Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner...

One thing that’s for sure is that south London can sometimes only be seen as bandit country. I was getting the night bus back home, sitting on the bottom deck (as girls should do when getting night buses alone, doncha know), and the bus stopped to allow a driver change at Camberwell Green (which I always think is a piss take, as it’s not like the driver has gone very far, but it obviously did not make me quite as mardy as some people). When the new driver started letting all the people on the bus, one quite fat white woman pushed a fairly young black woman and told her to get out of her way, as her and her boyfriend wanted to get past. The black girl started shouting at her and pushed her back, and an almighty fight broke out. As in, they were rolling around on the floor, punching each other, tearing each other’s hair, one stamping on the other ones head, ripping each other’s clothes. All their belongings started flying all over the bus- lip gloss, hairbrushes, etc- which made it even more amusing. It would have been even weirder if I had been listening to music (these things always are, like when I was attacked in the park) but the battery on my mp3 player had given up the ghost. Still, all I could hear, loud as if I was actually listening to it, was “take me away I’m dying, take me away I’m dying…”, which gave the situation yet another surreal edge.

Oddly, considering there was an out and out brawl happening literally at my feet, I did not feel in the slightest bit worried or scared, and viewed it more as an interesting experience, possibly because I had just been reading some anthropology book. I didn’t really want to intervene, as I am not a big fan of being punched in the face, and the fat woman clearly had a screw loose, although the other woman was winning the fight. In the end- probably only a minute or two after the whole thing started- someone did intervene: the campest man in the whole world. He was wearing a pink jumper, was carrying a giant poster of “Mamma Mia” and was Portuguese or something, and all the time he was grabbing hold of one of the women, he was saying “calm down, darling, is okay, she very stupid, you know, is okay”. The two women had a bit of a slanging match from opposite ends of the bus, which I wasn’t too appreciative of, as the fat woman, whose voice bore an uncanny resemblance to a fog horn, was about six inches from my ear, and I kept thinking I was going to laugh, and probably get punched as a result. The usual “you better watch yourself, if I ever see you around here I’m gonna get my boys and they’ll fuck you up” kind of stuff went down, and the black girl called her friend, who came and decided the fat woman wasn’t worth punching. The gay man and this incredibly tall Rasta managed to successfully mediate and some sort of peace was restored. However, the bus driver had called the police, and told us none of us were going anywhere.

By now, everyone on the bus was downstairs (many people had come down onto the stairs to watch the whole thing), and asking the bus driver to move. I said to him, “Dude, come on, we want to go home! They’re not going to fight anymore!” but he then asked me if I was looking for trouble. “Fuck this shit,” I said, and rolled a cigarette, precipitating a mass smoking session. It was like the blitz spirit, we all bonded outside and chatted about what we’d been up to, and how the fat woman was clearly in the wrong (I had to explain the phrase “thick as pig shit” to a Spanish girl). She was still sat on the bus, with her boyfriend. Someone said that it was commendable that he hadn’t gotten involved, as if he’d punched the other girl, even more of a ruckus would have broken out. I pointed out that he was clearly a shit boyfriend, as who’d let their girlfriend get into a situation like that? The police didn’t arrive, although that’s no surprise (I was told by one person that they knew someone who’d been stabbed and the police didn’t come at all). We had to wait ages for the next bus to come (night buses… like clockwork, you know) but by the time we got the bus, everyone was chatting like they’d known each other for ages, and the black girl apologised to us all, and it really was like the proper blitz. Nothing like a crisis, eh, and it was quite fun to get off a night bus at 3am and say “ciao!” and “have a good night!” to a bunch of complete strangers. Having said that, I am glad neither of my brothers have any inclination to live in London, as I wouldn’t want them seeing all this kind of stuff.

I didn’t realise quite how late it was until I got home, when I realised it had taken an hour and a half to do a journey that took me 20 minutes the other day. Still, I managed to do my obsessive email checking (it’s got to the point where I wake up every hour throughout the night, get out of bed and go to the computer, and click ‘refresh’…) before falling asleep.

And all this quasi-drama has eclipsed everything else I was going to write about.