WHEN I was little, I used to be able to do a magic trick in which I would make a necklace disappear and then reappear. It used to stun all the grown-ups around me.
I used to place it on a table, cover it with a handkerchief, tap three times on the necklace with a magic wand, close my eyes, turn around three times, and when I lifted the handkerchief the necklace was gone. I would go through a similar process to make the necklace return. It was excellent, let me tell you.
In fact, it was so excellent, I was emboldened to show my teacher and all the kids in my class. I took a necklace, covered it with a paper towel, tapped on it three times with a pencil, closed my eyes, turned around three times, and lifted the handkerchief to reveal… a necklace.
What I did not know was that when I did the trick at home, while my eyes were closed and I was spinning around, my dad was removing the necklace in full view of all spectators.
This is basically how Cameron won two general elections and two referendums, and then lost the EU referendum, isn’t it?
IT WILL come as little surprise to long-time readers of this column that I was bullied as a child. I mean, look at me. Now imagine me as a child in school, a clumsy swot with a lisp and an inability to play football… My parents might as well have coated me in honey and thrown me to the bears.
It was fairly low-level bullying when I was at primary school, a sort of background buzz within my tolerance.
But when I got to secondary school, it changed quite dramatically. There was a boy, a couple of years older than me, who lived near me. I’ll call him Squeakybum, partly to protect his identity (he might now be a decent man ashamed of his childhood), and mostly as an act of revenge.
We would get the same bus to school. In those pre-deregulated days, a junior bus ticket would cost me 9p, the equivalent of 28p now – yeah, thanks for that, Maggie.
But there was a cheaper 5p ticket available for shorter journeys. Squeakybum and his friends would buy that ticket and stay on the bus for longer than they were entitled. It was theft, basically, and I am many terrible things but I am not a thief.
A couple of days after my first term started, Squeakybum came up to me, surrounded by his friends. “Stop paying 9p on the bus. We all pay 5p.”
“Yeah, but it’s 9p,” I said.
“I don’t care. If you pay 9p, the driver will know we’re paying the wrong fare.”
His message delivered, Squeakybum and his associates went to get on the bus. I followed them. And paid 9p.
I continued paying 9p for days until Squeakybum realised I was still defying him. That was when he punched me in the gut for the first time.
I carried on paying the right fare, he carried on bullying me, verbally abusing me, hitting me, for months. This was a boy who if I had said to him, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me,” he would have taken it as a tip to use sticks and stones.
I would like to think it shows character on my part that I continued to pay the correct fare, but maybe I was just more scared of the authorities than of him. It is hard to tell. I am not even sure what motivated me to choose my current breakfast cereal.
The point is that it was not the actual punching that was so debilitating, nor the name calling. It was the constant sense of dread, the knowing that Squeakybum could be around any corner, and the helplessness to do anything about it.
I have not really felt that dread for years. I have had short stabs of it when I have remembered that time, echoes of the pain, like the day after you have recovered from a migraine and you cough, and the jarring brings the headache back for a moment.
But I feel it now, because we have started to elect bullies like Squeakybum into power. And even more so since Tuesday.
I get the appeal of the strong man, who will knock heads together, instead of the wheedling pygmy compromising politicians lining their own pockets, blah, blah, etc, etc.
It’s not as simple as that. Everything is connected. That’s not just the way of modern life, that’s the way of life. You can’t just yank out the bit you don’t like and expect there to be no consequences.
But these easy answers-peddling bullies won’t tell you that. They won’t tell you that working women or the immigrants you don’t like because they talk foreign in shops are the ones paying for your NHS and pension.
They will tell you everything would be great if it weren’t for one thing. They will give you scapegoats.
Build a wall, throw out the Poles, beat up the little kid who pays 9p on the bus so you can carry on paying 5p. They’re all of a piece.
And you have a choice. Are you going to be one of the kids standing behind Squeakybum, holding his coat as he beats up his current target, egging him on, so that he doesn’t make you his next scapegoat?
Or are you going to stand up to him, and carry on paying 9p on the bus because it’s the right thing to do?
