I've been catching buses a lot lately. And it's been working out okay. Because my house is at one end of the 10 minute bus ride, and Waterstone's in Middlesbrough is at the other end.
The only bit that hasn't been working out is that some of the buses have these shiny new seats, and it's impossible to stay on them when the bus goes round corners. I mean, why make a seat out of shiny stuff? It makes no sense. There's no friction.
When buses don't work out, is when they don't join up places you want to go to. This hampered me a lot during the ages of 15 and 17 when I wanted to go out with girls.
It would have all been different if I'd gone to the local comprehensive, because girls would then have been walking distance away, but most of the ones I met were through school in Leeds, and they all lived miles away.
Looking back though, and considering the miniscule percentage of girls I liked that would actually go out with me, it seems incredible to me now that I was put off by the lack of a direct bus service, but I was.
It was only when I started riding my bike long distances in the last few years, that I realised how easy it could have been for me to get to girls' houses. Especially when I discovered with the aid of Google maps, that most of the ones I'd been put off going to see, lived within a 12 mile radius of my house. That's an hour on a bike!
It all started to come home to me how lazy I'd been last year when I rode home from my mum's in Leeds, via York (an 86 mile trip). Only 4 miles into this ride I found myself in Sherburn in Elmet, where Rachel Waterfield had lived 27 years before. 4 miles! I could have walked that, but in 1983 after meeting Rachel at a party, I managed to let things fizzle out badly during my follow-up phone call to her because of the lack of a direct bus service. Why didn't I just get on a bike, I could have been there in 20 minutes?
And Joanne McAndrew. She lived in Alwoodley which was 10 miles away from Garforth on the Leeds Ring Road, and there was a bus that went from about a mile away from my house to hers, but I couldn't be bothered to walk the mile. In her case I did once ride it, on the 5 speed racing bike that I had then and didn't like, but it was when I worked at Rawcliffes and having no fashion sense I had bought some terrible sweat gathering jogging outfit which I cycled there in. The fact that I was wearing that was probably reason enough for the relationship not to get off the ground, but again I felt the difficulty of the transport options was a factor. The ring road is quite a busy road, and there's a lot of roundabouts, and I just totally failed to persevere either with the cycling, or the walk to the bus stop, even though she was funny and attractive.
And Susannah Baynard. Admittedly I didn't help my case with her, by not dancing very well at the disco with the Germans in 1983, but she lived in Linton which I'm not even sure was on a bus route, and it all seemed so impossible at 15. But I've just Googled it. It was 12 miles, in an almost straight line from where I lived aged 15. I could have been there in an hour!
Bloody hell, people have relationships these days whilst living on opposite sides of the Atlantic. What was I thinking?
Even my most successful teenage relationship, with Joanne Phillips, could have benefitted from a winning combination of bike riding and map reading. I say successful. It worked out, in the sense that we did go out for a while, and I thought she was the one, but then she decided hanging around with me was interfering with her A Level studies, so she dumped my ass faster than you can say Cheese Single.
It was one of those dumpings that was mitigated by the old chestnut of 'Oh, we'll still be friends', but those words were accompanied by body language which roughly translated meant 'I hope you get shot into space, and don't come back'. I didn't get shot into space, but I did go to Germany for a while. She lived in Boston Spa, which again was an hour and three quarters away on two buses, but on another ride home from my mum's (this year) I rode from Garforth to Boston Spa in less than an hour. It's only 11 miles away. Once again, I thought, I could have saved ages timewise, if only I'd got a bike.
And the thing about all these girls is, I went or nearly went out with all of them in the summer, when it doesn't go dark until about 11 o'clock at night, and it would have actually been quite pleasant riding a bike in the evenings or on a weekend then.
Unfortunately I just didn't think in bicycles when I was aged 15 to 17. I was a teenager. I thought about buses, and I thought about getting lifts. And to be honest I didn't think about getting lifts much. I had a step dad who was either drunk or his car had fallen to pieces or the engine blown up, or he was in the police station getting done for drunk driving, so I mostly thought about buses.
You would think logically that travelling by bike is quite slow, but it has the advantage that you can go directly from A to B, and you don't have to stop for old people and women with buggies. And you don't have to do laps of every village on the bus route. Buses go all over the bloody place, and if you work out your average speed on some bus journeys it works out at about 5 miles an hour, which is barely above walking speed.
Hooray for bikes, and hooray for girls! Especially ones that are easy to get to.
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