In Stoke-on-Trent, bus services were cut by 37% in the five years to March 2022. Things are worse in Hertfordshire, where they are down by more than half, and less bad in London, where services are down by only 4% – and this, by the way, is why people hate Londoners. Politics hits everywhere else harder, then turns round and says: “Look at those metropolitan elites – they have all the luck. Also, most of the buses.” I thought the phrase “piss on you and tell you it’s raining” was baroque and figurative, but the “levelling up agenda” is as close as dammit to a literal example.
I did lose some bittersweet time, though, to remembering the 1980s. If, towards the apex of Margaret Thatcher’s time in power, you were from a pretty affluent family, and none of you were ill, and you took public transport from time to time, this was your main brush with the disintegration of the public sphere: the sheer wreckage that was bus travel. That, and all those unloved urban spaces, potholed roads, graffitied walls, launderettes, a sense of belonging to a sad people who lurched from one trip hazard to another on the fumes of spray paint, wearing occasionally clean underwear.
When I was a kid, you could casually lose 40 minutes waiting for the one route that would get you from, say, south-west to south-east London. Thatcher was right in this one respect: there was no alternative, not even the tube. There was no way of knowing how long you would wait, no timetable, no electronic display, except you did know: just from the sheer thrill of waiting under 30 minutes, you knew in your heart that it would be 40.
If you took the overall shabbiness of the world, and spliced in some granite skies, the wait felt almost literary, and not in a good way – dystopian literature, existential pointlessness literature, the despair oeuvre with the phrase “waiting for” in the title. I think this is why I never had a book on me. I had a taste for the post-apocalypse genre, but to read it while also living it would have been too real.
The bus I took to school, I once calculated, moved at 3.4 miles per hour; on the bus I got from my mum’s house to my dad’s, someone put a lit cigarette in the hood of my duffle coat and I didn’t notice until the delicious smell of fags had commingled with the more woolly smell of damp hood. No wonder everyone was in a really bad mood. They had been sitting outdoors, staring, for 40 minutes, thinking about the end of the world. Who wouldn’t want to set fire to a hood?
I want to make the point here that this was a direct result of Conservative rule, which I know because the local Labour party used to make up songs about it for their panto: in one memorable stanza, “there were 77s and sometimes 39s / That could take you to Battersea / But they stopped short, never to go again / When they killed LT” (London Transport).
Amazingly, given the granular level of detail in most leftwing folk singing of the era, the song didn’t elaborate on why LT had been killed, in 1984: it was so that buses could eventually be privatised, as they were in the early 1990s. But maybe we didn’t have to memorialise that in the lyrics, because we knew what had happened. We knew because previously they were good, and now they were crap.
To the people currently labouring under reduced services, having to leave whatever they are doing by 9.15pm if they don’t want to walk home on the hard shoulder of a dual carriageway, I want to say that you get used to rubbish buses, somehow building their scarcity into your conception of time, so that, once you are completely acclimatised, two hours no longer means anything to you. But I’m afraid that’s not true. Really, all you can do is remember, in the future, never to vote for people who don’t take buses.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
