6 months in and still not bored of the bus journey

Taking the bus instead of the tube was one of the best decisions I made last year. Miraculously, I never get bored of the journey to and from London Bridge each day - there are always so many people on the street to watch - couples having fights outside a restaurant, cyclists getting into punch-ups with homicidal drivers, and of course the sorry street cleaners at the bottom rungs of this city's economy. Not only do they have the noisiest, dustiest, most toxic job in the world, they have to endure the added humiliation of driving what looks like a miniturised pope-mobile, with whirling brushes attached.

Recently, banners and bus ads have started appearing that proclaim "WE ARE LONDONERS", with the "ONE" highlighted, in big black and red letters. They give me a slightly eerie feeling of hands-joined solidarity tempered with a streak of good old-fashioned fear of being blown up. I was in London on 7/7, and I took the tube to work the day after (my reasoning was, the terrorists aren't going to strike two days in a row, right, I mean - that's just too obvious!). I definitely feel safer on the bus, though, where I can eye-ball everybody who gets on and keep a lookout for suspicious packages/shifty looking men.

I know it is highly unlikely, and that I am probably more likely to be hit by a bus than be involved in a terrorist incident, but the truth is, no one knows when it could happen again, and how bad it will be next time. Terrorism statistics don't count for nothing in my book, because the motivation behind such acts are impossible for white Westerners to comprehend or account for.

Anyway, in the unlikely event that there is a bomb on my bus, at least I will see the sky before I die.