Here’s a post I wrote on Wednesday evening on the number 73 bus: I realised I was going to miss it – not miss the bus, you almost never miss a 73 properly because there’s always another one coming – miss it in a piece of my heart way. And I also realised that it links a lot of my London experience together. It took me nearly three hours to get home. There are a couple of conclusions to draw from that. Either: if the people at Victoria say a tube train is not going anywhere anytime soon, it’s almost always quicker to wait for it to get going again than get the bus across Central London. OR: you get a new perspective on things if you take a different route home once in a while. Anyway. Here it is:
Tonight the Victoria line went down so I’m getting the bus from Victoria station across London. I meant to get on the 38 and pick up the tube at Green Park, but there was no 38 in sight, and anyway, as I was climbing the escalator the announcer – who had 30 seconds previously emphatically told the packed train (on which I had a seat) and the even more packed (and I mean rugby scrum packed) platform that the train wasn’t going anywhere – the same announcer said it was going one more stop to Green Park. Don’t know whether it was rebellion, or sense of adventure, or nostalgia for the bus I used to get all the time or cognitive dissonance in action, but I figured I’d get the 73 and find my own way across London. I’ve trained myself to think of buses across London at rush hour as only a fool’s pursuit, but on the other hand maybe it’s ok to be a Fool once in a while.
I’m going round Hyde Park now towards Marble Arch. I can see: traffic, or rather the yellow and red lights of cars and streetlights and traffic lights and bus numbers circling the mysterious luminal (maybe I mean liminal) space of the park at dusk with silhouettes of bare trees framing it. I’m going to miss the 73. Not the bus, the route, and not the bit of the route that goes along Oxford street but all of it, the whole route. I hadn’t realised until now – now I’ve been cajoled into it – that this route sums up a lot of my London experience. In a non-chronological order: First Out (a gay cafe I loved, sadly no more), the Drill Hall (where I worked behind the bar when I was younger), Seven Sisters (where we bought our first flat), John Lewis (wedding list, baby stuff, parent and baby room), Stokey, Islington (where my first girlfriend lived for a bit, where my Dad used to live with his Gran), UCH (where our son was born), The Pink Singers (the choir I joined in 2008 rehearse near Euston), the British Library (days spent writing my novels and my PhD), Kings Cross (endless trips to Cambridge and back). And my favourite memory of the number 73: Me and my woman, sitting at the front of the old routemaster, downstairs on the left, with a view of London like we were driving the bus.