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Tidings one and all. This is the introductory episode of Bus Adventures, a journal of experiences traveling around our nation’s capital by the most iconic of British vehicles, the bus. Whether you like them tall and dirty or long and bendy, i hope you will enjoy these educational episodes of life on London’s public transport. I wish I could begin on a jolly note but I’m afraid my first report is going to be of a darker nature…

There I was, on the lower level, standing close to the driver. I was on my way to work and (apart from the depression) I was feeling rather smug since managing to just about jam myself through the doors to get on.

Arriving at the next stop, the doors swing open. People file out and the doors are closed again. Just then a young lady, halfway down the stairs begins shrieking: “What are you doing? Why you packing up the bus?” (Packing up the bus? Had she gone mad?) She shouted at the driver to open the doors, complaining he didn’t give her enough time to get off. Her complaints were ignored by the driver as he started off again… mistake number 1.

The girl then makes a bee line for the driver, casting terrified commuters aside. The protesting can now take place face-to-face, and with more swearing. Good God I thought, it won’t be long before she tears him to shreds. Instead, here is what she proposed: “Open the door or I’ll spit in your face”. At length and after a considerable battle of willpower, he opened the doors for her to get off. At which point she spat in his face. Luckily for the driver, the bulletproof plastic separating him from the enemy offered ample protection from the monster’s venom. Fortunately, everybody on the bus survived.

So, how do we sum this up in a single word?…

Terrifying.

Welcome Londoners old, young, middle-aged, tweeny, teeny, toddler and glint in the Yo! Sushi delivery man’s eye, to a new blog about Britain’s fair capital. We’d like to say the arrival of the ominous-sounding “Boris” (blame Facebook for that victory over common sense) sparked us into a fervour of freedom-of-speech and democratic sounding-off.

We’d like to say that, but it would of course be utter utter bollocks. Rather, we’ve been sitting on this domain name for so long that in the end we decided to shelve the ‘online social network for the monosyllabic’ idea and instead just rant wildy with apalling punctuation about the metropolis around us.

What you’ll be getting over the weeks and months, then, will hopefully be a series of posts examining what life is like in the Big Smoke; observations, ideas, anecdotes, as well as the odd review, preview or SPECIAL REPORT. By SPECIAL we mean barely-literate descriptions of places we’ve eaten, entertainment we’ve witnessed, places we’ve visited. By REPORT we mean a photograph snapped on a Nokia from 2001, accompanied by bullet points about as colourful as a zebra.

So, by why of breaking the ice and kicking things off in style, lets borrow a highly appropriate phrase from London’s new Big Cheese:

“Life isn’t like coursework, baby. It’s one damn essay crisis after another.” (Daily Telegraph, 12 May 2005)

yes

Welcome