On the Buses

For 48 hours at the end of last week, the greedy bastards of the RMT union decided to pull another strike, affecting the Piccadilly Line - serving a huge swathe of London from Heathrow via the West End to our neighbourhood in North London. Usually, this kind of petulance causes huge disruption to everyone else trying to get to (their far lower-paid than anyone working on the Tube, for sure) work, as the buses (particularly in this Northerly stretch) become dangerously overcrowded. I have had to walk to work on previous occasions, which was not too horrendous from our previous locale, but now we are two miles further North would have been problematic.

However, the far-sighted management at Transport for London had the genius idea of hiring/bringing back into service a whole fleet of classic Routemasters and similarly vintage vehicles to take the strain. So, over a three-day stretch, we were treated to the most fabulously nostalgic commute. It took me right back to my youth - I almost sparked up a cigarette (as was traditional) on the top deck!

Continuing the nostalgia, here's an appropriate song for the occasion, courtesy of today's birthday boy, the sadly-missed Marc Bolan and T. Rex:

T. Rex - 20th Century Boy

Friends say it's fine
Friends say it's good
Everybody says it's just like rock and roll

Well, it certainly felt like being back the the 1960s.