About a Bus ...

[Sir_Nigel]

Sometimes, driving home from work on dark wintry evenings, when I’m trying hard to avoid all the stressed-out mad ******** on the road, I will gaze enviously at a lumbering double-decker bus, all lit up with a warm welcoming glow inside and think how cosy and inviting it looks. Before I bought my first car I always travelled by bus and, after a long days work, I would find my way upstairs and go into a dream, as it says in the song. Then I could just switch off and read the paper or doze. There was a kind of shared communal weariness - all us productive little worker ants, having done our bit for the day were transported home to a welcoming hearth. Plus if anyone ever said Fancy a drink after work? I wouldn’t have to say Just for a couple then because I was driving and then have to leave just as things were hotting up. And now they say it’ll help save the planet if I leave the car at home and use this quaint method of transport instead.

 

But I know perfectly well that in reality buses are crammed full of riotous schoolkids, chattering nutters, strangers to hygiene, batty old trouts and gigantic 22-stone women with 12 shopping bags and bottoms so vast and round that they roll over and crush you against the window at every corner. And that’s in addition to being slow, uncomfortable, smelly, expensive and unreliable. (The buses that is, not the 22 stone women – although I don’t know…) So I‘d rather have all my fingernails pulled out than set foot on such a barbaric conveyance.

 

And I have yet to be convinced that travelling about on a fume-spewing bus full of irascible sweaty people is the key to our salvation. I’m sure the ailing Earth goddess Gaia won’t see it that way. Is that it?! she’ll splutter, I’m dying here and you offer me a chuffing Leyland Metrobus full of the great unwashed? Right! That’s it – I’m giving this place back to the cockroaches.

 

Ironically though, the bus may serve as a warning of what is to come – when the seas rise and we’re all crushed together on the sun-baked uplands in a seething mass of downtrodden humanity, men will say - This is just like the number 42 to Rotherham. Then they’ll laugh ruefully about it before turning on the weakest and eating them.

[Mantaspook]

I didn’t know the number 42 bus to Rotherham was so popular with cannibals! Thanks for the warning Sir_Nigel.

 

I must admit I don’t go on a bus very often, and yes they are slow and unreliable, (especially when the horse has to be fed) but on my last journey the absence of chattering nutters was most noticeable, I wonder where they can all be?

 

On a totally unrelated subject I see The Sheffield Forum now has 45,558 members.

 

Nice piece of writing, I liked the comical comparison about the 22 stone woman & the bus, you could have extended that theme a little & inserted a surreal comical flip-flop routine with that imagery.

 

Something like:

 

…and gigantic 22-stone women with 12 shopping bags and bottoms so vast and round that they roll over and crush you against the window at every corner. Not only that in addition to being slow, uncomfortable, smelly, expensive and unreliable - The buses that is, not the 22 stone women – and why do they always belch out a cloud of noxious fumes and judder to a halt, pulling out without warning & then fumbling around in their purse to pay the fare, it’s the same in the supermarket. The number of times I’ve queued behind a number 11A whilst it fumbles in its handbag for the exact change… just a minute…

[pattricia]

I did like Sir Nigels story about the bus. Kind of warm & cosy somehow.

[Falls]

Hi,

 

Things could get pretty wild on the old 69 Rotherham bus coming back into Sheffield.

 

One day in the late 1950's, we were all returning from Rotherham Tech after a snow storm. As the bus was coming to a stop outside Attercliffe Baths, my friend was trying to negotiate the stairs from the top deck with a brief case in his left hand and a Tee square in his right.

 

Well he slipped on the slush on the floor and fell down the stairs. On the way down, he "brained" the bus conductor with the Tee square and stuck his left elbow throught the back window.

 

The conductor was very good about it, only uttering two words:

The first began with 'F' and the second was "me". There after, along Attercliffe Road and Saville Street, there was this tinkling sound every time the bus stopped.

 

When I got off at the Wicker, the back window looked like the Japanese flag.

 

Regards

[shoeshine]

Falls....I used the No.69 bus from Rotherham to Sheffield and vice versa in the very late 1950's...I was "courting' my (now) missus at the time.

 

I was also a student at Rotherham Technical College at the time.

 

I may have passed your bus going in the opposite direction as I went home to Rotherham!!!!

 

Why didn't you wave?

 

It really is a small world.

[Mantaspook]

I was waiting on Commercial Street for a bus when the lady in front of me spied the Rotherham bus approaching, not wanting it herself she turned around and said “Do you want a sixty nine love?”

 

For some reason the bus queue erupted into laughter at that point…

[shoeshine]

I was waiting on Commercial Street for a bus when the lady in front of me spied the Rotherham bus approaching, not wanting it herself she turned around and said “Do you want a sixty nine love?”

 

For some reason the bus queue erupted into laughter at that point…

 

Why?

[Mantaspook]

Because it was an upside-down 96.

 

No, hang on… it can’t have been…

[shoeshine]

Because it was an upside-down 96.

 

No, hang on… it can’t have been…

 

Add 3 to 96 and you have a .....

 

It was a winner for the Ice Cream Sellers.

[pattricia]

I was waiting on Commercial Street for a bus when the lady in front of me spied the Rotherham bus approaching, not wanting it herself she turned around and said “Do you want a sixty nine love?”

 

For some reason the bus queue erupted into laughter at that point…

 

oooher !! Steady on now Mantaspook !!