double decker violence
When I first got to London every bus I rode on I got on top.
Not out of some romantic bullshit tourist crap, I did that years ago.
Because there are always seats available up there.
I told this to one of my friends in London, and he said yeah, that’s because everyone gets stabbed upstairs.
Now this still hasn’t stopped me from sitting up there, because I’ll be damned if I am standing for 30 minutes.
If I have to take the odd knife, I can live with that, or not, as the case may be.
What I have been told from a few Londoners is that the double decker is dying.
With all the stabby stabby, and the fact Londoners are just not sitting up top anymore the double decker is being phased out for long super buses with rubber middles.
Since I have no emotional or cultural bond to them, I don’t feel sad.
I do however like that something as simple as a few knife crimes can change a cultural landmark of a city.
Most Americans know nothing about London, but they know about the buses.
People often say revolutions are not possible in this day and age.
But if a few kids with swiss army knives can make this sort of difference, there is nothing we can’t do.
I just now need to work out what crimes will make the government invest in a plan to get air conditioning into the tube.
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Don’t get me started about London buses. I don’t I’ve caught one in a decade. Nasty, horrible places.
It’s not the stabbing you need to watch out for. No one gets stabbed on buses. It’s the teenagers. Teenegers and their phones, playing the worst music this side of an Indian restaurant and with ear-meltingly awful sound quality.
I want to destroy those children. At least, I would if they didn’t have knives.
Oh, and bendy buses. Don’t get me started on bendy buses. Those things are the biggest menace on the road since Robby the Rampaging Rapist from Romford.
Bendy trams in melbourne are great, but their cousins, the bendy bus, not really my thing.
It’s fine to go upstairs during the daytime, it’s just night buses you’ve got to worry about, although I normally forget and go upstairs anyway.
Bendy buses are awful. They’re grim to travel in and make it a bitch to cross the street.
Crimewise: I believe you’d have to become some sort of guerilla alchemist and change the bedrock under London from clay to sort out air conditioning on the deeper lines but the Metropolitan should have some from next year with others to follow by 2013.
I got so side-tracked by adding links that I forgot the most interesting ones, on the Cooling the Tube Programme (CTP). (Well, interesting might be stretching it). If you were in London earlier this year you could have applied for this job or visited this event.
I’m sorry Lisa i can’t read what you’re saying lisa, i try, but then i click on a link and i get lost.
I think I’d better just stop.
An attempt to go into an involved explanation of ambient temperatures of 30 degrees C in clay tunnels and the impossibility of ventilation could only end badly. More badly than the drug nonsense. And I thought that was impossible.
You lost me at clay.
You even made me say your name a redundant time in a sentence.