November!

November 27, 2007, 1:00 pm; posted by
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My friend Keisha and I made an attempt this week to find a coffee shop with wireless on Oxford Circus so we could work on one of our many final papers. It was raining when we hopped on the 19 and struggled up the stairs to find seats, spotting two in the back after several moments of searching. We wedged ourselves in and watched the windows fog up as the bus lurched to a stop to pick up more passengers.

No one ever talks about buses in London. It’s all about the Tube and the Thames and other things starting with T that you can get around in, like taxis and trains and . . . tugboats. No one talks about how close you can get to people you don’t know on the bus — and I don’t mean inside. I watched with mild panic as mopeds and bicycles swerved in and out of our lane, wondering if they would suddenly slip on the wet asphalt and meet a damp and messy end before my eyes. Other buses breathed down my neck at stop lights, while my bus did the same to unfortunate passengers in other vehicles. I didn’t realize until that ride how small buses are. It wasn’t long before I was in a full-fledged anxiety attack, and I had to force Keisha to move to another seat closer to the stairs and surrounded by more windows to keep from hyperventilating.

We never got to Oxford Circus. By the time we reached Holborn (a 20-minute ride normally), we had been on the bus for nearly an hour and a half, and the muggy bus wasn’t even inching along in the driving rain. It was millimetering along. Keisha and I went downstairs in the mad hope of jumping off at the next stop, no matter where it landed us. Then a girl approached the bus driver and asked him to open the doors. “I’m late to an interview,” she said. “I’m so late, and I must get off. We haven’t moved in 15 minutes!”

“If I open these doors and you get plowed down, you’ll sue me. I can’t open the doors,” the gruff driver replied. He’d already displayed an extensive arsenal of colorful words throughout the trip, and so we inched away from the looming altercation.

“No, no, I promise I won’t sue you! Please, let me off, I need this job!”

She continued to beg him, and he continued to refuse. Then a gallant young businessman rose to the occasion and defended the fair maiden. “Look, please just open the door.”

Good job, turbo.

“I can’t open the doors, because I’ll get sued if you get hurt…but that doesn’t mean you can’t open the door.”

So the ambitious knight began tugging on the door. “No, no!” the bus driver said. “Press the button above your head!”

The hopeful suitor looked above him and espied the button, pressing it with all the fervor of a man about to be spurned by a pretty girl.

The doors hissed open and the girl sprang off, yelling “Thank you!” over her shoulder. The poor hero hopped off, too, heading in the other direction. So I was romanticizing it, but I had been on the bus for over an hour; I was mildly insane by that point.

Keisha and I made our escape at that point, too, giving up our search in Oxford Circus and returning to familiar territory — the Starbucks in Angel with two floors and magnificent heating. We were freezing cold and dripping wet, and we had spent nearly two hours getting there.

As I settled down with my Eggnog latte (┚¤3.05, but I so deserved it), I picked up the assignment for the literature class:

No traveling at all — no locomotion,
No inkling of the way — no notion —
‘No go’ — by land or ocean — [:]
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member —
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds —
November!

Indeed.


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