Edinburgh 2010; at the festival and risking life on the number 27 bus.

I wrote this post in 2010 and someone looked at it the other day which reminded me and it made me smile. I had been at the Edinburgh Festival with my show A Bit of Irish with many visits to the poetry nights in The Captain's Bar where I did some of my own stuff together with some by WB Yeats hoping some of his enormous talent would rub off.

When reading this remember – it is before Brexit and before Trump; oh how lucky we were but that's what life is about when you never know the future.

This will finish off the Edinburgh blog; that bus above, as you can see, is the number 27. This bus is a wonderful bus; it runs every 10 minutes and took us into the centre of town in 15 minutes from where we were staying in a place called Viewforth.

The fair would cost £1.20 each way but a daily ticket would cost just £3. The daily ticket could be used all day on as many buses as one would wish to use; the buses have wheel chair and push chair access and certain seats near the front are reserved for senior citizens.

In the evenings the buses are limited to one every half an hour but we knew the time table so didn't have to wait too long very often.

So what is the matter with this seemingly wonderful bus service from Lothian Buses?

The drivers don't know how to apply the brakes properly; that is all except one and that was Bernard.

When Bernard drove the bus you could get out of your seat and feel safe as you walked to the door but when the other drivers drove you risked your life as soon as you got up.

Now it so happens that on most buses you have to get out of your seat before the bus reaches your stop; if you don't the bus will start off again before you have the time to get off.

So when you see your stop coming up in the distance you get out of your seat and walk up the aisle to the front of the bus; this is the cue for the driver, except the aforementioned Bernard, to apply the brakes hard which turns your walk into a trot and sometimes even a little run.

If the bus has to stop at the traffic lights before the bus stop, the driver will have to stop at the light and then accelerate again to get passed the lights and to the bus stop. This will send you on a walk back down the aisle to where you just came from - backwards.

You can prevent this by grabbing on to a bar, if you can, and if not you have to wait for another bar to catch or just hope you might bump into someone on your journey backwards who is big and soft.

Or you can fall backwards onto the floor and bang your head!

This doesn't apply to Bernard, of course, as he would be able to drive the bus with a pint of Guinness on his dash board.

All this might sound like fun and indeed it is if you are fit enough but to see really old people go into a trot down the bus and then see them careering backwards makes you want to cover your eyes or dive to try and rescue them.

The old ladies struggle out of their seats and then seem to have a lease of life as their little legs pump away moving their bodies forward at a speed they have probably never experienced since they were teenagers.

There was a middle aged woman, one day, applying lipstick when the bus went into the full Monty; the full Monty is when the brake is applied for the bus stop, then just before stopping at the traffic lights the lights change to amber before the bus has made its final stop and then it accelerates to the bus stop then stops fiercely again. The lipstick went up and down the woman's face but I find it very hard to describe what happened to the woman sitting across the aisle who was picking her nose; not a pretty sight!

I am not saying that every driver on every bus in Edinburgh drove like this – they just seemed to be. I only ever used the 43, the 10 and the 27 although I used the 27 every day and it happened every time – except once when we met Bernard.

On the last night we had to get our stuff out of the theatre pretty damn quick; so we put all the props into one plastic box; the guitar went into its own box and we had to return a table I had borrowed from the pub back to them.

After that I decided it would be a good idea to get a taxi so after a few pints in the pub – and I sang two songs for which they gave me a glass of black grouse whisky for – we had a cup of tea with a Palestinian shopkeeper I got to know and then caught a taxi. The taxi driver took us on a different route from the one we normally took and we landed in heavy traffic; well, we didn't fall for that trick so when we stopped in that traffic jam we decided to get out and pay him off. So we walked to our usual stop and there was the number 27 bus being driven by Bernard.

I didn't know Bernard was the driver of the year at that point but I was carrying the box of props and my wife had the guitar and the bag of costumes; it was easier that way as the box was giving Margaret trouble when we 'ran' from the taxi to the bus.

So when we made our move to get off the bus we couldn't grab the bars as we walked along the aisle but Bernard drove that bus lovingly and smoothly to the bus stop where he stopped it without even a slight jerk.

 I look forward to risking things again in Edinburgh one of the days where maybe I'll meet Bernard again.