Categories: buildings-and-cities
Tags: london, politics, cities, buses
Date: 10 June 2009 12:13:48
Getting to work. There is a Tube strike. I foolishly didn't realise that the buses would be messed up. I rarely use the Tube to get to work, and when I went home last night I had had an easy bus journey. But of course that was because all the Tube-travelling wusses left work early so by the time I hit the streets the rush had died down.
Twelve hours later on my way back things were quite different. Waterloo was packed with people who didn't know where to go. Some seemed sad, some angry. I was sitting next to a young woman - maybe girl really, she looked a lot like my daughter did about five or six years ago and gave every impression of trying to look older than she is, lots of makeup, very high heels - who looked very sad. Well maybe looking sad was the point because the clothes were distinctly Goth - black al over, frilly round the edges, long skirt, rather chunky shiny black shoes.
An odd style for 10am. Its too early to be going out, and the clothes looked too clean and new and dressed-up to be her regular clothes (or the ones she was coming back from the night before in), and the style is too self-consciously Goth to be dressing up for work. Unless she works in one of the handful of deliberately self-styled Goth pubs I suppose. I rather patronisingly wondered to myself if she was going for an interview for some supposedly arty job, or at college or university, and wanted to look "different". Which if it was the case she was failing to do because you could see people dressed like that when I was in Brighton in the 1970s. Except that they were wearing second-hand stuff or clothes they nicked from their grandmothers rather than a style bought off the shelf at Claire's Accessories. No, not Claire's Accessories, that's cruel. But I hope it was the Goth pub. You always want to think the best of people. I smiled at her and she smiled back. Which is always heartening. Though she looked sad again later.
A woman on a wheelchair tried to get on the 188 bus in the rain and another woman, one of the other passengers, complained. She said it that motorised wheelchairs are against the rules. I hope she's late for work every day this week. And the driver agreed and didn't let the wheelchair user on. I felt very angry - but said nothing. There were a lot of other people who said nothing. Its not as if it was one of those refurbished golf buggies with steering wheels and five-speed gears that large Americans use to get round convention centres and airports and silly Brits drive down the wrong side of the road at ten miles an hour in. It was just a perfectly ordinary wheelchair with handles and everything and a little whiny motor controlled by a switch in the arm. The sort that nearly all wheelchair users actually use. She didn't get on the bus, but a couple of policemen helped her to the one behind. I hope she wasn't refused there. I didn't see what happened.
There were more idiot drivers on the road than I've seen for ages. More drivers of any kind. One fool tried to pass the bus I was on on the inside by moving into a side street and back out again and ended up with the nose of the car jammed between roadworks and the kerb. A wobbly wet cyclist also tried to come up the inside between a parked van and the bus, just as the bus was moving left to a stop, and his handlebars came within an inch of us. And he nearly fell off. Whey didn't he just stop? Why didn't he go on the outside of the bus the way you ought to?
It took me twenty-seven minutes to get from home to the platform at Waterloo Station, another twenty-seven from the platform at Waterloo Station to the south side of Waterloo Bridge (for non-Londoners that is about four hundred metres) and it would be poetic to say it took twenty-seven minutes from the south side of Waterloo Bridge to work, but actually it was twenty-four. Yes, I could have walked it, but I stupidly didn't come dressed for walking in the rain. Wearing sandals - I thought about putting on shoes and socks but didn't because I was late for work and wanted to catch a bus in a hurry. Sandals save a minute.
The 188 driver kicked us off the bus at the south side of Russell Square, as they usually do when they are grumpy (and black drivers do less often than white drivers - I wonder why that is?) But it didn't matter as the Square was so blocked with traffic we got there before the bus. And my feet hardly got wet at all.
This is what London was like every day before the Congestion Charge. Thank God for Ken Livingstone.
And expect worse. As we move towards a government that is likely to be even more unreasonable on worker's rights than "New Labour" has been, the chances are we will see a lot more of this.