On the buses

What is happening with the weather at the moment? I really shouldn’t be able to wander around London all afternoon without a coat in February… Perhaps it’s connected to the sudden continental drift that, according to the GeoURL thingy on this page, has moved London 1013 miles east of Nairobi. On the other hand, I could just have entered the wrong coordinates for East Dulwich. Hope it’s the former reason though, because I have to say it would be nice to look out of my bedroom window each morning to see Mount Kilimanjaro rising out of the mist.

Anyway, as I was passing the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street I was drawn in by one of their sales (is there ever a time when Virgin and HMV aren’t having a sale of some sort?). Tempted though I was by Liberty-X’s Brit Award winning offering, I ended up buying Passion by Peter Gabriel (music for the film The Last Temptation of Christ), a replacement for my copy that vanished about two years ago. I’ve been meaning to get it for ages, and now it’s been digitally remastered, there was no excuse for not buying it at a reduced nine quid. I’d forgotten how good Passion is — all sorts of evocative North African and Middle Eastern sounds (I refuse to use the patronising term ‘World’ music!), mixed together in a Gabriel-at-his-non-commercial-best sort of way. It was heavily sampled on Tales of Ephidrina by Amorphous Androgynous (a.k.a. Future Sound of London), if you’ve heard that. Ah, it’s like being reunited with an old friend.

Still can’t get used to the effect of the congestion charge — central London is so much quieter. It’s like a scene from Day of the Triffids, where the chap comes out of hospital and finds the streets deserted because everyone’s gone blind. Well, you know, it’s not a perfect analogy, as I didn’t seen any giant man-eating plants roaming around Soho — just the usual chuggers, who are just as bad. Now Ken’s successfully used the stick, it would be nice to see a bit more of the carrot though; the buses are still pretty crap around here.

In the league table of London’s worst bus routes that came out a couple of months ago, two of the four buses I use regularly made it into the worst ten routes. One that didn’t make the list is actually the one I consider to be the worst: the number 37 from Peckham to Putney, which is about as reliable as a Lada with a tank full of orange juice (on several occassions I’ve waited over an hour for a service that’s supposed to run every 12 minutes). The 185 (5th worst bus route in London)? Getting better. But the 176 (9th worst route) to Oxford Circus is rather dire — run-down buses that are always overcrowded and turn up at random intervals. The countdown-till-next-bus displays at the bus stops were good — when they worked — but the one at my usual stop on Lordship Lane has now been removed all together.

Put the congestion charge up to twenty quid and use the money to build a 24-hour, solar-powered monorail (with seat-back Playstations) from East Dulwich to Soho, I say.

Update: sadly I won’t be seeing Kilimanjaro for a while — I got my latitude and longitude the wrong way round, d’oh! — guess I’ll have to make do with the Teardrop Explodes album instead.

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