11. Feb, 2017

Bus Journeys

When I started on bus journeys, they were a very different thing.  The driver was remote from the passengers and a conductor took fares, variously gregarious or otherwise.  When it rained, people's coats smelt of wet wool, old smoke and often, themselves.  We did of course, queue nicely before getting on.  Passengers chatted together, whether they knew each other or not.  This can still happen, but usually because the person wanting to talk to you is foreign and not sure where to get off. 

Now, we do not queue.  There's a kind of random mob gathering and when the bus arrives, people force their way through, with a remote air, as if doing so is nothing to do with them.  But despite this, everyone politely thanks the bus driver on alighting, a new courtesy but already a convention.  Young people, unless they're students getting acquainted, or teenagers showing off a bit, are melded to their earplugs and smart phones  and don't talk or engage with the world going by the windows.

My bus home from work is a showcase for cosmopolitan Manchester, and most conversation is people talking on their phones from the minute they get on, loudly oblivious to intrusion, as their languages (all different, African, Romanian, Pakistani, Middle Eastern) come from more crowded cultures and sing out to be heard.    

So I'm struck to hear, this week on that bus,  two English voices, one young, one old, talking animatedly together.  They're companions of some sort, for the young man, about twenty or so, is saying with satisfaction that he's glad he showed her Affleck's Palace (an arty sort of indie market now, once a department store).  He speaks loudly and has a manic eye, with which he tries to catch everyone's gaze, as unselfconscious as a small child.  He is talking to a tall, elderly woman, seated, strangely, on her large shopping trolley.  She has the kindly air of a retired professor. 

They discuss future trips, he declaring that they could go to Altrincham, where there are many excellent charity shops, where she can buy books.  She replies that she would like this, as she has had to leave all her books behind in France.  He commiserates and, to comfort her, says he has read something interesting himself recently and that she would like it.  This turns out to be his horoscope, which he reads out carefully from the Metro free paper, and then asks what she thinks it means.          

There was something touchingly old fashioned and gentle about this odd little friendship in an  urban world where aggression soon surfaces in so many circumstances.  I was left wondering how they met, for they were not relatives.  He clearly lived in some sort of supported accommodation from his talk and mentioned that if they were to go somewhere where he had to prove his age to be served, his family would not mind letting him have his passport to do so.  Perhaps some volunteer befriending service had brought them together, or just an unlikely chance meeting between two eccentric outsiders.  It was, though, somehow, very typically British.