A picture of an otter. There are no otters in this column, but pictures of plastic carrier bags are quite boring and will actively prevent people from reading it
I BOUGHT a pen and a roll of wrapping paper from a shop and the woman behind the counter asked me if I wanted a bag.
“No,” I thought, “But you could wrap it for me, and then I would have extra wrapping paper.”
“No, thank you,” I said. I had weighed up the situation in my mind and realised that the pen could go straight into its new jacket pocket home, and it was not as if I would gain anything from carrying the roll of wrapping paper in a bag rather than in my hand. If anything, it would be worse as the roll would just keep bashing into me. Bags are rubbish, I thought. Stop trying to press bags upon me, Shop Woman.
I was too reckless. If only I had known that I would offend the gods of the carrier bags, I would have been more careful.
I went into another shop and bought the item which would go inside the wrapping paper – a box of Lego, intended for my soon-to-be-double-figured daughter. “Would you like a bag?” the man behind the counter asked. “No, thank you,” I said.
Then I weighed it up. Now I would have two items to carry – one in each hand. What if I fell over? I can never rule that out.
“Actually, yes, can I have a bag, please?” I said, after I had paid by card. I rummaged in my back pocket and pulled out a warm 5p piece. A momentary look of disgust flashed across Shop Man’s face as I dropped the coin into his hand. I did not blame him.
I put the Lego box and wrapping paper in my newly-purchased bag and left the shop feeling fairly happy with myself. I had already bought a birthday card, so I was bang up to date.
I did not even mind, as I walked back to the office, that I was right about the wrapping paper bashing into me as the bag swung in time to my weird lollop of a walk. The gods of the carrier bags had taken their revenge for my slight, and I did not care. I had achieved the bare minimum expected of a man in my position.
And then, as I got closer to my office, I remembered that last time I had slightly raised the bar by buying a box of chocolates. “Why must I constantly if only very marginally improve my performance?” I opined. “I have made a very minimal rod for my own back.”
Then I remembered that I had seen the particular sort of chocolates in the shop over the road from my office. It just went to show, I thought, that that day I was a winner with tiger blood.
I went into the shop, wrapping paper poking my armpit, and went to the confectionery aisle. “Where are they? Where are they? Ah!” I thought. I reached out and found the particular chocolates. Sunbeams shone out from them in their humble place on the shelf.
I picked them up, triumphant! And then I am not entirely sure what happened next.
I can only assume it was the true revenge of the gods of the carrier bags. Or maybe I was confused by a victory. But somehow, in my addled brain, I had decided that the carrier bag I was holding in my hand was a basket.
I dropped the chocolates straight into my bag.
And I did not realise what I had done until I noticed the mini-supermarket worker who was stacking the shelves about a metre to my left and who had clearly seen everything.
How on earth was I going to retrieve this situation? What was I going to say to her? “I’m not shoplifting, honest, I was just confused by a bag.”
“There’s only one thing to do,” my useless brain told me. “Shift the blame. I don’t know how. Why are you asking me? Just do something. Quickly, that woman is looking.”
And so, I yanked the chocolates out of the bag, and yelled, “You naughty chocolates. You know you’re not meant to be in there. Don’t do it again.”
The woman’s jaw dropped. I think her brain told her, “No, you’re OK, you’re hallucinating.” And then I raced to the self-checkout, and paid for the chocolates, waving my card about so that nobody was left in any doubt I was buying them.
IT WAS one of those evenings during which everything went wrong at the worst possible time, and yet we still managed to bring out a newspaper.
Not that readers would have been able to tell, for newspaper production staff are like ducks – we are calm and unruffled on the top half, but covered in water and lichen on the bottom half, and we quack and taste great on a pancake.
Anyway, battered and bruised and covered in hoi sin sauce, I staggered away from my office into the night, half an hour later than usual. This probably does not sound excessive to you people who work a nine to five day, but to somebody who works my hours it can only mean one thing – I had missed The Bus Window.
I had three choices: go back into the office and sleep under my desk, walk four and a half miles through a number of what the charitable would call “up and coming” areas, or hail a taxi.
