City Bus Driver

Hospitals are just cities in soft shoes. The traffic’s slower, but it never stops, and no one’s indicating. I’ve been spending more time in hospital lately. Not as a patient, just visiting. One of those stretches that creeps from the odd evening to most days of the week, until you start recognising the vending machine repair guy and knowing which café has the strong tea. When you’re in that long enough, not in crisis, not in control, just there, you start to notice things. Patterns. Flows. Familiar strangers in uniforms. The way the place moves. And what struck me, more than anything, is that hospitals are just another kind of traffic system. A city of motion. Only instead of horns and headlights, it’s rubber soles and trolley wheels. There’s a certain choreography to it all. You can tell the staff from the visitors within two seconds. The staff move with purpose, straight lines, no hesitation. They walk like they’ve already made three decisions you haven’t caught up with. The visitors...

The weather’s warm, the schools are out, and everyone’s forgotten how doors work. Here’s how to keep your bus moving (mostly) forward. Top Tips for Managing Summer Crowds on the Bus Summer brings out the best in people, by which I mean their full volume, their worst planning, and their complete inability to stand behind a yellow line. If winter is for head-down commuting, summer is a circus, and the bus is the main tent. Here's how I survive the season without combusting or being mistaken for a tour guide. 1. Open the doors like you mean it, but only when you’ve assessed the species outside Approach the stop with caution. Not for traffic, for what’s waiting. You've got the dad who's already pointing where everyone should sit. The kid who's mid-meltdown about a dropped Calippo. The teenager pretending not to know the rest of them. And hovering off to one side, the wild card: the preboarder. You know the one. Does a wee side-step shuffle as if they're going to let oth...

It started, as these things often do, with something small. A mark. A smell. A hesitation no louder than a breath. The kind of moment you barely register, until it turns into something else entirely.  By the time the bus pulled away, the story had already begun to write itself. Just not the one anyone meant to tell. Three seconds. One shadow. A hundred headlines. There are moments on this job that last no longer than a blink, but echo for weeks. A pensioner's awkward glance. A hesitation at the step. A mark on the seat that might be nothing, or might be something. You weigh it. In real time. With forty people behind you. No script. No time to consult the manual (because there isn’t one). Just a quiet flicker of dread and the question no driver wants to ask:  If I’m wrong, what happens next? I wasn’t there. But I’ve been there. I’ve seen shadows that looked like stains, and stains that looked like shadows. I’ve had the smell of spilled cider haunt a bus for a whole shift, only ...

It was the last run of the shift, the sun was setting, and the air inside the bus was thick with the scent of teenage rebellion and something far worse. Between the Bluetooth beats, fruity fog and an unidentified chemical weapon left behind by a pensioner, I found myself refereeing a strange kind of peace treaty, with vape clouds as our only line of defence. School’s out, vapes are in, and one mystery stinker nearly derailed the lot. A tale of teamwork, tolerance, and a tactical haze. There’s a certain breed of chaos that only arrives when school’s out and the sun can’t decide if it’s setting or just sulking. You know the kind, restless energy, hormonal banter, and that dangerous combination of boredom and Bluetooth. I’d clocked the group as soon as they boarded. Usual weekend suspects. Faces I could sketch from memory, fair dodging routines rehearsed like a school play. One of them tried the classic "left my pass in my cousin’s car" routine. I gave him a look that said, “So...