemed missioned to make their children amusing anecdotes for for the north London dinner table. In this fashion Mummy insisted on addressing the child sitting peering out as “Window”. There are some ridiculous names but surely this is not one of them and the child did not seem to react to her mothers attenpt to make her adorable – except to mouth silent pleas for help at passing strangers and dream of the day she can cast off her Osh Kosh and inject heroin direct into her eyeballs.

THe family were off to lunch with Carl from New York and “Little George” whom I suspect was not an 11 year old with a trackie, gold hoop earrings and a Croydon facelift. The children had to guess what was GROWING IN LITTLE GEORGE”S TUMMY? A tumour I thought hopefully but apparently it was a baby and the children were being primed to rub her tummy and show adorable intrest. I left the bus with great relief as Daddy explained at length and in volume to no interested party that the longest bones in the world were in an elephant and its trunk but that snakes are different. Its the Blue Whale you idiot.

THe milk of human kindness was flowing not through my veins this morning as I muttered darkly of the north London set and continued on my mission to find the perfect pilates mat in John Lewis. The Love Bus rolls slowly on a Saturday afternoon and I’m in a Sex Bus state of mind – this is no country for pilate’s purchases.