And so I traipsed through the city centre in search of transport, shivering, Medium Coat flapping behind me in the wind. Younger men were wandering about me in shirt sleeves, but I no longer have anything to prove, nor the ability to prove it. I shall say it loud, I’m nesh and I’m proud.
After about 10 minutes, an orange light appeared in the distance and moved towards me. Could it be…? It was! It was a taxi. I felt like a shipwreck victim sighting land.
I had to wait till it got closer, though, otherwise I would have looked to passers-by like a madman frantically waving at ghosts. I know that I have to work on my cab hailing technique, but I have been trying for 40-odd years to learn how to whistle with my index fingers in my mouth and it still sounds as if I’m blowing into a glass to clean it.
The cab got closer and closer… Just a couple more seconds and I would be able to hail it… And then the driver turned off the main road and down a side street. I raged at the injustice of it all. How on earth could he possibly have not seen me in the dark in my dark grey suit and dark grey coat and black scarf?!
I chased after the cab. Perhaps it would lead me to more cabs. I didn’t know, I am a bus man.
But there was nothing. I continued to walk, and there, stopped at some traffic lights, was a cab with its orange light on. I took no chances. I waved my arm for all it was worth. A passing jumbo jet pilot would have been able to see my signal.
The taxi driver indicated. He had seen me! Better than that, my weird hailing motion had not put him off. And then, just as the lights started to change, a couple appeared – a man and a woman. They, like me, had clearly been searching for some time for a taxi. But, unlike me, they had clearly been spending some time carousing in several bars.
They started running towards the taxi, but the driver had already committed himself to stopping for me, and he moved off, driving away from them.
Now, put yourself in the couple’s place. They had hailed a taxi, which had its light on. They had got within inches of the door, and the taxi had moved away, towards another person. Imagine their sense of injustice at being gazumped.
I do not have to imagine it. I witnessed it. The man let out a bellow of rage and charged towards the taxi like a rhino as I struggled to open the door.
I stumbled inside the cab and slammed the door shut as the angry carouser banged on the window. “Get out of my [expletive deleted] taxi,” he suggested forcefully.
His face, squashed up with rage, pressed up against the window and I made a sort of shrugging gesture as if to say, “I am sorry, my friend, but your quarrel is not with me, it is with the ways of the taxi.”
“You [expletive deleted],” he said, as he banged again on the window, as the taxi drove off.
I do not want you to think I am a coward, but I had had a long and difficult day in work and I really did not want to end it in a brawl with an angry drunk. Especially as I wasn’t even on a bus.
SO, about a dozen or so years ago, Pete Burns had one of his flurries of millennial fame, long before Celebrity Big Brother.
As a result, my newspaper, the Liverpool Echo, did a spread on him, seeing as he was a local chap. It was a nice interview, the sort that newspapers regularly carried in those days. We did not take a picture of Pete, though. Interviews conducted by local newspapers tend to be done over the phone, and Pete’s publicist emailed us a portrait of the reborn star.
It was quite a restrained look for Pete. He was wearing a suit and patterned tie, and he had short hair. The suit, though, was purple, and his hair was green, and his lips were pink. He basically looked like The Joker.
You can see a cropped version of it at the top of this blog entry.
Still, it was a decent picture, and I used it well, even if I do say so myself. I am a newspaper designer by trade, and it was my job to lay out the spread. I did a cutout of Pete’s torso, and ran the text around it, and it looked jolly good.
It appeared in that Friday’s Echo.
On the following Monday morning, my editor at the time called me into his office, and suggested that I might elaborate on the thought process which led me to use that picture of Pete Burns. He explained that he had received dozens of complaints from readers.
I made some noises about homophobia, and said that we, as a modern newspaper, should be treating…
“No”, said the editor, “I’m talking about the tie.”
“Oh,” I said.
I peered at Pete’s patterned tie.
“Oh,” I said.
The pattern was not apparent in the black and white proofs of the pages which I had checked and had been checked by others, nor was it apparent on screen as the pages were laid out.
Only when it was printed on a colour page did it become clear – abundantly so – that it was not a pattern at all. It was an anatomically correct line-drawing of a eye-wateringly enthusiastic gay orgy.
Cheers, Pete.
