On the bus

 We do have a car — here it is in front of our house. 

It's a nice little car and we both like driving it, but these days we have no reason to go very far or go anywhere very often. I take the car when I go up the hill to visit my family in the evening sometimes, if my body is hurting and I don't want to walk, and every week I take some of our family to the shops that are too far for them to walk, for their groceries. And if we go out in the evening when the buses have thinned out, or go out to one of the villages where public transport is patchy, then we take the car.

But mostly for going to church on Sunday or to the bank, or any other reason to go into Hastings town centre, or up the hill to see our family or get something from the shops nearby, we travel by bus, because we have old people's bus passes, so it's free after 9.30 in the morning.

Yesterday I caught a bus into Hastings. That maybe sounds odd, in that you probably know me as living in Hastings. I do, but like many seaside towns Hastings is a long sprawling place. St Leonards-on-Sea was a seaside holiday resort added on to it in the 1820s by a Victorian architect called James Burton. It grew through the Victorian and Edwardian era, and then in the 1930s when building deregulation gave rise to massive housing development in England, the housing estate where we now live was added to St Leonards in what had been a little country village called Hollington. So we do live in Hastings, but on the northern part of the bit that's St Leonards, and the centre of Hastings down by the sea is a couple of miles away — a bus ride.

I was going to a lunchtime concert. Through the summer these happen every week at the church where I go most Sundays now. It's a donation-only concert, so anyone can go even if they haven't got much (or any) money, and it's in the daytime, which I prefer, and only forty minutes long. These summer lunchtime concerts have a mixture of all kinds of music, but yesterday's was French café songs, very ably performed by two singers and a pianist — delightful.

The bus going into Hastings was almost full, with some people standing, and only a smattering of seats available. But I was lucky; at the point I boarded the bus the seat next to the emergency exit half-way down was empty. That's a good place to sit; it has more leg room, to make space for using the emergency door if need be. So I sat by the window, and as it's a double seat that meant there remained a vacant one next to me. And across the aisle from me the corresponding double seat likewise had someone sitting by the window and an empty aisle seat.

A couple of stops further along, several people got on board, including a small, thin, middle-aged man with a beard, wearing a rucksack and carrying a stick, and accompanied by his carer — who was a big, burly, gentle-looking young man with tattoos.

They came along the aisle past the many occupied seats, the man with the stick going first and saying softly "Not this one. Not this one." Mine was the first possibility of an empty seat, so he sat next to me, saying quietly to himself, "Keep quite still. Don't say a word." His carer took the adjacent seat across the aisle.

I spoke to the man who sat beside me, to tell him I liked his note to self — "Keep quite still. Don't say a word." — and he turned his head very fast and abruptly to look at me. He had bright, shrewd, twinkling eyes. I liked everything about this man. He told me his name is Paul Young, but explained that he was not Paul Young the rock star. He said a little more about Paul Young (the one he wasn't) and then after that our conversation lapsed; but sitting beside someone on a bus takes you within their aura, allowing you to continue to commune with them; and I liked his. 

When their stop came, silently inside my mind I said to him, "Have a good day," and as they got up from their seats his carer looked down and said to me, "Have a good day." So that was interesting. Evidently we were all tuned in, because nobody normally says that to you on a bus.

I hope I meet Paul Young (not the rock star) again one day. He felt like a friend.

As you can see, another friend has come to sit with me now —

— so I guess that's the end of that.