Day Three

Day 3

555, 510 and 118

118. Driver: Long, grey hair. No visible tattoos. Sound bloke. I was in and out of sleep. At one stage I woke up to find the bus nearly empty. We stopped in a small town and a man stumbled on carrying a bag with a bottle of Laphroaig inside. He looked somewhere between Tom O'Connor and Ken Railings (the bad guy from Strictly Ballroom), his silver hair meticulously styled. He was dressed in shabby clothes and was clearly tight. He made a move straight for the only other passengers on the bus, two young girls sitting up front, and loomed, kissing the air at them and saying things like 'Hello girls, pretty girls. Where are you going?' They couldn't have been older than 15 or 16. Unabashed deviant behaviour.

The girls laughed at him. They made it clear they weren't going to engage him in any way. He started saying, 'I'm just a bloody owd fool,' and sat and turned away, but he would keep turning to face them, speaking incomprehensibly, kissing the air. The situation woke me up and I watched him to make sure he didn't do anything to upset the girls. He got off several stops later without having worried anyone.

After this stop we were out on a dual carriageway. It was about half an hour after I was supposed to arrive at my destination. The driver said, 'We went through Bideford a while ago, mate,' and he dropped me in a lay-by just outside Barnstaple where my Aunt picked me up.

That wretched pederast made me miss my stop.