Peak Hour Terror: Surviving the Bus Crash

Yesterday started as any normal day. An early start, coffee, toast and I made my way to the bus stop for my usual ride to work. In a few short minutes though, my delusions of peace and calm were shattered by the terrifying sound of a collision between my bus and a 4WD.

As my regular readers will know, my history with buses is long and illustrious. I have previously speculated on the existence of bus gods and this remains the only chink in my otherwise impermeable atheist armour. The terror of that bus-crashing sound then was the terror of a devout atheist seeing a crazy-comedic god looking rather a lot like Jack Nicholson and poking their head through an axe-shattered door screaming 'Here's Joooooohnny!'

Melodramatic headlines not withstanding, and I note for the sake of accuracy that the featured picture has nothing to do with the bus I was riding, I was indeed on a bus when it was involved in a peak hour incident. A BMW X5 managed to somehow avoid seeing the bus and then decided to change lanes - into the bus lane - as the bus was tootling merrily through that very same bus lane. The result was that the lane change was aborted, but not before the bus put an interesting new racing stripe down one side of the beamer and souvenired its side mirror into the bargain.

The effect inside the bus itself was negligible save for the noise. There was a sharp intake of breath from some passengers and a small exclamation of joy from me. The joy was due to the fact that I now had a suitable - and novel - excuse for being late. The driver exited the bus, exchanged details with a frazzled 30-something lady, reboarded the bus and continued on his way. Sadly there was little of note for me to blog about.

The astute reader will note at this point, that I am blogging about it anyway.

As one does in such situations, I arrived at work and explained to various people that I was late because my bus crashed. By this means I managed to avoid doing anything of consequence for several hours which greatly annoyed 'The Volvo', a chap so boxy that no other nickname will suffice and who occasionally claims to be my boss. He commented, rather uncharitably I thought, that I had been late every other day that week so what was the big deal about today. I can tell you I gave him one heck of a dressing down after that comment and I expect he would have been mightily chagrined had he waited around to hear it.

I also explained the incident to the divine Ms K. Ms K is a work colleague to whom I send emails of increasingly purple prose until such time as she observes that 'some people' may find such correspondence inappropriate. At this point I desist altogether from emailing Ms K anything - just to teach her a lesson - for sometimes up to 5 or 6 hours. I then start the cycle again, increasing the shade of purple until my long-suffering correspondent points out once more that there may well be a time and a place for everything, but my most recent email, probably belonged to a time and place quite far from the premises of my employer. She may even patiently agree that 'cock' was indeed a synonym for 'god' in Shakespearean literature, but that much has changed in the intervening 400 years or so.

Ms K was curious to know whether people had 'flown through the air' when the bus crashed. At least she affected to be curious, it may have just been an attempt to prevent me from drifting too far into the inappropriate. I replied to her that they had not and then proceeded into a long-winded and wandering response that ended by speculating on the enormous benefit that personal flight would give when one was involved in an intimate encounter.

As it happened, there were several people who asked me whether I would blog about the incident and, later that day, I commented to The Volvo that there had been such interest. I felt that this reflected the growing popularity of my blog.

"How do they know you have a blog?" asked The Volvo.

"I don't know." I replied, "word gets around I suppose?"

"Are you sure it's not because you bang on about the bloody thing endlessly?" said The Volvo, once again displaying his uncharitable side. The Volvo went on to speculate that the reason why people suggested that I should blog about the bus crash was so that I would stop banging on about that.

I told you he was uncharitable.

In any case I have now blogged about it, so perhaps I will stop (in the words of The Volvo) banging on about it.


Photo courtesy UK Railway and Road, available at https://www.flickr.com/photos/138702556@N07/23641221044