City Bus Driver

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Would You Like Me to Hold Your Dragon?

There are things you expect to encounter while driving a city bus. Traffic, roadworks, cyclists, pedestrians ... and, apparently, the occasional dragon. There are certain sentences you hear during a working day that simply refuse to leave your head. A dragon, rendered with rather more restraint than the subject traditionally demands. Not because they're particularly profound. Not because they're funny. And certainly not because they make any immediate sense. Sometimes it's just the combination of words. I was going about my business when, somewhere in the background, I heard: “Would you like me to hold your Dragon?” And that was it. No announcement. No explanation. No helpful follow-up sentence to put the whole thing into context. Just those seven words, floating through the air as casually as if asking someone whether they'd like a cup of tea. Would you like me to hold your Dragon? Now, perhaps I'm overthinking this. But there are questions that immediately present...

I Stopped For A Passenger… And Somehow Ended Up Questioning Whether I Even Knew Where I Was

It started with a simple question. It ended with me wondering if I had somehow been driving around the city all day without knowing where I was. When one missing direction is enough to make a bus driver question everything he thought he knew. There are certain moments in bus driving when you think: "I've got this." You know where you are. You know where you're going. You've got the route. You've got the bus. You've even got a vague idea of what day it is. And then somebody asks you one simple question and, within about three minutes, you're questioning your entire existence. This was one of those moments. I pulled into a bus stop and stopped to pick up a passenger. Doors open. I'm ready. Except they don't get on. Instead, they start asking me questions. Now, that's not unusual. Bus drivers are basically public transport's version of Google. People ask us everything. "Does this go to...?" "Where do I get off for...?" ...

The Dug, the Mystery Cough and the Passenger Who Missed Their Stop

A cough from the back of an apparently empty bus led to a rather unexpected discovery. What followed involved a slavering dug, a 999 call, a passenger who'd been completely sparkled out, and the most bizarre missed-stop excuse I've ever encountered. I blamed the dug for the mysterious coughing from the back of the bus. Turns out the poor thing was innocent, its owner was sparkled out on the back seats. There are days driving a bus when you genuinely wonder if you've somehow wandered onto the set of a comedy programme without anyone telling you. This was one of those days. I'd had a busy run, the sort where you've barely had time to scratch yourself, never mind contemplate the meaning of life, and things had finally quietened down. The bus was empty. Or so I thought. A quick glance in the interior mirror. Nothing. Another look. Still nothing. A check upstairs on the CCTV. Not a soul. Brilliant. Just me and the bus. Then I heard it. Cough. I looked in the mirror. Noth...

The Day My Bus Became The Jeremy Kyle Show

It started with one empty seat. One passenger sat between two people who were travelling together. I knew nothing about it... until there was a knock on my cab door. "Driver... I'm being verbally abused." Five minutes later, I'd somehow gone from driving a double decker to hosting The Jeremy Kyle Show on wheels. One Empty Seat... and My Double Decker Became The Jeremy Kyle Show There's an unwritten rule on public transport. If two people are travelling together and there's an empty seat between them, most people instinctively leave it alone. This morning... ...someone didn't. And that's how my quiet commuter run turned into The Jeremy Kyle Show on wheels. The irony is, I didn't see any of it happen. From my seat behind the wheel, it looked like every other weekday morning. Commuters climbing aboard, coffees in hand, headphones on, minds already in the office before they'd even got there. At the rear of the lower deck sat two passengers who had ...

A Proper Bus Drivers' Day Out: From the Depot to the Devil's Elbow

What do a bunch of bus drivers do on their day off? They go for a 250-mile blast through the Scottish Highlands on motorcycles, and spend the entire day proving you can take the driver out of the bus, but you'll never take the bus driver out of the rider. People often assume that after spending all week behind the wheel of a bus, the last thing a bus driver wants to do on a day off is drive. They're only half right. It isn't the roads we're sick of... It's the buses. Swap forty feet of double-decker for two wheels, throw in a handful of fellow bus drivers, some of Scotland's finest roads and enough banter to fill a depot canteen, and you've got the recipe for a cracking day out. The plan was simple enough: meet at McDonald's in South Queensferry before heading north for a run to Braemar. Simple... Unless you're a numpty. Despite spending my working life getting people to the right destination, I somehow managed to turn up at the McDonald's in Ne...

When Your Driver's Instinct Kicks In

Sometimes being a good bus driver isn't about what you do. It's about noticing what everyone else missed. A passenger says they're fine. Your instincts aren't quite convinced. So what do you do when something feels wrong, but isn't quite wrong enough to intervene? Sometimes nothing obvious has happened, but something doesn’t quite add up. Recognising the signs and simply asking, “Are you okay?” can be the most important action of all. There are plenty of things you expect to deal with on a bus. Late runners. People who wave at you from half a mile away. Someone insisting they definitely pressed the bell (they didn't). And, of course, the daily debate over whether the empty seat next to someone is actually occupied by an invisible friend. Then there are the moments that aren't in the timetable. Recently, I was doing a driver change when I noticed a bloke sitting at the back of the lower deck chatting away to a lone female passenger. He appeared to be under th...

The Butterflies That Weren't Butterflies

A routine shift took an unexpected turn, not because of what I saw, but because of what I smelled. Then came the black butterflies drifting across the windscreen. Except they weren't butterflies at all. Every city has two faces. There's the one we know. Busy streets. Coffee cups in hurried hands. The rhythm of traffic. The familiar dance of buses, pedestrians and cyclists, each weaving around the other in a choreography repeated thousands of times a day. Then there's the other face. The one that only appears when something extraordinary happens. My day began like any other. There was nothing to suggest that, somewhere nearby, a building was fighting for its life. The first clue wasn't flashing blue lights or a road closure. It was the smell. Not the comforting scent of a wood fire, nor the faint aroma of traffic baking on warm tarmac. This was heavier. Damp smoke. Wet ash. Burnt timber soaked by thousands of gallons of water. A smell that settled in the air and lingered...

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