Waiting tonight on Houndsditch for the 42, my bought tea stretching out the deformed Tesco carrier. I’m wrapped against the winter cold. The 78 passes, then the 100, and another one, a double-decker, the number - something or other - three of them, including a ‘2’. I left my gloves on a train a month ago, heading home for Christmas, and with no replacement the plastic carrier straps chop up the skin in the curve of my fingers and create numb swollen puffs between the white plastic. When I put down the bags and straighten my fingers, the rucks and puffs remain like the tired blistered hands of the decrepit.
The 42. I reach down with my right hand and fuss with the sloppy carrier now ranging across the floor and signal with my left. I look up – NOT IN SERVICE – ungh! I reverse the motion to lower the bag and prepare to recompose against the cold. Unexpectedly the bus shudders to a halt a little after my stop, it’s away from the curb, stopped in it’s tracks type of thing - there in the middle of the street. The doors wind open and the little wizened old lady I’ve previously seen driving the 42 - long died black hair, lots or rings, one signet - calls out to me from behind the wheel to hop aboard.
She asks where I’m heading and I say close to the depot, guessing she’s returning the bus after her shift, and we’re roaring off down Houndsditch, me on the raised little seat at the front by the driver – courteous - she at the wheel.
“If folks put vey’re arm aat when I ain’t in service, I always pick em up” she reassures me, in a foreign accent finished with East End polish, “if ah fink vey’re desprit”
As we approach Tower Bridge she is chatting about the daughter who has moved to Sydney with the husband and two kids. There’s a bit of cussing as the road narrows and she manoeuvres her bus vying for a place in the traffic stream telling me how she started on the buses sixteen years ago when she arrived in London from Greece. Her husband has been dead five years and she’s had enough. “It’s all crap pay and long haars in London, ain’t it luv?”
She asks me what I do and do I have kids, no I say, ‘What, never married ?” no, I reply. Past the Tower of London, The Tower Hotel – ka-bonk - as we rumble over the gap between the bascules of the bridge and downhill past Butlers Wharf and on and away towards Bermondsey. “I’ve saved up - gonna see Dawn in Sydney vis Friday, and me grandchildren, lovely. Gonna move aat vey’re when I give up va busses. Where dya want me ta drop yer love?”
We spin off the Bricklayers roundabout and head towards the depot, “Just on the corner here is great,” I say. A hiss and groan, and we come to a halt outside my flat, the doors whip open with a slap and the breaks fart. “Cheers luv, best a luck” and I step off the juddering red bus at my front door - I’m home. The bus hauls itself off on the final leg of its journey to the depot and I jangle the keys in the lock of the gates, with a wry smile. My own bus to the door, I haven’t left anything onboard, she’s off to Sidney, Dawn and the kids, I’ve my tea in my bag and the flat’s as warm as toast.
And I didn’t have to touch in or out with oyster.
Showing posts with label legends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label legends. Show all posts
hyperopia
It's greyer out than in. Flat winter sea-side light that won't allow a texture in, stops forms from etching in the gloom. It's floodlit, but not like a photoflood. No, not warm, it's dank, fills every empty pool with a banality that depletes me. It's SAD light. Inside it's tungsten yellow, a warm mellowness, for matinees, muffins, and fireside hostages. I'm walking to the river, as it's suicide composting on the sofa. The traffic, like rain before it develops character, drizzles it's way along the road. There's a kind of slow motion here in strolling to the river. Dull days are like bewildered grammar. Today is like one long sentence without punctuation slipping and sliding uncertainly between unrelated clauses and random prepositions. I slide into the eventuality of this insular indulgent mood and hope to make sense of it by averting my gaze uncharitably from the grizzly faces of passers-by with whom I'd rather not relate.
