My Blog Thing

I must say, whilst commuting for 4 hours everyday has its downsides (like, losing 4 hours of my day every day) it does have some bright points.  My hatred of bus drivers has now been fine tuned to an almost fanatical obsession with:

 

Their constant rudeness

 

Their lack of any comprehension of how their driving might affect the health of those using the bus.

 

The constant lack of change, like a large magnet passed over the depot and removed coins of all amounts, leaving them with a hundred 20 pound notes and nothing else……which of course is my fault!

 

However me being an optimistic soul, I now view these things with less irritation and knowing smile – like the smile you might give when someone pushes in front of you in an airline queue, but you know that they’re the one who’s going to have a routine cavity search.  I’m sure bus drivers will get their own one day, and although I don’t believe in any gods or anything like that, I can’t possibly believe that they could just pass away and get away with it.

 

However the number one high point of using public transport is the vast potential for listening in to other people’s conversations and just being generally nosey……this is an example of that:

 

Yesterday there was a girl and a lad both from
London, they didn’t know each other but some how fate had thrown them together.  She was young (19 ish?) and she was on her way to
Leeds, to audition at Gatecrasher as a dancer.  This was a really big deal, she used to be a good dancer until she had 2 kids, but now they had grown up a bit (!!!!!!) she could get back into it.  Gatecrasher apparently pays its dancers really well, which is why she’d come all this way, as ‘why else would I bother coming up here’

 

This is where I knew it would be worth listening to.  Picture the scene.  This is the stopping train between Sheffield and Leeds, taking hard working northerners back home and takes in Meadowhall (the shopping centre that seems to have the status of a city, and apparently is a great ‘shopportunity’ – see what they did there!), Barnsley and Wakefield, basically a tour de Yorkshire, and this girl is about to rip into the north…….brilliant 

 

She started on a well worn subject…..sandwiches

 

‘I mean innit, when I go to a sandwich shop, I wan’ it in a bun, but no, they ‘av a breadcake, I mean what the bleedin hell is a breadcake innit?!?!’   ‘ I don’t want a cake, I want a sandwich’

 

And she kept on with the food references

 

‘and when I ask if there’s somewhere I can get some tea, they point me a café (Kaff) or summat, I mean naaoh, I don’t want my dinner, I want a cup of tea, is that too much to aask???’

 

At this point her companion, a southerner who’d been in the north long enough to know the dangerous game she was playing, began to look and sound very uncomfortable.  His platitudes became quieter, he edged across on his seat…he tried his best, but failed.

 

I won’t go into lots of detail but she went through the weather ‘I mean its so cold innit, how do people live up here’, men, ‘and is it just me, but are all the men thick’ (I though that particularly ironic) and bizarrely, the lack of continental pastries. ‘back home I can get a croissant, a Danish, anyfin, but here all I get is an iced bloody finger….AN ICED FINGER?!?!?’

 

Needless to say by the time we reached
Barnsley (which when it was announced she annoyingly imitated as ‘Baaaaaaarnslay’)  everyone was right annoyed and someone asked her to keep it down, which she did but not before a shrieked ‘how ruuuude’

 

If the bloke had been talking like that, he would have been dead by
Wakefield.