In some ways it’s easy to see why London has become like this, why there is this simmering anger. Take the buses. I did before I got myself a hire car and I tell you, they are hell on earth. Not because of the people who use them but because it was summer and they were like mobile cauldrons. Ironically the older buses, the traditional red double-decker Routemasters that you see plying the streets of truly central London, up Piccadilly and Regent Street and on to Oxford Circus and Oxford Street, are coolish even when the weather is stickily hot because you can open the windows along the sides and there’s the ever-open back end where the stairs go up. The newer buses, which have only their colour in common with the Routemasters, are shiny and clean and inside their seats are clothed in the brightest flecked material I have ever seen. These seat colours jostle and fight each other and I have to tell you they are not a pleasant sight first thing in the morning. I wondered if they came out of the packet like that or if someone had actually sat down and designed this horrendous colour scheme. If it’s the latter the perpetrators deserve to be tarred and veloured in garish multi-colours to within an inch of their lives until they promise never, ever to do anything like it again.
I got on the first new double-decker on a sweltering hot day and asked the driver if he could switch the air conditioning on. He looked at me. "You takin’ the piss, mate? This is London Transport, not bleeding Mercedes-Benz." Such is their witty repartee.
Suitably chastened I walked down the back of the bus and by the time I got there I was almost drowning in my own sweat. I flopped down on the back seat and it was hot to the touch. That’s not too surprising because underneath its padding you’ll find an engine the size of a small passenger car. In the winter this is fine. People perch there like a row of grey pigeons, all puffed up in their thick quilted jackets, each making the most of the fierce heat, each saying nothing, each savouring the intense warmth beaming up through their buttocks. But in the summer only a package tourist down from the Sun would want to go anywhere near this particular heat source.
On today’s modern London double-decker there are only a few side windows to be opened and they’re those ridiculous letterbox affairs that flap up. It beats me how anyone ever thought air could get in there, let alone how any of it could actually flow around the vehicle. Maybe they knew it wouldn’t work but just stuck them in there anyway, perhaps as some kind of cruel joke. Of course there are worse places to be, like upstairs where there are no opening windows at all. This is real pressure cooker stuff and I’m surprised not more people are carted off to intensive care suffering from heat stroke, gibbering in their delirium, "the windows, I saw no open windows...". Certainly if you’d had the gas turned off at home for non-payment of your bill this would be the ideal place to head for. Just slap your bacon and eggs on the inside of the front screen and they’d be done to a crisp in less than a minute.
I should say that at least regular bus travel gave me the chance to sample much more of the London bus drivers’ unique approach to customer relations. One day a woman came up to the open door of the bus and asked, "Can you tell me which bus I need to catch for Euston?" The driver didn’t look at her, just took a long and deep breath and said, "No" and we drove off. I saw her as we passed, her mouth suitably agape.
Another day the bus was almost empty and a tourist stood up. (I knew he was a visitor because he had his wallet in his back pocket where it was handily placed for any mugger to lift. Even a trainee pickpocket could have been away with it in the time it took his thieving fingers to touch the leather. What most worried me about this observation of mine was that I was beginning to think this way…). The tourist went to the door. The driver looked at him in the rear view mirror and as we approached the next stop he said, "If you want to get off mate you’ve got to press the button." The tourist watched as the bus stop went past. He looked at the driver who ignored him. Eventually he got off two stops up the road when someone else wearily got up and rang the bell for him.
There is air conditioning on London Underground trains. For the drivers. One day I ventured down to the Tube, taking the lift to the deep subterranean levels. As the doors parted I believed for a moment that I hadn’t paid enough attention at ground level and had mistakenly entered some exclusive underground sauna club, a place where businessmen could go to ease the stresses and strains of the daily grind. But no such luck, this was indeed the Underground, sizzling, humming with heat, a heat as big and as fierce as a pack of rabid animals. Imagine, I imagined, what it would be like on one of the dreaded trains itself what with the frequent and unexplained stops in the middle of tunnels and passengers who cannot even bring themselves to speak and their bodily odours all mixing and mingling. The thought of it all was enough to work me up into a sweat. I got back in the lift and returned to the world outside, being careful of course to look around before emerging into the sunlight. You do that in London, you are forever looking around, conscious of the youth who is walking perhaps a little too close to your heels or the young woman who brushes up against you on the Tube for just too long a moment. For all you know she may have been fishing for your wallet or your phone while she was making what you thought was bold sexual contact.