How to…Life and styleHow to... wait for a bus
Waiting for a bus is an art. Conversations should be limited to, 'It's late this morning.' Anything more, and you'll end up having a complete stranger sitting next to you and showing you their eczema for the whole of your journey.
When standing at the bus stop, form an orderly queue, and remember that this is the order in which you get on the bus. Even if the bus doors open at the back of the queue, you must do a little snaking manoeuvre to get the front of the queue on first. It's first come, first served - anything else is throwing out 2,000 years of civilisation.
Waiting for the school bus is just about the only toughening-up outdoor activity that children get these days. They may be as warm as toast in a nice duffel-coat, but as far as coolness is concerned they'd rather throw themselves under the bus. Kids have such big sports bags because they're full of the scarves, mittens and thermal underwear that mothers send their little darlings out in. Adults dress up warmly for the 20-minute wait, the bus comes early, they make a mad dash for it and they end up sitting in their own dripping sauna. That's why, in the winter, all buses smell like the drying room of a youth hostel.
Looking for the bus actually stops it coming; the driver is waiting around the corner and he simply won't budge until you stop constantly looking for him. The only way to guarantee that the bus is coming is to position yourself at the exact point where you know that, unless you're Linford Christie, running to catch it is futile.
Hailing a bus requires shoving your arm out in an aggressive, assertive manner that is entirely alien to the British character - in fact, most of us would rather miss several buses than be accused of being too fascistic in our arm movements. Teenagers, who are physically incapable of moving their arms higher than their waists, can't hail buses full stop; fortunately, however, they usually stand around in such big clumps of sullenness that bus drivers can't miss them. Especially if they aim straight for them.
Of course, all of this assumes that your bus comes. Sometimes, buses just don't come - and they don't come three at once, either. This is a myth put about by bus companies to pretend that there's actually more than one bus serving your route. If you really want a frequent bus service, you need to live in Not In Service, which is choked with buses pretty much all the time.
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