The politics of London travel are strange and mighty. You may have heard of my adoration of those who hold the knowledge; the black cab drivers with their superb skill. Perhaps you've heard my wonder at how hydrogen buses appear to be some sort of mechanical unicorn of science whirring by into the future, or how breaking bus etiquette warranted summary execution by bus commisars.
Sometimes things are not all that good.
Tube strikes happened on the Easter weekend. The greater city sloughed to standstill as the proletariat siezed key platforms and infrastructure, industrial action being taken against the commuters in the overworld. I, like many others was a veteran of such industrial actions. I was prepared for the action, but nothing could truly prepare me - or anyone for that matter, of just what was to unfold in those fateful days. We were attached to the 381st mechanised brigade [two-decker]. To say such stalwart infrastructure was unaffected by industrial action would be to tell an age old lie: it is always practical and fitting to travel by bus for your country.
The early birds regiments who had blitzkrieged the only bus lebensraum went about their day, holding their hopeful image of a perfect day in their minds, brushing away the corpses of the fallen and the incapable. Mechanical doors kept out the undesirables who didn't show their very same dedication. In time, the early birds went about achieving their strategic goals, only leaving behind a small rearguard to deny any future spaces to others in line for the next salvation.
In their hubris, they did not see the rise of the people's commuting army. The full might of zones 1 and 2 flocked in droves, overwhelming each and every bus station. Refugees who could leg it, ran, running fast and never looking back, fleeing to the overground or the river services. People like myself had no such avenue of escape. We began the bloody march in plain view of the lucky few on the buses, turning their blind eyes to our suffering. Generals and commanders sallied across the network of roads in their battle chariots, the command cabs resplendent in their black warpaint. Such an escape was not to be mine, I took my journey the hard way.
To get ahead, I had to step back. Station to station, walking further and further away. Four times denied, four times I moved. Gradually less and less followed until of the original 17 who had joined me, none but myself remained. There were others on this new station to be sure, but that didn't matter. The world was a crueler place, and I still remember as I bundled onto the backdoor of the bus with other newcomers, just looking back on the people that were there on my arrival still locked outdoors. Maybe they were only there for 5 minutes, maybe several hours. It didn't matter anymore. The bus commisars knew they couldn't stop us. Bus fares went entirely unpaid, respect for queues that had become the moral imperative for centuries was discarded under the ruthless progress of necessity and improvement. The only way to survive was to do what you had to do, and I did what I had to do.
I traveled.
On the final day of strikes, I was caught in the junction between 3 lanes of traffic when I counted 21 double decker buses all passing one another. I'd never seen that many buses before, and it was hilarious seeing these red Titans maneuver around one another, boxing in the little fish flitting about below them. There were also 3 single-deckers, of which 2 were hydrogens - by gods do you even know what it is to see the dance of the buses? Many a time, I would have sworn collisions were inevitable. Inevitable! Yet not one happened!
[Although previously further down the road on some other day a police van did a barrel roll].
Something of the scale of what 21 double decker buses all occupying all the roads looks like is lost in words not conveying its sheer size. Words such as these... They do not capture the immensity. 21 whales somewhat loses just how god damn awesome 21 whales maneuvering about one another in cohesion looks like. It's rare to get 4 double deckers in the same place outside of some sort of big end station. 21!
Today marks a respite in this action, the pleasant, exciting and the... Necessary.
It was marked by unusual traffic, in a post-strike world most had opted to rely on car - I presume this was the reason for the gargantuan traffic jam stretching from hell to heaven. At several points in the infinite pileup that was unfolding, people were getting out of their cars and simply having a nice chat in the sun. Such was the joy in the fact that at least everyone was stuck in this together, that people began making songs out of their car horns. The police saw fit to add their siren song to the wail, and one cab driver even brought a vuvuzela (clearly he is wiser than us all for being prepared for this occasion). One woman appeared to have gotten smashed at 3PM and was shouting jovial things out of a car window, though whether for a lack of speech capabilities or through the sheer volume of blaring cars I couldn't tell what exactly it was she was so happy about. The length of this jam was so brilliant that the songs each segment sang actually merged, mixed and melded in a soothing, trumpeting way that bursted your eardrums but at least made you feel befuddled and awed, then diverged, split and fractured into brand new melodies reminiscent of a football stadium's benchers preparing for VICTORY and GLORY. There was no figurehead, no announcer demanding this - everyone had seemed to have just arrived at the same conclusion that the only way to counter this boredom was to assemble the world's first traffic jam orchestra.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14927005 times)