Jingle Bells

Ahhhh, and so this is Christmas - when To Do Lists get longer, and tempers get shorter, and the season to be relentlessly shitty to our Fellow Man is upon us all, gracing each face with a sweet-natured snarl, and each lip with a cheery "...Fuck You Too!"

Ain't the human spirit grand?

Somebody stole Harrods this morning - I think it must have been some of those jolly, rosy-cheeked urchins that Dickens was always wittering on about at this time of year. I got off a tube at Knightsbridge, intending to walk the shortish distance into the office, only to discover that Knightsbridge tube station (which I've walked by many a time en route to getting hopelessly lost in Victoria) had been shifted down a back alley somewhere. I found Harrods eventually, but I'd walked so far by then I think it was visiting the Moulin Rouge. Certainly, it wasn't where I'd left it last time. It's kinda weird - now that we've given notice on our flat, we'll come in of an evening and just do a mental checklist of whether anyone's been in to see it - is the bathroom door open, or the toilet lid up? Is there (as there once was when we came back from a holiday and hadn't given notice on our flat), a carrier bag full of ancient printer in the hallway...that type of thing. So now it's kinda like we've given notice on London, and familiar landmarks have been moved, as though the estate agents have come in and shifted things around to impress the new tenants.

Finally found my way back to my office, and had the kind of day that was deeply deeply productive, but only by virtue of jettisoning my To Do List early on (side-note to Kathy - SORRY - tomorrow, images, first thing, I swear!). I was home late, and got on a bus for the last stretch at Stratford. We'd gone one stop when things kicked off. A couple of twenty-something women had been dinging the bell to get the doors opened.
The doors stayed shut.
They dinged some more.
The doors stayed, if anything, shutter than before. It would be fair to say they almost pursed.
"Oi!" shouted one of the women shouted. "Can you open the doors please!"
The doors positively puckered, into a state of shutness that would be the envy of a pharoah's tomb. The bus began to move off.
"OOOOOIIIIII!!!!" yelled the woman. "Open the doors! There's people who wanna get off the bus!"
"Should have rung the bell, innit?" yelled the driver, pulling out into traffic.
It's important at this point to note that I was between the two of them, getting an earful of this positively Shakespearian dialogue each way.
"WE DID RING THE FUCKING BELL, YOU FOOL!!!" The woman had given up on yelling as it clearly wasn't getting her point across, and had moved on to demented Harpy-like screaming instead.
"FUCK OFF!" yelled the bus driver, presumably eschewing the scream as too demonstrably non-masculine.
"The bystander, a man in his forties, was due to leave the city in just two weeks time..." ran the newsreel of my accidental stabbing in my head.
The driver though clearly wasn't thinking this through. The woman would have been more than happy to have fucked off at this point, except she'd have broken at least a couple of nails trying to claw her way out through the hermetically-sealed cast iron doors, and then, in all probability, she'd have been run down by oncoming traffic, assuming her stilletos hadn't snapped on the impact of landing and pitched her under the wheels of her own bus.
He drove off, with her ringing the bell repeatedly every inch of the way.
"I'm RINGING THE BELL, you deaf fucking FOOOOOOOL!!! she screeched. He didn't appear to care. He drove us around a big corner, then stopped in the middle of the road, and opened the door.
"Now FUCK OFF!!!" he yelled again. A cab bacon-sliced right by the side of us. Now it was her turn not to care - clearly several tons of metal, travelling at speed, was less of a danger to life and limb than staying in this bus.
She screamed at his once more as she was leaving, he tried to decapitate her with the deadly doors, and we moved off with a scream of tyres I didn't think buses could achieve unless they were driven by Sandra Bullock.
My stop was next.
"It was the bell-ring that that broke the driver's mind, causing him to strangle the so-called 'Disappearing Man' with his own man-scarf..." said the newsreader in my head. I reached up, tentatively, took a deep breath...and rang the bell.

Clearly though, the driver had vented his day'sworth of fury and fucked-offness. He let me off, and I scurried home.

Merry freakin' Christmas, people. I'm a Welshman - get me out of here!