Tuesday 12 July 2011

Buses

I hate buses.

I really do. I've been doing work experience for the past two weeks and have had to get the bus for the first time really since I left Harrogate.

I've been nearly hit by them in Birmingham more times than I can count though admittedly this is partly my fault (and the fact that the temporary traffic lights on Bristol Road never seem to work) and have got lost in Edinburgh more than once over the past week or so simply because I don't know which bus stop to getting off at.

My woeful lacking in the navigation department has been well documented and I have always relied on trains (or the Tube when I'm in London) because of it. Despite the fact they're never there on time at least its simply, you get off when you see the sign for the station, there aren't five hundred stops with the identifying markers around them being a non descript electronics shop.

I just can't do it. Some people look at maps and see a logic grid depicting the world around them; a see a confusing haze of wavy lines varying in size and meaning absolutely nothing. I can picture streets in my head but I mark them with certain shops and they stand out isolated in my mind; I can't connect the dots.

And its because of this I hate buses, I find travel stressful at the best of times but trying to find the correct point to jump off a moving vehicle makes it all the worse.

I've mastered the 73 from outside Angel tube station in Islington and the 36 to Leeds from outside my doctor's in Harrogate, anything other than makes me feel stressed and slightly ill.

My fear of buses may also come from the fact that I nearly lost my teddy bear on a London bus when I was about two or three. It was pretty scaring.