AAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaa *deep breath* aaaaaagh!

Yep.

I've had another of *those* days.

You might think that doing the second bus out of the depot, at 04:20, would be a doddle. Well, you'd be dead wrong today. First off, the bus was chronically slow. It had absolutely no get up and go when I had more than a few passengers on board. Second, everyone, on seeing two drops of rain, decided that poor little Johnny should be driven to school in a Chelsea Tractor. At the same precise moment.

Result?

Mega-slow traffic, averaging one mile per hour.

Then we get a traffic light stuck on red. A clue to this was the massive line of traffic waiting there, but only the professionals seemed to cotton on to this - everyone else sat there like wet lumps. Clogging the road. Making us all late.

So... there I am, second round, waiting to get into the eastern end bus stand (at the top of the hill), and I've just served the penultimate stop, close to the brown of the hill; I've closed the doors, checked my mirrors, signalled, and lo and behold, someone decides that he's going to overtake me. Nothing new there. No-one seems to pay the blindest bit of attention to the highway Code, so why should this lame-assed git?

What he does then is more than a little gob smackingly bone headed. He closes to two inches, and waits there for me to pull out and spread his car all over the road. See the photo. It's pointing down at the gap between the side of my bus cab and his nearside. Yup: That's roughly two inches, alright. So I took that photo, and sat there, armed crossed, waiting for him to move away, sans-impact. He must have seen me take the photo, as with a two-fingered salute, he sped off, missing my corner post by less than half an inch.

What a muppit.

It got a little better, though...

There was one bright spot. On the way back, the local Old Bill Safer Neighbourhoods Team of PCSOs for where the lights were stuck decided to sort out the mess, and directed traffic while the traffic lights engineer, who on current record couldn't keep those lights working right if you gave him a winning lottery ticket, was taking a lump hammer to the traffic lights control circuitry box, presumably in the vain hope of fixing the fault that causes these lights to go base over apex all the darn time.

Good bleeping luck on that one, mate.

I was still late into my lunch break, and no late meal relief for me, nope, 20 minutes off me lunch break, make do with just over half an hour (mutter grumble curse etc), so it's scoff scoff chomp burp, and out again.

This is gonna really annoy a whole raft of people, but I'm rapidly being convinced that the ONLY way to make the roads safer and less congested, is to bar everyone from the roads who does NOT possess a valid PCV/LGV licence. By this, I mean that no-one who has not taken the very stringent and elongated course and tests that we, the professional drivers on the roads, have to take, should be allowed anywhere near an ignition key.

OK, the road lobby would have a fit, Jeremy Clarkson would probably scream like a raped panther, the Oil Lobby'd have a conniption, the exchequer would almost have a heart attack, and the car makers'd excrete masonry, but hey, it'd cut congestion, pollution, and the green party'd want my babies

Well... we can all dream, can't we - about Clarkson screaming, I mean