The Long Voyage Home

Seeing as taking a trip in a car to or from work is a disastrous and stressful experience I’d rather avoid, I decided to once again take the bus.

Though I was shielded from the dreaded cyclists, I cannot say these were pleasant trips.

Okay, the journey there was fairly uneventful, but the one home was a completely different matter.

Bearing in mind I’d been at work all day and was as thus tired, hungry and irritable (like I need an excuse) I was in no mood for irratants. On observing a child in the front seat, I nearly backed out and walked home. But, she was asleep, so I reckoned I could bear it.

Five minutes passed as I stared out of the window, lost in my own thoughts. We soon stopped at the local Sikh temple to pick up worshipers. It all went downhill from there.

The main passengers coming on to the bus were elderly Indian ladies, all wearing those pretty shawly things they do (which I actually quite like) and jabbering like a bunch of little monkeys.

Seriously, you know when you sit in a café or restaurant or such like, and you zone out slightly and become aware of the background noise? The babble and clatter? The sound that’s always used in films?

That was the bus for half a fucking hour, except it was all in old lady voices, and a different language.

I actually felt like I wasn’t in England any more for a moment or two.

Seriously though, this noise was the kind of eardrum stabbing din that would make a parrot hang its head in shame. It was incessant and unrelenting, and several times I felt myself sliding off the cliff of sanity into the frothing, foaming sea of delightful lunacy. Many homicidal fantasies were had.

If the noise wasn’t bad enough though, the woman in front of me smelled like curry. Stale curry. If you don’t know what stale curry smells like, you’ve never been a student. I know it’s a “stereotype” to say Indian people smell like curry, but this one seriously did.

I kept getting blasts of it in my face every five minutes or so. You know how you get used to a scent? I’ll bet this woman had a sensor in her hair to tell her when I’d got used to stale chicken tikka masala from last month, and her scalp would send out a pulse of old food Eau Toilette right into my poor nose.

To make matters worse, some mad old cat lady decided she’d park her big ol’ arse next to me, and spent the next twenty minutes or so trying to expel her lungs from her ribcage into my hair. I’m too scared to look just in case there’s phlegm there.

Wait, it gets even better.

When I finally escaped the noise, odour and potential tuberculosis of one bus (having to sidestep the women who sat in front of me, as they’d decided to have a conversation right in front of the bus doors) and jumped on the connecting bus, I breathed a sigh of relief.

Which soon turned into a retch.

There was a tramp on the bus, and by god did he stink.

 

I have a lot of sympathy for some homeless people, you know, life’s got you down and used you as its toilet paper, but having a fairly good sense of smell, I really don’t like being near them for longer that it takes to give them a fiver or a sandwich. Being in a confined space with one with the heating on?

Fuck.

There were also a bunch of dirty chavs in the back, swearing and playing Nikki Minge or whatever her name is, or Justin Beaver (I can’t tell the difference) like chavs tend to do. I was ready to commit murder.

Coupled with a tantrum throwing child, a woman who kept trying to engage random people in conversations about her frog collection and the bus’s squeaky brakes, I’m lucky I haven’t been incarcerated yet.