Despite running down Jamaica Street at full pelt after the bus sailed by me as I stood legitimately at the first stop on Union Street, I made it to the next bus stop right as the driver shut the doors, which in Glasgow these days constitutes ‘missing the bus’. The fact the bus sat there for another full minute after I waved and chapped because it couldn’t pull out in traffic doesn’t count, nor does the fact it only managed to move 5 yards after that and sat stuck at the traffic lights for another three minutes. Meanwhile I stand right there at the bus stop awkwardly gawking right at the driver through the perspex door while he resolutely stares straight ahead, focussing through the swish-swish of his window wipers as they clear the pissing rain out of his field of vision, pretending I don’t exist right there in his periphery. Nope. Standing at a bus stop after the event no longer counts. Once the ‘YOU SHALL NOT PASS’ button has been pressed and that door swings shut, YOU ARE MOST DEFINITELY NOT GETTING ON. It’s been like that since the introduction of the Jobsworth’s Act 2010, which also states ‘If ah’m no et a stop, yer no gettin aff.’ Fair do’s. They’re only doing their job, at the end of the day. Much better they get back to the depot bang on time than (heaven forbid) the company actually make any money picking up passengers on the way…
I don’t think I mentioned how wet I was by this point. I had been splashed by a truck on Great Western Road before catching the tube into town, then had been well and truly soaked to the arse in the downpour as I ran down Buchanan Street without a brolly or winter coat. Long and short of it, I was cold, damp, tired, knackered, hungry, had a stitch developing from chasing the bus, and was so thoroughly wet my pants were clashing through my jeans as if I’d been sat in a freezing bath. I think you could sum my mood up at this point as ‘Not Great’.
I also haven’t mentioned that it was the last bus. There is a night bus service, but that one wasn’t due for an hour and is notorious for it’s similarity to a mobile cattle slaughtering wagon on an average Friday night, never mind catching it on the Friday before Christmas when everybody and their granny has been out on works’ nights out. So I (miserably) drag my soggy-arsed carcass across the road to see if I can make one of the last trains out of Central.
Low and behold, I pass out of the rain into that brightly lit glass cathedral of commuting splendour and find there’s a train about to depart in the next few minutes. I rush past the Christmas tree and giant snowflake lights, grab a ticket from the machine (because obviously there’s also now the You Shall Not Get On A Train Without A Ticket Even Though We Have Conductors On Trains Who Sell You Tickets Act of 2012), crash my way under the big clock where a couple of die-hards look like they are still waiting for dates that never turned up, run up the platform and totally make it. YASS! I even find a seat to myself, and 30 seconds later the whistle blows and the train pulls away.
It’s the Gourock train I’ve ended up on. It’s the last one of the night to Gourock, I gather, and it’s busyish, but not as bad as I’d feared it would be. There’s a clique of bedraggled folk huddled round the toilets who look like they’ve been out since work finished at 5, and there’s a guy noisily munching on a tray of chips and cheese behind me—and when I say noisily, I mean he’s troughing at them while simultaneously heavy breathing and chowing and masticating like somebody taking a plunger to a drain. BOAK.
There’s also these two lassies sitting in the seats opposite me. They look like extras from one of these reality TV programmes that you’re supposed to think are real life but which everybody obviously knows get made up by writers and producers, even though the cast kid on it’s all real and make out like they’re doing stuff of their own free will. These lassies are fake baked within an inch of looking like jobbies, with fake eyelashes like the Hephalump from Sesame Street and fake hair extensions dead obviously knotted in as they’re a different colour from the rest of their hair. It’s funny how the ‘reality’ look consists principally of ‘fakery’, isn’t it? Anyway, I’m sitting there freezing cold and clashing wet while they’re sitting there in skimpy wee dresses like they’ve just disembarked aff flights from Tenerife in mid-July. Go figure.
It’s not the look of them that drew my attention—it’s the conversation. The first one is having a bit of a loud tirade about a guy called Gary who I gather had been getting aff wae Gillian fae the office earlier in the night, which he had nae right tae because she (the loud one) had telt him she’d gie him his hole at the night oot and cannae understaun why he widnae want it. The quieter of the two pretty much answers every statement made with a simple “Aye, fuck.” And the loud one is going on about how if she knew he was going to turn out to be such a dick they could’ve left early and met Boydy and his pals, and when the quieter one asks if she’s seen him again since last time the louder one says “Naw, no since ah slept wae him et Bonfire Night, mind?” and the quieter one says “Aye, fuck.” And then the loud one says something about another guy she was seeing for a couple of weeks from Troon, and the quiet one asks about an incident involving text messages, and I gather from the response that she’s been playing these three guys plus a potential fourth off each other for the best part of two months, and that she’s been sleeping with at least two of them over that period of time and planned to bed a third. And to think since Bonfire Night it’s taken me the best part of those 7 weeks to finish gutting out my bedroom drawers…
The loud one then suddenly announces “Fuck the lot of them, ah’m gonnae text Steve when we get tae Gourock and just get back wae him, d’ye think a should?”, and the wee quiet one says “Aye, fuck. Might as well,” and the loud one settles it as she picks up her phone and starts battering away furiously at the touchscreen with a huge sigh by saying “Fine. Ah had ma heart set on gettin ma hole the night. Ah know he’s a bit skelly and thick as pig shit but he’ll just have tae dae.”
And I thought the train was meant to be classier than the night bus. :-/
Enjoy your Christmas nights out folks. Wrap up and stay safe.