The Karmamaster

There’s something so quintessentially London about the Routemaster bus. Some people say tourists come to London to see the queen, but I reckon what they’re really coming for is the tea, the biscuits and the Routemaster.

Since the Routemaster bus was practically abolished in 2005, however, tourists have since had to make do with just the tea and biscuits, which is fine (I mean, we may not have the most well-renowned cuisine in England, but we do make some pretty tasty Bourbons), but not exactly something to (literally) write home about. But now, thanks to Boris Johnson’s frivolity with the capital’s money, that dear old death trap of a bus is soon to make its return. It’s had a bit of a facelift since we last saw it, but I’m sure we could all still pick it out of a line-up. What a bus would be getting arrested for, however, I do not know. Anyway, read all about it here.

I have fond memories of the Routemaster.

No wait, scratch that. I have one fond memory of the Routemaster. All other memories involve coming home from school on a jam-packed bus and falling over people’s legs, as I was too short to reach any of the handles that protruded from the bus’s ceiling. (Please offer these seats to those less able to stand my arse.) So sometimes I would stand on the lower platform, next to the conductor, which really you’re not supposed to do, but falling off a moving bus sounded more appealing to me at the time, than having my face squashed up in a sweaty fat man’s armpit.

So there I was, twelve-years-old, waiting on the lower platform for the red light to turn green and for the bus to reach the stop where I always got off. My daredevil personality didn’t really extend past waiting on an open platform, and I had no intention of ‘hopping off’ the bus when it could have moved away from the light at any moment. But the woman behind me had other ideas. Fed up with waiting, she shoved me (a short twelve-year-old girl in her school uniform – hello, rude much??) hard in the back in an attempt to get me off the bus so that she could shave half a minute off her journey. It didn’t work, though. I swooped to the side of the platform, holding on for dear life, and just as the bus accelerated away from what was now a green light, she put a foot out onto the ground.

I’m proud to say that I didn’t laugh as she fell into the road and rolled, several times, down the curb (though the thought did cross my mind). I just watched as the bus sped me and all the other passengers away from her, and the pedestrians who had stopped to help her stared back into my face disapprovingly as if I had somehow been at fault. Oh, but that wasn’t me; that was karma.