Trashed elbow

1. We arrive at the bus stop at 13:30, ready for a 13:50 bus.
2. At around 14:15, with ne'er a bus in sight, we start boozing, having a fairly good stock of pop / spirit mixes. Joe takes one sip out of the cola / disaronno mixture and declares that he is not touching another drop.
3. A lady at the bus stop phones the Mega Bus company to ask where the bus is. They profess ignorance.
4. We finish our two-litre bottle of cola / disaronno. Joe has drunk about half of it.
5. I ask Tim if, in fact, he has booked us onto a Meta Bus: a bus which does not exist on our plane of reality, but instead occupies a realm of potential and Platonism.
6. At around 16:00, the bus shows up. We toss our bags in the hold, keep hold of our beers and hop on.
7. After we make a stop in Birmingham, I crack open a beer. At this point, the driver announces that boozing on buses is against the law, and anyone caught boozing will be put off the bus. Sitting at the back, boozing furtively, we can imagine no greater felicity.
8. It then transpires that we are on our way to Leeds via Manchester, which, as I say at the time, is pretty much like doing two sides of a triangle, including the hypotenuse.
9. At around 17:30, we find ourselves stationary on the M6, a state of affairs in which, I believe, I have spent about three months of my life in total to date.
10. We eventually arrive in Manchester and the driver disappears. I hypothesise that he has popped off to the toilet to shoot himself. Joe expresses relief that at least he hasn't opted for the hosepipe-through-the-window option. The lad in front, overhearing this, dissolves into giggles.
11. The sun is low in the sky as we trundle along the M62, next stop Leeds! We crack open the last few of our beers which, being a bit warm and gassy, make a fair old hiss. As I crack the last one open rather too audibly, with Leeds not 13 miles distant, the driver pulls smartly over into a service station.
12. The driver stands up at the front and announces that he has been driving for four-and-a-half hours straight so, in accordance with the law, and flagrantly contrary to any kind of sense or justice, he has to take a 45-minute break. I hobble off the bus with an open almost-full beer in my pocket. We go to KFC to stock up on calories ahead of the weekend's sporting exertion.
13. At 22:00 we arrive at Bodington hall in Leeds. Total journey time: nine hours door to door. We steal a fridge from a kitchen, stick it in our bedroom with some beers inside to cool, and head off down to the bar.

Labels: COMRADES, EVIL, THE BEAUTIFUL GAME

# posted by daniel @ 5:53 AM