Suddenly, also sliding, two protagonists come into my lonely little play as one black and the other silver Mercedes cross paths, smack, headlights crack, wings fray and the scene, no injuries, conveys the exclamation mark so far missing from my day. Pepped-up by a little vigour, I turn with jolly gait, into Queen Elizabeth Street, and head for Maggie Blake's Cause, and the river. I've been coming here for years to sit, contentedly, looking out blankly, not quite to sea - not awaiting the French Lieutenant exactly - but it amounts to the same thing really. In London I seek structured opportunities to expedite these vacant episodes of staring. There's Primrose Hill and it's unfolding vista rolling sight lines grazing Westminster, Canary Wharf and fading into Greenwich Park where this picture is reversed but just as blissful. Richmond Park, Wimbledon Common, I suppose even The Eye provides this visual nectar, but for me, my window on the river is where I effect a kind of sensory dumbing down. I recently considered moving onto the twenty-second floor of Aragon Tower in Deptford Creek. Here, you pay for height not space, the chic sun-kissed twenty-second floor costs twenty to thirty thousand more than the dingy lower level flats. It's expensive to eschew the floor in favour of the sky. But I end up on Butlers Wharf, and where the river swings north-east - The Pool it's called - and passes Wapping, the sky and river meet. It's not exactly what the Time-Out guide to London would call breath-stopping, but as my eyes trace the distant silhouettes of cranes, church spires in Rotherhithe and Millwall, the thrusting towers of Canary Wharf, and old warehouses, now apartments, cladding both banks, I feel that I could sit here long into the night whilst the landing planes of City Airport are reduced to pretty blinking lights.
Through the bascules of Tower Bridge, the prettiest City view of all: The Gherkin, Lloyds, Nat West, The London Port Authority, Custom House, St Paul's.
Close up, in a corner, underneath a nearby bench, some abandoned orange flowers, green stems wrapped in fine gold leaf ? I put on my glasses, oh, an empty Veuve Clicquot bottle, left from New Year's Eve.
Suddenly, also sliding, two protagonists come into my lonely little play as one black and the other silver Mercedes cross paths, smack, headlights crack, wings fray and the scene, no injuries, conveys the exclamation mark so far missing from my day. Pepped-up by a little vigour, I turn with jolly gait, into Queen Elizabeth Street, and head for Maggie Blake's Cause, and the river. I've been coming here for years to sit, contentedly, looking out blankly, not quite to sea - not awaiting the French Lieutenant exactly - but it amounts to the same thing really. In London I seek structured opportunities to expedite these vacant episodes of staring. There's Primrose Hill and it's unfolding vista rolling sight lines grazing Westminster, Canary Wharf and fading into Greenwich Park where this picture is reversed but just as blissful. Richmond Park, Wimbledon Common, I suppose even The Eye provides this visual nectar, but for me, my window on the river is where I effect a kind of sensory dumbing down. I recently considered moving onto the twenty-second floor of Aragon Tower in Deptford Creek. Here, you pay for height not space, the chic sun-kissed twenty-second floor costs twenty to thirty thousand more than the dingy lower level flats. It's expensive to eschew the floor in favour of the sky. But I end up on Butlers Wharf, and where the river swings north-east - The Pool it's called - and passes Wapping, the sky and river meet. It's not exactly what the Time-Out guide to London would call breath-stopping, but as my eyes trace the distant silhouettes of cranes, church spires in Rotherhithe and Millwall, the thrusting towers of Canary Wharf, and old warehouses, now apartments, cladding both banks, I feel that I could sit here long into the night whilst the landing planes of City Airport are reduced to pretty blinking lights.
Through the bascules of Tower Bridge, the prettiest City view of all: The Gherkin, Lloyds, Nat West, The London Port Authority, Custom House, St Paul's.
Close up, in a corner, underneath a nearby bench, some abandoned orange flowers, green stems wrapped in fine gold leaf ? I put on my glasses, oh, an empty Veuve Clicquot bottle, left from New Year's Eve.
Nikon
Travelling home on the 42 I'm all weighed down with shopping and other bags. I aim myself awkwardly in the direction of those two sets of seats facing each other towards the back where I plan to have everything unwind and spill off while I collapse. I'm shot in that direction when the driver accelerates off from the stand firing me down the bus with the little extra help I hadn't planned, tho' If I were a bus driver, I suspect I too would enjoy this cavalier driving style, upsetting the trajectory of newly boarded fares with a wry smile, although unfair to spill aunt Vera off her heels. I like the 42 because it has that single seat up beside the driver, although no street cred' can be extracted from either sitting here or choosing it above all others and I delude myself - this choice is no sign of decrepitude. But it offers the grandstand view I like. It's not that I cannot picture each and every vista with my eyes closed, but that Tower Bridge thrills me each and every time I cross it, and in winter time at night, it is fairyland lit up.
