Some stories from the 176 bus

The first time my Mom rode the 176 bus was like meeting a celebrity, because she'd heard so much about the extraordinary goings-on aboard it. It's the only bus that runs all night between us and central London (from Penge to Oxford Circus, to be precise), and all-night buses get pretty wild, but the 176 seems to attract a certain amount of chaos at any hour. To give just a few examples:

There was the broken window. There was the guy who freaked out and lightly hit a ticket inspector in the chest, leading to a swift evacuation of the other passengers. Then, there was the ex-bus driver who held the bus doors open in protest after the current bus driver inadvertantly shut the doors on a woman who was trying to get off. The ex-bus driver knew that the bus couldn't move with the doors open, so he and another concerned citizen kept the bus motionless and called the police to report the assault of a young woman by a bus driver, heedless of all criticism (including from the woman herself, who was shouting at them to stop being idiots and let the bus leave). When the police arrived, they detained the two men who were blocking the doors. However, they weren't held for long, as we discovered later in the evening (it took a looong time to get hoem that night), when we found ourselves again on the same bus as these two concerned citizens, who had never met before this fateful evening. I still remember one bit of their conversation, when one told the other about someone who'd killed himself by jumping off the roof of a block of flats.

'Coward's way out,' his new friend said.

'Naw, it's not,' he protested, 'it takes guts to jump off a building. Doing it with pills - now that's the coward's way out.'

Because we now live a bit further out, Briony and I don't take the 176 as much as we used to, but we still live near a stop, and every once and a while trains stop running, and we get to ride it again (in fact, I'm on the 176 as I write this in my notebok, and a few seats ahead of me a young man is loudly taunting his friend for possibly having contracted scabies over the weekend).

Earlier this evening, Briony and I set off to see Emmy the Great play at the Queen Elizabeth Hall (it was a great gig, incidentally). When we arrived at the train station we discovered that due to engineering works, there were no trains. So we walked to the bus stop, where there was a 176 bus with its hazard lights flashing,and all the interior lights off. At first we thought it was broken down, but Briony's pretty sure that in fact, the driver had taken a break in order to pray. In any case, after a few minutes, we set off.

A little while later, a guy came on talking on his mobile in a state of rage, and kept up an animated phone conversation about rent, and money he was owed, and somebody's illness - his (exceptionally loud) conversation so enraged the man sitting behind us that he started humming loudly to himself to cover the noise.

Meanwhile, the guy sitting across the aisle from me was playing a snooker game on his iphone, with sound effects that were uncannily similar to the sound of a heart as amplified by an echocardiogram machine (though he was wearing headphones, so he was missing out on the sound effects that the rest of us were enjoying).

After the phone conversationalist got off ('Thank God for that!' the guy behind us cried) the phone-gamer started playing some game that seemed to be all about rubbing your thumbs on the screen vigorously, and generating the sound of a TV set that's getting nothing but static. I finally caught a glimpse of the phone's screen: it was taken up by four photorealistic pink udders.

The guy was milking a cow on his phone, for entertainment.