Bus 21
Coast Hopper – Wells-next-the-Sea to King’s Lynn
Unlike my first two Coast Hoppers, which were well patronised, I was the sole passenger for long stretches of the 78-minute1 journey to King’s Lynn. While this meant that there was very little in the way of fellow-traveller-watching on offer, it did at least allow me the pick of the seats. And although it was only lunchtime on my fourth day I had already learnt how to sniff out the whereabouts of the best seat on each bus. The secret, I can reveal, is to seek out the emergency exit.
In order to allow passengers to escape from any bus that has thrown itself in a river, exploded, or lost the will to live, the empty space in front of a seat next to an emergency exit is larger than that normally assigned as leg room for all other seats. By my reckoning, about 50% larger, meaning that that my legs, which I would guess are a good 50% longer than the average Briton’s, are more than happy to fill the space thus apportioned.
Oh, and if there is an emergency, well, you’re right next to the emergency exit. For this reason, if you’re lucky enough to nab such a seat you should always take something smart to slip into in case news broadcasters press you into giving an impromptu interview to camera in your new found post-crash rôle as ‘only survivor’.
Of course, in order to make up for this spatial generosity, the leg room assigned to the seat immediately in front of the ‘emergency exit seat’ is correspondingly dolls-house-esque. Unless you are a doll, or don’t mind the permanent loss of the use of your legs, it’s best to avoid such seats. Indeed, they really only have one use. If you happen to be standing next to them in a crowded bus you can smilingly offer them up to any fellow passengers for whom an inability to perambulate freely from that day forth would be of major benefit to society.
§§§
We hustled as best we could through a positively throbbing Hunstanton. Once at the end of a railway line beloved of Betjeman, the town was cut adrift in 1969 by Dr Beeching and went into decline as a seaside resort. It’s fighting back now, partly due to the Coasthopper which connects it to King’s Lynn, as close as the railway gets nowadays. However, the miles of stationary traffic we passed that was attempting to enter the town from the south suggests it would probably be doing all right for itself regardless of public transport. Its pavements fair spilled over with bank holidaymakers.
Like all seaside day-tripper crowds, this throng moved at the speed of its slowest members: barely toddling toddlers, arthritic grandparents, snogging teenagers. The fleeter of foot wove loosely choreographed patterns around them as they pressed on to wherever it is in Hunstanton one presses. The fine lighthouse at Old Hunstanton, perhaps? Now a holiday let, it was the once the only lighthouse in the world to employ a parabolic reflector, you know. Or maybe the moderately famous stripy cliffs? A layer of white chalk tops vermilion Carrstone with a thin band of Hunstanton red stone between them. The effect suggests that the town is built on nothing more substantial than a large cream biscuit. Wherever the multitudes were heading, they all seemed to be reasonably happy about it. Looking on, I envied them their apparently unthinking contentment.
I think my unease with summer and other accidents of life – Christmas, my birthday, parties – during which one feels one really ought to be happy, began when I was sixteen. Back in those days, summers were always hot and long, of course, and full of meadows. You couldn’t move for meadows: they were everywhere. In fact, I seem to recall there was some government programme that brought meadows into the hearts of small, otherwise inconspicuous towns in the home counties. I can think of no other explanation as to why my adolescent memories of Caterham, a nondescript blot on the North Downs, are bursting with cornflowers, cow slips, yarrow and bumble bees.
And where there are meadows there must young love be also. At sixteen, to see a meadow and not have the love of one’s life on hand to invite into its concealing grasses is to feel pain. Actually, one can be a lot older than sixteen and still feel that thrust to the guts. As Oscar Wilde said – or at least I vaguely recall the fact that he said it but can’t seem to find any trace of his doing so, so I append my apologies if someone else said it, particularly if it was you – there is nothing worse than a missed opportunity. Being in a meadow on a warm summer’s day without a belovéd one with whom to share it feels more like a missed opportunity than almost anything under the unforgiving sun. And Lucy was never there.
So were sown the seeds of my unhappiness at summer, a misery that would grow to cast its shadow over any other occasion at which it should be possible to feel happy in the normal scheme of things. Of course, that is not to say that I have never known aestival glee or enjoyed a cheery moment when celebrating my birthday, it’s just that I suspect I find it much harder to do so than most people. The up side of this is that when circumstances are outwardly gloomy – when sleet lays waste the population, recession ravages the land and the grim streets blow with detritus – the lack of pressure to feel happy rather lifts my spirits.
Today, as we jolt unsteadily through Hunstanton, I suspect there’s something else going on as well. Everywhere there are people grouped in families or couples. Hard as I look, there doesn’t seem to be a single person who is, well, single. And here am I, alone on a bus. ‘I’ve got a girlfriend, you know,’ I want to call out to the maddeningly contended crowds, ‘and friends too and everything.’
But I rather suspect that only people with neither of those things actually do say that to strangers. So next time you hear someone make such a claim, do be extra nice to them. You’ll probably be the first person to do so for quite a while.
§§§
Our bus, or rather my bus, eventually wriggled its way free and shot along the Roman-straight main road towards King’s Lynn. I saw a Muntjac deer in the woods here once. But I was on a bicycle then and, with little traffic about, I had crept up on it. From my seat by the emergency exit I spotted precious little wildlife. However, there was an intriguing graffito on the back of a road sign to be savoured. ‘Love not obsession,’ it declared. I imagine the author probably meant there to be a comma in between the first two words but as an imperative it still worked rather well.
I pondered its intent as we made our way through the outskirts of Lynn (I’m assuming here, rather rashly perhaps, that locals shorten the name of their town to this – ‘Kings’ just doesn’t sound right and ‘KL’ risks getting it confused with that other mighty East Anglian town, Kuala Lumpur). Once the third most important port in England, Lynn was a member of the Hanseatic League, the alliance of trading cities that hoovered up the lion’s share of northern European commerce in the late Middle Ages. Nowadays, that grand monopolising spirit lives on in the town’s four Tesco supermarkets.
But I digress. As I stepped out into the now humid air swaddling the bus station, I had to concur that love, as the graffiti poet averred, is clearly better than obsession. However, when there’s no love to be had or given, obsession can be a wonderful comfort.
Until it eats you, of course.
1Apologies for the geeky exactitude of the time keeping. Since I tend more to the ‘chaos’ end of any scale whose other end reads ‘strict regimentation’, it does me good occasionally to engage with the mild autism with which nearly all British males are afflicted.
[Up next: Spalding – you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.]






















