Skip to main content

Bus Stop - Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire

I had some frightful luck with the bus yesterday.  I wanted to make as good an impression as I could with Bernard, the gentleman who'd very kindly taken me on as his stone letter carving apprentice.  I had pushed the Prince's Foundation for this placement and I'm glad I did.  I feel very honoured to be here.  To be around and learn from someone who works in a most noble and skilled craft is a source of energy that I will carry with me for a very long time.  

I got to the bus stop for 8:00am.  I wanted to get a head start on drawing my L's and E's before Bernard arrived.  I wanted more practice, wanted to feel the good drug of progress in my veins and the skill in my hands. I wanted to feel the fullest weight of its expression.  I wanted to be the one who takes the panorama of the kingdom of language that exists within it.  What are you saying, Tom?  Does that even mean anything?  Take a breathe.  Keep it simple.  Okay: so in short, I wanted to live in a single letter for an extra hour.   But I had to get there first. 

Ten or fifteen minutes or so after the bus was due to arrive, we were told by a passerby that it had broken down and had italicised its state of brokendownness by filling with smoke, and that its Emergence From Wherever was left in considerable doubt.  In spite of this woman's plummeting faith in public transport and a token disgruntlement of a situation that didn't transcend the borders of the inconvenience it caused her, she may have been secretly thankful of her escape, though as she walked out of the scene I fear I may now never know.  So the unseen bus I had intended to board was now decidedly still, and if these accounts were to be believed, and there was no reason why they shouldn't have been, the fated bus would maintain a similar degree of stillness for a while.  

So we waited.  I thought about it for a while.  Even in this technologically advanced age in which we are free to broadcast a picture of our dinner to everyone we've ever met, the only thing anyone can really do in this particular bus-smoking situation is get off as soon as possible and walk.  Even for the posh sort - and there are a lot here - it must be a stretch even for them to complain to a driver with a smoking bus as the backdrop.  Subsequent passersby provided important eyewitness accounts of the advancing seriousness post-evacuation.  "Fire," one woman said as she passed.  "The bus is on fire.  It was smoking but now it's on fire."  I responded in the only way this Englishman knows how.  "Gosh," I said.   

  








Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Samsa & Shabeezi

Samsa was now a human.  He’d recently become a human after his architect decided to put a human heart in him and give him feelings.  The five litres of blood that now pumped around his body warmed him up.  It made for incredible nose bleeds, spasms, cramps and bruising, to name o nly a small fraction of the symptoms, but his architect assured him that it would all be worth it and that he'd feel normal very soon.  He didn't know what normal was, but he knew it wasn't puking and shitting and bleeding all over the place for the first two months and then just feeling terrible for several weeks after that.  Human life is agony, he thought, but he trusted the process.  One day, a little over twelve weeks after the operation, he woke up from his first good night's sleep and was able to open the curtains without the light splitting his skull in two.  Samsa had known Shabeezi before she became a human woman.   All they had done was fight.   Samsa especially liked doing flying

When I Needed a Winter Project, I Turned to Dylan Thomas - a Tommy & Moon Story

Before the snow came the smell of cinnamon. I wanted to track it all the way back to its source, to see who gave it flight. I imagine a woman, seventy-five, making herself a cappuccino next to an open window. The air is cold and sharp but she needs a quick blast of late autumn’s best before she gets out with the whippet. Wisp is looking at her from her basket, scanning for indications from mum that her walk is coming. Don’t worry, Wisp: walkies is imminent - but then a song comes on the radio that she hasn’t heard in fifty years. The Serge Gainsbourg ballad throws her into a deep dream-state, a reverie that takes her all the way back to Paris. She walks to the cupboard to find the cinnamon shaker, brushing shoulders with actors and actresses who’d worked with Godard and Truffaut and Antonioni. She remembers the time she once saw Jane Birkin at a party and witnessed first-hand the effect her beauty had on all the men in the room. I was two miles away from home, running at an easy, stead

An Expert Analysis of Michael Fassbender's Running Style From the Film 'Shame'

Tom Wiggins: What are your first impressions of Michael Fassbender/Brandon's running style? Paul Whittaker: He's running nice, smooth and relaxed. He seems like he has a good amount of fitness and he is running well within himself in terms of pace.   TW: What improvements could he make to his running style? PW: The main improvement I'd make is his foot plant.  He lands heel first and this causes a 'breaking' effect when travelling forwards.  If he landed on his mid-foot/forefoot, this would be a much better for impact stress and propulsion going forward into the next running stride. TW: Regarding his speed, how many minutes per mile is he running? PW : I would say he is running approx 7-7.30 minutes per mile. TW:   What do you make of his stride lengths?  Is he overstriding/understriding? PW:  The actor is definitely overstriding in this clip.  It would help if his feet landed underneath and below his centre of gravity. TW: What's his