As I sit I catch a corner of the shopping bag - some cod, bluberry juice, a fruit salad, some soup - a loud click and I think, oh shit, the chocolate, I've cracked it. Never mind. We course down Bishopsgate and swing left at the lights into Houndsditch. Barely anyone on the bus, a chap behind. Strange that on the bus rich and savoury smells of supper should fill the air, and whet my appetite for tea. Also wet, my jeans I notice, from behind. Examination reveals I'm now sat in a growing pool of chicken & corn chowder, thick and sticky, half of it still fills my carrier. The top has popped off my tub of soup, the chocolate is in tact, but I am soaked. And now a delicate maneuver. I can't stay sat in soup (it looks like sick) and if I get up to leave, the embarrassment of it ! At this point I have to make a choice, at the next stop, I will quickly rise, alight and allow the evidence of my embarrassment disappear into the night. I press the bell, gather up all that's mine, and poised, tense, prepare to rise. The bus comes to a jerky stop, and I quickly get up, my carrier slops more gloopy mess along the aisle and I hop off, stressed, relieved, and in a sticky mess.
On a low wall, I try to rearrange my luggage, the carrier is all amuck and needs discharging into another, my work bag, my precious Nikon D70 SLR camera... is... where ? Not here. Accompanying the sticky goo - to Denmark Hill I think it stops - I've left my Nikon on the bus. I feel blind.
If you are lucky enough to find, in an expensive, protective camera bag, my treasure, I hope you will enjoy my snaps and allow this lovely lens and body to hone your own photographic hobby. Stood alone and lost by this little wall, the horror and sadness of it all could not ring louder and my fingers smell of chowder.
As I sit I catch a corner of the shopping bag - some cod, bluberry juice, a fruit salad, some soup - a loud click and I think, oh shit, the chocolate, I've cracked it. Never mind. We course down Bishopsgate and swing left at the lights into Houndsditch. Barely anyone on the bus, a chap behind. Strange that on the bus rich and savoury smells of supper should fill the air, and whet my appetite for tea. Also wet, my jeans I notice, from behind. Examination reveals I'm now sat in a growing pool of chicken & corn chowder, thick and sticky, half of it still fills my carrier. The top has popped off my tub of soup, the chocolate is in tact, but I am soaked. And now a delicate maneuver. I can't stay sat in soup (it looks like sick) and if I get up to leave, the embarrassment of it ! At this point I have to make a choice, at the next stop, I will quickly rise, alight and allow the evidence of my embarrassment disappear into the night. I press the bell, gather up all that's mine, and poised, tense, prepare to rise. The bus comes to a jerky stop, and I quickly get up, my carrier slops more gloopy mess along the aisle and I hop off, stressed, relieved, and in a sticky mess.
On a low wall, I try to rearrange my luggage, the carrier is all amuck and needs discharging into another, my work bag, my precious Nikon D70 SLR camera... is... where ? Not here. Accompanying the sticky goo - to Denmark Hill I think it stops - I've left my Nikon on the bus. I feel blind.
If you are lucky enough to find, in an expensive, protective camera bag, my treasure, I hope you will enjoy my snaps and allow this lovely lens and body to hone your own photographic hobby. Stood alone and lost by this little wall, the horror and sadness of it all could not ring louder and my fingers smell of chowder.
perfume
At work this evening a colleague asks me what I'm wearing, he means what do I smell of. "Is it Jupe?" he says. It's not, and besides, I don't know what Jupe smells of.
When I took my bath earlier today I discharged into it an experimental elixir - black pepper, pachouli, ginger...
No future need, then, for aftershave. I have become a perfumist.
When I took my bath earlier today I discharged into it an experimental elixir - black pepper, pachouli, ginger...
No future need, then, for aftershave. I have become a perfumist.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
