When I am working, three days per week, my day starts at
twenty past six in the morning, when I lumber out of bed, bleary-eyed and
totally disinclined to face the rigours of yet another day. A glance through the bedroom window discloses
yet another cold grey dawn, and I stumble downstairs to a bowl of cereal even
before the frozen little sparrows have had time to unfurl their tiny wings and
make a beeline for the bird table.
I
leave the house at seven and start up the car. It eventually coughs into life. The outside temperature is one degree. I park in the same place in Musselburgh, next
to the River Esk, where the canada geese and mallards are already hooting and
trumpeting their welcome to the morning.
Some of them will doubtless leave a little present for me on the car
boot lid, which hardens to concrete and virtually needs a skarsten hook to
scrape it off.
I catch a bus outside the
police station. It’s normally a Lothian
Buses number 26, but sometimes it’s a Firstbus number X24. You can tell the difference. The Lothian bus is modern and almost plush
compared to the 15-year-old Firstbus, which has seats of granite and wheezes
into Edinburgh like an asthmatic accidentally caught up in a cloud of
smoke.
I always sit in the same place –
upper deck, three seats from the back, left-hand side. There I can observe the antics of my fellow
passengers as they embark. No-one wants
to sit next to anyone, so those on the inside of the seats spread out as much
as possible, thus reducing the amount of space available for other
passengers. Those wishing to sit down
desperately search for an empty seat and, finding none available, tend to
gravitate towards the front of the bus, so my seat is typically one of the last
to be occupied by anyone else. One
student-type, straggly beard and indolent expression, normally sits on the
outside of his seat, with his haversack on the inside, and it takes a fast man
to divine that there is a space available next to him. Normally, the passengers take a quick sweep
from the top step of the bus, see a row of bobbing heads, and beat it back
downstairs to stand, so the studenty type gets away with it.
The women, upon sitting, immediately bring
out their mobile phones and turn to Facebook for the lastest goings-on in the
weird and wonderful alternative world of social media, whilst the men read the
free ‘Metro’, a ghastly newspaper filled to the brim with advertisements and
drivel in equal proportions.
After
forty-five minutes, we heave into the splendour of Princes Street and it is time
for me to disembark. Approaching the bus
stop, the drivers seem to take a delight in lurching forward, stopping
ferociously and then lurching forward again, so making your way down the bus becomes
something of a slalom as you cling to the backs of seats and grab the upright
poles in order to protect yourself from being hurled forward like a guided
missile, to end up, muttering profuse apologies, in the lap of the elderly lady sitting in the front seat.
It is but a short walk over the tram-lines to the office and the start
of another day of sitting in front of a compute for nine hours whilst no-one
there gives you the time of day. You
could turn up in a sailor suit and a sombrero and no-one would bat an
eyelid. Still, without the trip to the office,
one would be denied all of the entertainment on the omnibus and that, for a
keen student of the social sciences, is worth the entrance fee alone.
