Easter Hijinks #2

Monday, 24. March 2008, 10:31:06

After yesterday I will hate public transport until the end of time.

At the end of my last post, I had returned home after missing a bus to MacDuff due to my own stupidity (If you haven't read that post, please do so now). Having written the post to alleviate my temper, I once more gathered my things, wrapped up as warmly as I could, and headed out into the cold and snow, which was at this point falling gently.

Or it was, until I turned my key in the front door lock and started moving down the road. This was apparently the signal for the snow to dial-up to 'blizzard' again, as if the objective had suddenly become to bury me under tonnes of frozen water. In the mood I was in there were a fair few choice curse-words hurled at the sky right then, I can tell you!

I once more made it to the bus stop, a five minute walk along Northern road, next to an oriental takeaway called 'The Happy Palace', and waited for the next bus to come.

It was freezing by that point. Despite my gloves my fingers were going numb with cold, and it was all I could do to keep any sensation in them at all, clenching and unclenching seemed to do little good, and hyper-ventilating to increase my blood circulation only made me dangerously light-headed. And the shivering...god, I was miserable. But while I was still cursing the weather a good 50 percent of that ire was directed inwards; if only...

While waiting this time I forced myself to concentrate: I repeated '305' in my head like a mantra, and fixed my vision on the bend on the road where it would appear. There was no way I was missing it this time! Suddenly, there it was! I grabbed my bags and ran out to the road-side waving like a mad-man, confident that I'd done everything possible to get on this bus...

...which, to my astonishment, drove right past me. The bus driver didn't even look in my direction so I'm still not sure if he didn't actually see me or simply ignored me. A fury erupted in me then, white-hot and blinding: I started spewing hot torrents of abuse at the back of the rapidly diminishing vehicle. My cold extremeties momentarily forgotten I even started to run after the thing, bags in hand, determined to catch it at the upcoming roundabout and kick the driver senseless. How DARE he keep me out in the freezing weather and parted from my family?!?

Obviously I didn't catch the bus so I phoned my parents and spoke to my innappropriately-amused Dad in short exclamations of frustration and pure liquid rage.

The outlook was gloomy: If I had to wait another hour and a half for the next bus I wasn't going to reach MacDuff until tea-time. That's IF I could get on that *$!*ing bus! I needed someone to shout at - big time - so I resolved to catch the first city-bus into the town centre and unleash my fury at some undeserving, under-paid office-clerk; if nothing else it would help me feel better.

A bus duly arrived, I got on (hating the irony of being perfectly able to catch a bus heading AWAY from my destination), and travelled into town in brooding, simmering silence. At Union street I alighted and stomped down to the steps toward the bus station, picturing in my mind's eye everything I was going to say, every swear-word I was going to use.

The bus station was in the process of being demolished.

I stood and looked for what seemed like the longest time, shocked out of my dark thoughts. 'No...you can't do this to me'. Of course I'd known they were closing this bus station; I just hadn't realised they'd already done it. 'Where the hell do you catch buses from now...???' Visions of a new terminal on the other end of town swam into my mind...

And then a bus turned out of a slip-road directly to my left. 'Of course. Next-door!'.

I rushed through the glossy new terminal to the platform, and found the stance that my bus would leave from. A quick scan of the timetable revealed a surprise: there was a bus leaving in...two minutes? I looked up at the bus sat there, full of passengers, door open, and read the number above the windscreen. '305 to Elgin...! Ohmygod...excuse me-' I asked the driver, not daring to believe my sudden good fortune '-is this bus going through MacDuff?'. The driver answered my question in the withering tone of someone weary of being asked moronic questions by members of the public (I used it myself many times as a Barman), but that didn't bother me in the slightest: as long as I was on a bus heading to MacDuff you could have kicked me in the nuts and I'd still have wept salty tears of undying gratitude. And instead of arriving in MacDuff at 4.15, I was now an hour ahead of that schedule. Only 3 hours later than originally planned, rather than four.

I took my seat up the back of the vehicle with a profound sense of relief. I was still angry, still convinced that I should just have returned to bed and awaited a new day where I wasn't the target of some cosmic ill-humour, but my ordeal seemed to have miraculously come to a close. Perhaps the big evil upstairs had wearied of toying with me and moved on to another poor sap.

Of course, small things still irritated, like the way this bus driver - in contrast to her blind colleague - stopped at EVERY stop on the way there, and even lingered too long at one or two more, but I made it to MacDuff eventually and settled in to the familar bosom of my family, who quickly fed and watered me back towards something approximating my natural good cheer. A good night's sleep did the rest.

So that was my day yesterday, long, cold and frustrating. Hopefully you've all had better ones.