EDIT: @anyabike off of Twitter found the picture in question, for reasons I cannot begin to comprehend. I’m not putting it on my website, but here is a NSFW link to the article in Digital Spy.
YOU know how in films the hero’s friend survives an attack and then either limps on, or appears perfectly fine for a while, but then collapses and dies?
“Oh, no,” says the person with medical knowledge conveniently nearby. “Billy Yourmate must have had internal injuries. You couldn’t have known. There was literally nothing you could have done to prevent this.”
I had just arrived on a railway platform. I had had to go down to London for A Thing at which I would have to talk to actual people about stuff the previous day, an exhausting task. All I wanted to do was go home and make a cup of tea that did not feature a guest appearance by UHT milk – the worst substance in the world.
Why is UHT milk the worst substance in the world, you ask? Because people who hate milk hate it and people who like milk hate it.
But I digress. I had just stepped onto the platform. In one hand I held a heavy suitcase containing my laptop. In the other hand, I had an Oyster card, such is my preparedness to “tap out”. (If you are not from London and do not know what an Oyster card is, it is a card with the word Oyster written on it.)
And snaking from both of my ludicrously belobed ears was an earphone cable, leading to the phone in my jacket pocket. This is a recent development. I do not generally listen to music on my phone, but I have been trying to learn a couple of foreign languages in an attempt to make myself more interesting.
The point is that I am not used to having my head wired up to my phone. And so when I reached forward to tap my Oyster card on the sensor, my arm caught the cable, yanking the phone out of my pocket.
My hands were full, and, in any case, if my reflexes were to be compared to those of a cat, that cat would be Garfield. I was helpless as I watched the phone tumble groundwards. The cable was pulled taut by the phone, and then gravity pulled the phone away from the cable.
“Oh, good,” I thought, watching the incident unfold in slow motion, “NOW the cable comes out. Why didn’t it do that when the phone was in my pocket?”
The phone hit the floor hard. “Oh, dear,” I thought, “I hope, with some force, that the screen isn’t broken.” I picked it up. It was unscathed. I tried to use it. It was working. “Phew,” I thought, which is an odd word to think, “That was close.”
About an hour later, as I was learning the German for the important phrase “A duck is a bird”, my phone froze. None of the buttons would work, so, in a huff, I removed the battery and replaced it, my standard “I used to work in IT” solution to phone freezing.
It must have had an internal injury. Reader, my phone would not come back on, a calamity beyond measure and scarier than Ed Balls twerking while dressed as a killer clown on the Hallowe’en edition of Strictly.
Now you are all saying at this point, “Poor Gary!” But half of you are being sarcastic, and remembering war and refugees and suffering. And the other half are genuinely realising that you would be completely stuck if that happened to you, and angry I did not put a trigger warning on this column.
And it would be even worse if you were in a strange part (i.e. Barnes) of a city in which you do not live (i.e. London). And if the code you had to type into the ticket machine at the station to get your ticket home was only on your phone.
And it would be even even worse if you didn’t know anybody’s phone numbers these days because nobody knows anybody’s phone numbers these days because they are all on your phone. Or if you had to tell a German that a duck was a bird and you had forgotten the word for “duck” because of the business with your phone.
Essentially, it has made me incredibly aware of how stupid it is to have everything upon which you depend stored on a single mobile device, which you can break just because you are trying to learn conversational Portuguese and you don’t have three hands.
THEY say that before you die your life flashes before your eyes, a Big Brother-style showreel of your best bits. I have often wondered how they know this. Seances, probably.
It must be awful finally to remember in which programme you first saw that man who was in that thing, but not be able to say because you are now dead.
Sorry for the morbid thought. It was prompted by one of my surprisingly infrequent brushes with death. It may appear unlikely that a man as accident-prone as myself is rarely confronted by mortality, but my mishaps are usually minor, if frequent.
For example, only yesterday morning I had a minor mishap. What I did not realise at the time was that it would turn into a more serious threat to my wellbeing.
This story features, as so many do, a cup of tea and a bus. I was due to work an early shift. An early shift to me is what most people would call an ordinary shift – a nine-to-five slog involving traffic-clogged journeys to and from work and a lunch break taken at exactly the same time as everybody else. I don’t know how you do it.
