Dreadful Nonsense

Last night on the bus on the way home from work, I was suddenly and inexplicably surrounded by old people.

The events happened as follows: I got on the bus (no problems, everyone around me was under 30 and slightly odd looking, all perfectly normal for that time of night); I sat downstairs; I opened my OU book; I pumped up the volume on the discman; I immersed myself in the frankly boring world of child psychology.

Two stops later, we were taking longer to upload passengers than usual, so I tore myself away from the fascinating Bowlby theory of attachment and looked up. And lo, there they were. Old people. Hundreds of them. Doddering and wobbling and grinning from ear to ear like a rubbish out take from Cocoon. Where had they come from? Where were they going to? Why were they travelling en masse? All of these questions occurred in rapid succession, but the most pressing thought was: where the fuck are they all going to sit?

The dilemma of giving up seats while travelling on public transport is one that I frequently am confronted with, and I have quite a good system for dealing with it - I don't give up my seat. And before you start with the evil looks and the tutting and the stamping of feet and the moral highground, I'd like to remind you, in that way I have, of my three - THREE - slipped discs and added complications of a back nature. And if that's not enough for you, I'd add in the fact that I'm quite, quite evil.

No, the way I get around it is I usually sit upstairs. If anyone is sprightly enough to make it up the stairs on a Dublin bus, you're capable of standing downstairs - and you must be considerably sprightly to climb those stairs, as well as slightly acrobatic, because Dublin bus drivers seem to get extra points or a weekly bonus or at least some kind of sexual thrill if they knock you off your feet while ascending or descending the stairs, such is the veracity to which they dedicate themselves to the task. On the days I can climb the stairs, I do. On the days I can't climb the stairs, I need my downstairs seat just as much as the next pensioner, and no state sponging old granny is going to take it away from me.

But last night, there I was, trapped in a sea of blue rinses and false teeth, hips, knees and bladders. Looking around me, I could see that many other passengers were also feeling the horror I was experiencing, as they looked at this swarm of OAPs wrinkling towards us. We did what we had to do. As one, we all stood up and ran up the stairs, thereby achieving two things:

1. We'd given up our seats like good responsible citizens.
2. We'd rubbed their OAP faces in the fact that we can all still run up stairs.

This entry was posted on 04 February 2005 at 11:39 pm. 0 comments

Dreadful Nonsense

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