Again, with the non-pop culture related posts! When is this
going to stop! I’ll be back on DC’s case soon enough, but for the time being
they seem to be quiet and contemplating their idiotic choices, so we are
letting them do that and see if they can make a Deadpool out of a Green
Lantern. Very unfortunate that the bad movie in this analogy is DC and the good
one is Marvel, I promise it was not intentional. Well, not completely
intentional. I didn’t wake up thinking up a connection between DC and Marvel in
the form of Ryan Reynolds. You know what? I will switch sides! “I’ll be back on DC’s case… idiotic choices…
and see if they can make a Bruce Wayne out of a Matt Murdock”.
So this is going to be another post about nothing to do with
superheroes, wizards, TV series or anything remotely of interest to me. It is
going to be about transportation. Public transportation. British public
transportation. Let me start by saying that I came back from Nepal, where any form
of transport is a risk for your well-being. I think the whole ‘you are more
likely to die in a car crash than a plane’ would be very different if Nepal was
excluded from this statistical analysis. Seriously, the only adhered law in
Kathmandu is that if a cow decides to sleep in the middle of the road, cars have
to quietly make a detour, which I think should be a law everywhere. So upon my
return to civilised driving, I believed that nothing could ever again bother me
on the road. But I had, of course, forgotten about the London Bus drivers. They
clearly feed on our misfortune; I know everyone has at least one story of the
bus door shutting in their panting, sweaty faces and the bus driver menacingly
smiling and waving goodbye. Those are the moments they live for, I am sure of
it. In their defence, if I was a bus driver I would probably do that at least
once a week. Or at least once for any
passenger who could not spare a semi second to smile back. A wild GUILT has
appeared while writing this post.
My recent experience involved one of those drivers, but a
morally indecisive one; for the sake of the narrative, let’s call him Chidi. So
Chidi stopped at my bus stop where I and another lady in front of me wished to
get on the bus. It must have been Chidi’s first day on the job and they must
have left out the ‘more than one people may get on the bus at each stop’
lesson. Granted the lady in front of me was tall, let’s call her Tahani, and I
am very short, so maybe Chidi simply did not see me, but Tahani barely made it
inside which makes me think maybe another bus howled and ours was rushing to
its aid, or however buses work. As you do in these cases, I kindly knocked on
the door, suggesting that we put all this behind us and I get on the bus and
get home to all that pop-culture I am leaving out of this post. Chidi was not
happy! He frowned, he huffed, he almost banged his hand on the wheel, but
ultimately decided to let me in. And then it happened. The indecisiveness. From
what I gather, midway my entering the bus, Chidi decided he didn’t want me
there! Chidi sped off before all of me was inside the bus premises and I had to
practise my long-forgotten, basic ballet skills. And then the driving began. I
felt so much sympathy for everyone in the set of ‘Speed’. I know this is the
go-to movie for anyone describing an insane bus driver, but there is a reason
for it! There is a limited amount of action movies starring buses. I would look
around and I could see the shared fear, the certainty of death before us! And just
like any good psychological thriller, Chidi, the villain in this case, was
softly but very distinctly humming a melody which to me sounded like ‘Requiem
for a Dream’. I might be making that last bit up. I don’t know what he was
humming. But I feel it could have been ‘Requiem for a Dream’.
Nonetheless, I am alive and well and very much able to
celebrate Jake Gyllenhal being discussed as the next Spiderman villain (which
means they might keep Battfleck for a while longer). I am, therefore, going to
end this post on a positive note; I have not yet died on a London bus and intend
to make more meaningful posts in the future.
