Blog On The Motorway

If I have been a little quiet of late it’s for one reason only, and that’s the World Cup, and its glorious exhibition of the dullest football around. Well, there are exceptions obviously, but even last night’s Spain game, which saw them dominating proceeding throughout and coming away with a two goal victory, was about as exciting as listening to a Travis album on repeat whilst waiting for a bus that never comes whilst an elderly lady taps you incessantly on the shoulder every five seconds to ask when the bus is coming.

I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of the dullness is down the constant droning of Vuvuzela hum, but since I don’t really want to be one of those people who moans about it, and I do think that if we’re going to have an African World Cup we have to accept that crowds in South Africa may watch football with slightly different traditions than us Europeans, I won’t. But they are bloody annoying. But not as annoying as watching our national team attempting to create a new style of football known as ‘comatose.’ I won’t write much more about that, since you are either already following the World Cup, in which case there is far more insightful commentary at every turn (although not on the BBC or ITV, naturally) or you hate ‘the football’ and would rather I just shut up about it. Besides, there is something that is grinding my gears far more than the underperforming nature of our useless windbags.

Since we moved I have been forced to restart my old epic struggle with a whole section of society. There are people, and I hesitate to call them such, who seem set to try and ruin my day with every opportunity, to baffle with illogic, to kill with tedium. I am referring the fine men and women of the First Bus Company in York. Before I moved to Acomb, I had gotten used to walking to and from work every day, and come rain or shine all I had to worry about was the possibility of large dogs attacking me. And that never even happened. But now, my work is a 40 minute bus journey away, with Rosie’s nurseries an additional complication.

But it’s not that simple, since every single day, the drivers get to our bus stop on time, and then sit there for ten minutes. Since the bus is supposed to come every 10 minutes (but it only ever seems to be my drivers who pull this stunt) they then just take up the next time slot. This allows them to say that although you are setting off ten minutes late, you are leaving on time. Now, ten minutes I will give you, but over the course of a 40 minute bus journey they invariably pull this trick twice more, once on the way into town, once on the way out. And this is even when they know that the traffic in and out of town will make them even later. Today a 40 minute journey took an hour and ten minutes, and yet the driver insisted that he was still on time, no matter how much I pointed to the timetable on my phone to prove otherwise. I understand that being a bus driver must be a really horrible job, and you take a break whenever you can. I would do the same, but surely if you are driving people to work every morning, you should act accordingly, and make some attempt to get your charges to their destination on time? But no, not the First bus drivers. And this is just the day to day nonsense, quite apart from all the times they refuse to open the doors because they have pulled away from the kerb by an inch by the time you get there. Or the times they refuse to acknowledge that a note is currency they cannot refuse.  All of these have happened to me in the last month, and there hasn’t yet been a day where I have not had to curse the very existence of First Buses.

The long and the short of this is that I need a bike. I hope to get one this weekend, as it will bring about the end of my need to be ferried around on the bus of doom, as well as halt the seemingly terminal decline in the Year Of Health experiment, which has spectacularly fallen by the wayside of late. Hopefully a long round trip on a bike will lead a fitter, leaner me. At the very least it will mean I no longer have to spend a good two hours of every day, inside a travelling sweaty chav box as it bakes in the summer sun. I will just have to worry about being sideswiped by a double decker instead.