baaa-rmy

This morning I woke up and felt like I had never been to sleep – it was the weirdest feeling and not at all pleasant.

I lay there struggling to work out how my body had ignored the 6 hours of sleep I had given it but didn’t find an answer. So I got up.

My journey to work was marred by a broken-down bus – yesterday I was on a broken bus too, and I was also on a bus that got lost in South Kensington and ended up near Hyde Park – it made me very late. Is there a pattern forming?

This morning’s bus was chugging along just fine – I had a seat upstairs in the glare of the low morning sun but I knew that downstairs was stuffed to the gunnels with people from later stops than me.

And then, it stopped for quite a while, at a useless bus stop in Shepherds Bush. I sat there twiddling my thumbs and then, all of a sudden the bus driver announced something unintelligible down his mircrophone and there was a stampede to get off the bus.

Naturally the deaf girl in me thought the worst in the announcement (bombs, fires etc), especially as the descent of my fellow commuters down the bus stairs was far from leisurely, while the other bit of me stayed calm as I followed the baa-aaing sheep down the stairs.

My scorn of my fellow travellers doesn’t end there actually either – there we were, a heap of angry commuters waiting for the next bus. When it arrived I was quite near the door – the crowd surged behind me, an elbow clouted my head and a fist pushed the small of my back – forty people were trying to get on an already-full bus.

At first I wondered if I had missed something –was this the last ever bus of this number? Did these rude people’s lives depend on getting on this bus?

I quickly ascertained that I didn’t give a toss whether it was last ever bus or if their lives depended on it and burrowed my way out of the scrum. The bus left, so full that someone’s face was literally pressed up against the doors.

Two seconds later, a bus rounded the corner, empty – I boarded it and sat down, the warmth of the sun on my face allowing me to catch up on the sleep I felt like I didn’t have last night.