I got up, made a cup of tea, showered, dressed, and drank my tea. I was a model of early-morning efficiency. And then I went to wash my cup and it all went horribly wrong.
There was a teaspoon in the sink, and I had somehow managed to leave it in exactly the wrong place. The water hit the spoon, and it was then deflected into the air making a textbook arc straight for my light blue shirt and turning it into a piece of modern art.
I chuckled. “Ho, ho,” I said, as I removed my sopping wet shirt. “At least my daily mishap has already happened. Argh! I don’t have any ironed shirts.”
I set up my ironing board and started the pointless time-sucking job of temporarily removing creases from a clean shirt. Seconds were ticking by, but at least I would just about make it to the bus stop in time. Years of practice have taught me exactly what time my bus will arrive at the stop.
“Oh,” I thought, as I arrived at the stop. It turned out that the bus arrives three minutes earlier at that time of day. I had missed it. “Silly me for thinking that the spoon incident was my daily mishap. THIS is my daily mishap.”
I started to walk. I would have to get the train to work instead. It was annoying, but not the worst thing. Assuming it was on time, I would arrive at work five minutes late, giving my colleagues the gift of less time with me.
The sun was low in the sky as I reached the corner of my own road again on the way to the train station. I checked the road for oncoming traffic, as directed by the Green Cross Man.
The sun was in my eyes, and I looked across the road, seeing a boy wearing the same school uniform as my own son. I wondered what he would have been up to at that time of day, then I stepped into the road without checking again.
That was when the car hit me.
My life did not flash before my eyes. The only thing that flashed before my eyes was the sun, and the strong awareness that I had just been hit by a car, and I was not sure how long that state of affairs would continue.
It must have lasted only a second, but time really did seem to slow down. It hit me in the leg and I felt it buckle, but I did not fall over. Instead I was pushed along the road as my palm hit the bonnet.
Luckily, the car was driving slowly after having just taken the tight corner into my road. If I had been a few feet further down, I might have been in more trouble.
Shocked, I shouted out a bad word. But the impact had been so minor that nobody had noticed it apart from me and, I would like to think, the driver.
And so, all any onlookers noticed was a forty-ish, respectably dressed man screaming out an expletive in the street for no apparent reason.
Embarrassed by the whole business, I fled. I can only hope that it does not appear in my end of life showreel.
Theresa May – Andrea Leadsom without the giddy sense of fun
SO somebody asked me: “Where are you from?” And I said: “Well, I was born in Liverpool.”
And he looked me in the eye, and he said: “No, but where are you from? Where is your family from?” I blinked. “Er, Liverpool. That’s why I was born there. It was more convenient.”
He stared at me, his eyes boring into me. “No, you’re not getting it. Where is your family from? You’re not British, are you?”
“Oh!” I said. “Well, I’m not really sure about my dad’s side, though Bainbridge is a village in North Yorkshire, so I suppose they must have come from there at some point.
“But on my mum’s side… well, there’s some Irish in there. I mean, see how pale I am. I make milk look brown. I could hide out in a paper factory for months.
“But there’s also some Italian in me from a few generations back. Half my mum’s siblings looked Irish like me. The other half looked like Al Pacino.”
“Ah! I thought so,” he said, and made to wander off. “Hang on a sec,” I said to him, “are you a figment of my imagination?”
He nodded, and vanished in a puff of smoke, his point made.
I’m quite lucky in that I am white, and usually pass for a native. If I were brown or black, I would have been asked those questions so many times I would not have had to make up an anecdote.
But ask yourself: “Where am I from?” If you can go back more than four generations without finding a foreigner in your forebears, you are a very unusual and rare flower. Even the Queen is part German, and married to a Greek.
The fact is we are all immigrants, or the children of immigrants. So when the Government starts talking about cutting immigration, and about taking us out of the European Single Market just so that we can halt immigration, you should feel uneasy.
When the Government talks about cutting the number of foreign students who come to Britain, pay fees to learn here, and then go back home, you should feel uneasy.
