Monday 20 May 2013

Day 140 : on the buses

My daily commute has really changed with our office relocation. Previously I'd start the journey from home by bus, opt for a tube all the way, or train and tubes. Now we fall in between two tube stations, neither on my line so after the mainline train it's back on a bus. It’s a bus-train-bus sandwich, I thought that would be a train sandwich but I guess when bread isn't the before and after you have to be more specific.

I thought this would be the worse, a bus sluggishly crawling through the morning traffic stopped constantly to avoid the swarm of commuters streaming across the roads. But actually it’s been much pleasanter than I could have imagined. Thankfully, the buses are more frequent than I anticipated and even though the queue snakes past another two bus stops somehow the double decker bus is capacious enough to squeeze us all onboard.

The buses start their journey in the street parallel to the station. You can either take the escalator under the street, climb the utterly packed steps and walk back the end of the queue or walk the main station steps, dodge the Boris bikes whizzing past, through the first arch and inevitably join the end of the bus queue. I favour the latter. And one determining reason was the beautiful mosaics directing you to the buses or conversely to the trains. They didn't have to be so decorative, but I cannot help but applaud somebody’s vision in deploying the Venus de Milo arising from shell to indicate the route to something so prosaic as a bus stop. It makes my heart soar to see art conquer the boring and the bland, and long may it continue.

 

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