Death by bus-stop

My journey to work, like most people’s, doesn’t much veer from the following standard going-to-work fare. I hurriedly lock the door behind me and crash onto the street. It may be raining, but invariably this is the first I know about it but I’ll miss my bus if I attempt to go back inside, unlock the door to my flat and find a broken umbrella. So I head for the top of the road. The short walk to the bus stop: I have one eye on the shelter and another on the drone of vehicles passing by in case I spot my bus and have to mount a lumbering run to slither between its closing doors. I reach the shelter, hopefully in good stead to catch my ride, but by this time if it is raining I am soaked through and know that I must slouch like a slimy elk for half an hour before I can get off again.

This particular bus stop is always inhabited, but the seasons dictate the formation and the temperament of its dwellers. In the depths of winter it is a clammy affair where people huddle for warmth underneath the slight roof of the bus shelter like newborn mice hankering for a lactating mother-tit, the more unfortunate relegated to the sidelines to cushion the fall of rainwater streaming gutter-like from the shelter’s corners. If you’re late you don’t even have the privilege of this position and must watch from the pavement like an experiential meteorologist.

Eventually (and at this point we must assume it was a ‘good’ morning and you actually made it this far) the bus arrives, accompanied by the obligatory second bus tailgating behind. The endless wait ensues where you have to scratch your head and curse under your breath as you consider the vacuous mind of Other People as they suddenly realise they have to pay to use public transport (as if this were some lightning-rod revelation) and must manage their petty cash at the bus stop, call their accountant, haggle with the driver, and any other malignant fool-action they can devise in the long-haul time it took for them to activate their brain stem for the day ahead. You begin to sympathise with Sartre. Eventually we all board and the driver heaves the hulking great wheels around the roundabout and we hunker down for the roasting/freezing 45-minute journey to seven hours of job in which your life is disappearing one second at a time.