The Big Smoke

I was on the top floor looking down at my newspaper when the couple got on the bus, so I didn’t see them. But I heard them as they walked past me. The male half of the equation was attempting to placate the female half: ‘Look, I don’t mind really, but you know you can’t behave like that.’

She wasn’t saying anything.

‘Okay,’ he sighed, ‘have it your own way.’

I went back to the report I was reading about whether crime on London buses is increasing or decreasing. Evidently it is and it isn’t. According to Transport for London there has been an overall 11 per cent reduction in crime on London buses since last year, but according to a poll in my newspaper 83 per cent of its readers believe crime is out of control on London buses.

I’m not sure which buses the newspaper’s readers are catching, but the 176, which trundles along a route from Penge in the far south to arrive three or four years later virtually outside the Time Out office door in the centre of town, is representative of many London bus routes in that it passes through a mixture of good areas and bad areas. The good areas, in my opinion, being the fun and chaos of Camberwell Green and the Walworth Road, the bad areas being the coffee-shop hell of East Dulwich.

The people who get on at Penge are usually poor, quiet and knackered because they work long hours cleaning and servicing the West End and, finding themselves setting off to do it again, have little joy in their hearts at the prospect. The people who get on in East Dulwich are palpably wealthier, usually have an iPod and, though I can’t be certain, purely from the hiss of cymbals coming from their headsets, I strongly suspect they are listening to Elbow. Not a crime in itself, though perhaps it should be, but a sure indicator of their place on the social scale and their general outlook on life.

Then at Camberwell Green young, loud people get on. Actually they charge on, laughing, pushing and shouting. The East Dulwich iPod people flinch and shake their heads in disapproval as the tired people from Penge snooze on.

But not today. Today, things are different. The misunderstanding between the couple I hadn’t seen suddenly heats up and she starts to screech at him.

‘Easy, easy,’ he says, but she screeches on, so inarticulate with rage that she can’t form words. There is a flapping sound. She is hitting him over the head, I think. I don’t turn round. Because you don’t look round, do you?

The first rule of avoiding trouble on a bus or any other public transport is to look the other way, steadfastly and without flinching while wishing yourself somewhere else and thinking bitterly: Why my bus? But she really was screeching at him now, making so much noise that even the loud kids from Camberwell were being quiet.

There is a point when you have to act, when you must turn around, and for me a woman screeching on the top deck of the bus is that point. So I break the first rule and turn around. Three seats behind me, at the centre of a circle of open-mouthed kids and sitting next to a sleeping person from Penge, is a man with one arm outstretched. Perched on the arm is a parrot.

Although my house is regularly overflown by packs of yelping parakeets I’m no expert on the order Psittaciformes, so maybe this bird – blue-green, about a foot long, vaguely crested and, from the look in its eye, naturally pugnacious – isn’t a parrot, but whatever breed or genus it is it’s very angry – and with a beak the size of secateurs, it is parrot enough to hold my gaze.

Anyway, if you are scared of getting on a London bus don’t be – the on-board crime rate is 15 per million passenger journeys. I don’t know what the on-board parrot rate is.