The wisdom seat delivers a verdict on shoes while a fox crosses at the green man
Thursday. I took the night bus home from Vera’s birthday in Peckham, the N171, and I am of the settled view, renewed annually on this route, that the night bus is the truest parliament this city possesses, more representative than anything at Westminster and considerably better attended after midnight. The top deck at one in the morning held, by my census, two nurses coming off shift, a chef still in his whites carrying a single enormous marrow, origin unexplained, unexplainable, three students conducting a post-mortem of an evening that had clearly detonated, a man asleep with the specific dignity of the long-practised, upright, arms folded, waking at his stop by sonar, and a woman in full evening dress eating chips with the focus of a surgeon. Every stratum of London, one staircase, one driver, four miles an hour through the amber-lit city. The Museum of London could close its doors and simply run guided tours of the N171. Nothing in the cases is more London than the marrow.
The night bus operates under its own constitution, unwritten, universally ratified. Chips may be shared with strangers but must first be offered with the tilt of the cone, never words. The front seats of the top deck belong to whoever needs them most, and the bus somehow always agrees on who that is. Singing is permitted below a certain volume and above a certain quality, both thresholds enforced by collective sigh. And the driver, the night driver, is owed a thank you at the doors of a warmth never extended to daytime drivers, because the night driver is not providing transport, the night driver is shepherding the city’s strays personally home, and everyone aboard knows it, even the chef, even the marrow. The TfL bus pages will give you the routes and the frequencies, the skeleton of the thing, but the constitution travels only by oral tradition, top deck, after midnight, chips optional.
The Wisdom Seat
I sat, as I always do when it is free, in the wisdom seat, top deck, front left, and was joined at New Cross by an elderly gentleman in a flat cap who settled beside me with the exhale of a man docking after a long voyage, and we performed the night bus miracle, which is conversation between strangers, impossible in this city at every other hour and location, entirely natural here, as if the ban lifts at midnight with the fares. He had been at his granddaughter’s engagement do. He disapproved of the fiance’s shoes but not the fiance, a distinction he explained with great care, the shoes can be changed, he said, the character was sound underneath them, and I thought, there is the whole of wise grandfathering in one sentence, judge the changeable lightly and the permanent closely. He got off at the Elephant, tipping the cap, and I will never see him again, per the covenant, and the covenant is right, some conversations are complete at one act and touring productions only spoil them.
The students, meanwhile, had reached the forensic stage of their post-mortem, in which the evening’s central incident, involving someone called Jordan and a karaoke decision, was being reconstructed from three conflicting testimonies, and I want to record that they conducted it with more procedural fairness than most public inquiries, witnesses heard in turn, interruptions minuted by groan, and a final verdict, Jordan meant well, which is the verdict this country reaches on nearly everything, and not the worst one available. The woman in evening dress finished her chips, folded the paper into a neat parcel, and held it the remaining three miles rather than leave it on the seat, and if you want to know the moral character of a population, ignore the surveys, watch what it does with chip paper at two in the morning when nobody official is looking. This city passes. Quietly, greasily, it passes.
The Long Way Round
The N171 does not hurry, and this is its final wisdom. It takes the long way as a matter of principle, looping through estates and high streets the day routes ignore, and from the top deck the city at night reassembles itself, the kebab shops like lighthouses, the launderette that never closes and never explains, the foxes conducting their inspections, one of which crossed at the lights at Camberwell, at the green man, I swear it on the marrow, and the whole top deck saw, and the whole top deck said nothing, filing it away, as I now file it here. London gives you one image like that per night ride, admission included in the fare.
Filed with the satirical desk at The London Prat, and the account posted to Bohiney Magazine, whose correspondent replies that in America the equivalent institution is the late diner, counter seating, bottomless coffee, and that their version of the marrow is a man in a booth with a parrot, no explanation either, and we have agreed, across the ocean, that every civilisation keeps one unexplained passenger as a matter of policy, and that the policy is sound. It keeps the night honest.
Tally, one constitution reaffirmed, one fiance approved pending footwear, one fox legally crossing, chip paper carried three miles to the bin. The N171 docked me at the corner at half one, and the driver received the warm thank you, and earned it. Parliament adjourned. Same time next birthday.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk