I visited London last week, and my day had started off a bit rubbish, and the week leading up to it hadn’t been much better, so I went a leisurely walk round the city centre on Friday in my free time, and I visited lots of the landmarks off tea towels that you sometimes forget to appreciate, and I drank in the architecture and the culture and the buzz of tourists, and I crashed about on the tube till my snotters turned black, then I wandered along the South Bank by the Thames till I felt calmer and more contented than I have for a while, and eventually I arrived at London Bridge to catch the big red number 43 to my pal’s house in Muswell Hill where I’d arranged to sleep on the sofa bed.
And as the bus wound its way past Bank and Monument and Moorgate stations at the back of 5, I watched as thousands of office dwellers teemed out of sandstone and granite and glass and metal buildings and piled themselves down into subways or swarmed round corners like ants from a nest or bees from their hives.
And then we were up past Old Street, which looks like a different place altogether since last time I was there, and I thought how funny is that things can transform so dramatically—even in a short space of time—while other times it’s wee incremental differences that happen over the long haul, so discrete that you don’t see them happen after a while and forget what things used to be like, and how nothing lasts forever and everything changes even if it’s just a wee bit at a time, and sometimes you don’t notice because it was so gradual until you look up suddenly one day and think Where The Fuck Did That Come From?
…or Who Even Am I?
Then we’re up past Angel and Islington and Highbury and Holloway Road, and we’re not far from the Emirates Stadium when a woman started struggling trying to get her buggy on the bus, and the baby started girning as she thudded and shoved and tried to hoist it up the step from the really low pavement. So I jumped down from the backseat where I’d been perched watching the world go by and asked if I could help, and she turned with evident relief as I lifted the front up and squeezed it in beside besuited worker drones in headphones who refused to budge an inch to make room or even flinch their eyes temporarily away from the smartphones they had glued to their noses, and in a broad Scottish accent the woman said ‘Cheers pal, mighta kent ye wurnae local when ye came tae help—folk can be as ignorant as fuck doon here.’ And I was a bit affronted, and I blushed, and the few folk who weren’t blaring music in their lugs scowled at us indignantly from their territorially defended seats, clutching handbags and manbags and bags of entitlement, so I said ‘Nae bother—take my seat’, ruffled the wean’s hair, said Ta-Ta and made my way upstairs to see if any seats were free up there.
And there was one. It was the front seat on the top deck. And I sat there as the bus made its merry way up through North London, admiring the old brick houses and shopfronts and parks bathed in pink and crimson and golden light as the sun set over to the west casting long shadows on the road, and I had a wee smile to masel as I sat up front and kidded on I was driving the bus (DON’T JUDGE ME, YOU ALL DO IT TOO!) and thought: Ken, things are never really all that bad, are they?