And when the Government talks about forcing companies to publish lists of their foreign workers, you should feel worried. Because while this is bad enough, where will it end?
It is becoming clearer than ever that Brexit is going to hit this country hard. The pound is crashing already. And instead of surgically unpicking the legal and social veins which bind us to the EU, this gang of vandals is going to yank us out.
And as the blood spills and the damage mounts up, the Brexiteers in government who blundered and blustered and said we had nothing to fear from leaving the EU will not take the blame.
David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, has already said that if Brexit is a failure we are all to be held responsible. Well, not me, matey – I am not going to be accountable for this disaster. And neither will the half of the country who voted to remain in the EU.
So who do you think will be considered responsible? It will be the ones who always get the blame, the easy targets already being lined up – the unloved immigrants. It will be the people like your great-grandparents, the people who spoke foreign in shops and even so were allowed to stay and work and marry and eventually produce you.
They will be blamed for taking British jobs, as if there is a queue of Brits outside the hotels and fruit farms dying to do a hard day’s work for a pittance. They will be given the blame for why you are unemployed after the car manufacturers and call centres leave this post-EU country. And God help them.
We’ve seen all this before in this continent. It ended with a world war and millions dead. That’s why we had an EU, why we had to make it inconceivable that the countries of Europe would ever go to war with each other again.
But the question is, which side are you going to be on?
Are you going to be one of those cheering as people like your great-grandparents are hounded out of their homes and this country?
Or are you going to remember that you yourself are an immigrant, with foreign blood rushing through your body, and tell the Government “No?” Because that would be the British thing to do.
I TAKE quite a lot of buses and I have probably done a poor job in concealing that fact. But what you might not know is that sometimes I use other forms of transport.
For example, occasionally I use the train. Trains are great. If you are not sure what a train is, it is a sort of incredibly expensive bus that goes on rails, apart from on Sundays, when it is an incredibly expensive bus that goes for large sections of the journey on roads.
And, even more occasionally, I use aeroplanes, or “flying buses” as I like to call them. Up till this month I could count the number of times I had flown on aeroplanes on one conventional hand, i.e. five times. If you are wondering how somebody can fly an odd number of times, the answer is that I got the train back once because of a shampoo-based incident which need not concern you.
But last week I took an aeroplane to Abroad, specifically Portugal. I arrived at the airport in plenty of time, having weighed my bag several times to ensure I was nowhere near the point at which my chosen carrier would make me shell out actual money.
I was, it was fair to say, something of a naïve rube at the airport. All I lacked was an ear of wheat protruding from my mouth. I tried to remember the advice I had found online at airportsforidiots.com, “Remove your belt and metal jewellery and walk through security with purpose.”
The trouble with this advice is that I find “walking with purpose” difficult at the best of times. It is terrible advice, like being told to “act naturally”. I never know what to do with my hands when forced to behave as if everything is perfectly normal. It’s a wonder I can remember how to breathe.
But it is even worse when you have to “walk with purpose” without your belt and your trousers are on the loose side.
So my purposeful walk was less 1-2-3-4, and more a sort of free jazz. The scanner beeped, despite the fact I had less metal on me than you would find on the bill at a twee folk festival.
I had drunk some Irn Bru a couple of weeks previously, so maybe it was that. Or maybe it was because I was a shifty looking man travelling alone.
In any case, I was called “sir” and told to face a guard, who gave me a patting down so intimate and delicate that I think we might now be engaged.
And then I was told to go into The Other Scanner, where I had to hold my hands above my head as if I had been photographed in the audience at a Queen concert during Radio Gaga, and scanned again until I was told I was free to go, certified “No Threat: Irn Bru/Awkward Walker”.
I greeted my various possessions on the other side of their own scanner, and went to retrieve them, to be told by a second security officer that my bag was going to have to go through a second time. I gulped. Because I remembered… On a previous trip to London a few weeks before I had packed some migraine tablets in the bag.
“Oh, crumbs,” I thought, paraphrasing, “I am going to be hauled up before the beak for drug smuggling. I’m going down. I won’t do well in prison. There’s no wi-fi and I wouldn’t have the first idea how to make a shiv.
