This week I'll be mostly on the bus

"Form a line to the front
Form a line to the back"
- Gouldman

(This is not about leaving.)

There's a class of people in Chandler's Ford.  Middle class.  They know how to queue for a bus.  They're British.  They stand quietly and wait patiently.  They're elderly.

There's one lady in particular who is very talkative.  When she's waiting at the stop the mood is entirely different, and there's laughing, joking, telling of the same stories as last week, and general good humoured banter from everyone.  If the bus is late, there's a gentle murmur that ripples around, slightly critical, but generally concluding the delay is likely to be the result of some problematic traffic in Winchester.  When the bus arrives, it is the job of the eldest man to put his hand out and signal the bus to stop.  If there isn't a man, then the youngest woman will do it.  There's only one bus that stops here anyway, so the driver doesn't actually need to be told.  But it's the polite thing to do.  The boarding process is similarly organised.  The bus is boarded in the order of arrival at the stop.  This is strictly adhered to.  It is possible to find oneself at the bus door while someone who has been waiting for longer is behind you.  Etiquette maintains that you beckon the person forward with a nod, a gesture of the hand and a gentle 'after you'.

While standing and waiting for a bus is an art form, getting on and sitting down is a science.  It's been years (no, decades) since I've regularly used the bus, but getting up the stairs on a moving bus has the same science involved that it did when I was catching the 121 to Southgate, or the 279 to Seven Sisters.  There's stuff that your hand-eye co-ordination has to do that can't be explained because your brain just knows how to do it.  If you watch your brain tell your limbs what to do, you find that it is telling them to always have a minimum of two points of contact with either the floor or a hand rail, or the back of a seat, or whatever.  It is also ensuring that your centre of gravity is constantly at the optimum point.  You can't do any of this stuff consciously, you just have to let your brain run through its masses of tangential and triangulational computations, arriving at the most perfectly timed movements and contact points, based on the bus's speed, acceleration, deceleration, roll, pitch and yaw.  For a real applied maths mental workout, throw a rucksack over one shoulder and carry a small americano from Costa Coffee while climbing the stairs of the Bluestar number 1 as it negotiates the mini-roundabout at Fryern Arcade.

Today, I've told the talkative lady and her friend that this is the last time I'll see them, as I'm moving house next week, then I'm on holiday, and when I get back I'll be living in Devon for a while and catching the train.  She says she'd better shake my hand then, and does.  Then she repeats the story about the Mars bar.  The elderly gentleman (the one who's job it is to signal the bus to stop today) wishes me good luck.

(Oh look, it is about leaving after all.)