On a Bus
I’m on a bus. The bus is travelling along Old Kent Road in South London. It is a flawless January day and the lazy, mid-afternoon sunshine is streaming into the bus from the left hand side. The people around me are talking in other languages on mobile phones, staring ahead into their own lives, rocking like bouys as the bus manoeuvres blearily through the currents of traffic. Another bus, one that is running the same route as this one but in the opposite direction, approaches, I crane my neck around the scratched glass screen in front of me and try to see whether or not the drivers of the two kindred vehicles will acknowledge one another. I always check for this. I can’t see the face of my own driver, but that of his opposite number lights up with a comfortable smile as he guides the front corner of his bus closely past the right flank of ours, suggesting that the two have engaged in some brief, probably wordless exchange. From my experience of observing such scenarios, bus drivers do tend to acknowledge on another as they pass and I always wonder, if they’re both driving the same route for the same shift, do they not pass one another at least 4 or 5 times and does it not start to become awkward, like when you bump into an acquaintance at the beginning of a supermarket trawl and continue to do so for the next hour at various places around the shop? Occasionally, bus drivers do not acknowledge one another, sometimes, when they are driving different routes I give them the benefit of the doubt - maybe they’re based at different depots, have never met ouside of their cabs, have no grounds for interaction. But, when the two drivers are piloting equal numbered services (the 78 in this case) and fail to initiate any contact, I immediately assume hostility and imagine the two of them are involved in some bitter love triangle or dispute over an unrequited loan. Getting off the bus now.
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