“My only hope is that my glasses and general demeanour would make the other inmates call me The Professor, and I would have to read or help them compose their letters.” Also, I was worried about my belt, as my trousers were hanging onto my hips for dear life.
But my bag came back without explanation. Maybe I had packed it in an amusingly unconventional way, and the guards were going to pass the x-ray around later on in the pub. “Ha! Have you seen the way he’s balled his socks? He must have three feet.”
In any case, as I reattached my belt and saved everybody from a terrible fate, I looked across at security and wondered: “Why do they have two scanners? Why don’t they just make everybody go through the good scanner?”
This is why I stick to buses. It is simpler and nobody ever frisks me apart from late-night drunks.
I WENT to the newsagent’s to renew my monthly bus ticket. This is always a source of conflict for me. On the one hand, I understand that I would save money on bus fares over the month by paying in advance.
On the other hand, what if something happened to me which would prevent me from taking enough bus journeys in the month to justify the initial outlay? What if I won a car, or I died after being hit by a bus wing mirror, or there was a nuclear apocalypse? That would be typical.
Of course, after I had paid the surcharge for using my debit card to buy my ticket in a newsagent’s – 50p to use a card in a shop in 2016 – I bimbled towards the bus stop, whether I wanted to or not. How else was I going to make inroads into my investment?
And there in the bus stop was displayed an advertisement recommending that I buy the very ticket I had just purchased. It was illustrated with a photograph of a young, unthreatening, ethnically-diverse bunch.
This gang would not play videos of auto-tuned singers on their phones on the bus, unlike every other group of youthful bus passengers I have encountered in the past eight years. Nevertheless, I hated them, obviously, with their haircuts and their enthusiasm and their lives stretching ahead of them.
But that was as naught compared with my anger towards the words which accompanied the picture. “Cut out the need for photo ID and buy one or more Mega tickets on your Wibble card, leaving you more time to have a laugh with your mates.” I have changed the names of the tickets because I do not want this column to show up on a Google search and give them extra publicity.
It is not the first time I have seen a poster which suggests travelling on public transport is a source of unlimited mirth. My local train provider recently ran an ad depicting a carriage filled with, variously, a woman singing karaoke, a man DJing, a string quartet, a chef cooking, and a hen party. Underneath was the slogan “Great Nights Out Start On The Train.”
That is not a great night out, that is the result of a fire alarm at Blackpool Tower, or ITV’s Saturday night schedule. It is certainly not a great train journey.
But what is this bus poster nonsense, this “leaving you more time to have a laugh with your mates?”
What sort of young person will see that advert and think: “Well, yes, having more LOLZ with my friends is exactly the sort of thing to which I aspire. As God is my witness, I WILL buy this season ticket – which, by the way, is the only type of bus season ticket available now – and achieve my ambition, no matter how marginal the effect?”
For how much time is the travel authority suggesting will be made available for mate-orientated ribaldry as a result of buying this season ticket? Why is this not quantified? There should be an asterisk after “more time” and some small print at the bottom of the poster stating: “On average, 28 minutes more LMAOs and LOLZ over 35 years, assuming 10 journeys per week. That’s roughly 0.7 extra HAHAs a day.”
Also, I am not sure the travel authority should be encouraging raucous behaviour on buses. Buses are not fun places to be, like nightspots or Methodist youth clubs or wherever youngsters congregate these days. Buses are for quiet and despairing reflection on where you are going and how your life has come to this.
But the worst thing about this statement is that it is not true, certainly not for me. Back in the olden days, about a year ago, I had a conventional pass, what I would dub The Classic. It had a terrible picture of me on it, and the expiry date clearly stamped, and I wafted on and off buses like Rihanna or the late Sir David Frost might saunter into Claridge’s.
Now I have lost my VIP status and have to queue up with people who pay their fare with 43 different coins, and teenagers, leaving me with even LESS time to “have a laugh with my mates”, if only I had some.
I calculate I have lost an average four minutes a week, and 50p a month, because of the Great Bus Pass Switch Caper. And that is no laughing matter.
Gary Bainbridge 