Monday, May 08, 2006

Transport of Delight

Friday Night Mary and I went to the The Naked Turtle in East Sheen. A fine restaurant with waitresses who double as Jazz singers and, in between taking your order and delivering food and wine, also deliver a song or two to the accompaniment of a live pianist.

Rather than take a taxi we caught the bus, why pay a tenner when you can get there for 1.50? There is, in my opinion, only one place to sit on a double decker bus: upstairs in the front, left-hand seat. From this Olympian vantage point one can gaze down on the street life and observe the first floor buildings. Much of South London was thrown up by our be-whiskered Victorian forebears in a frenzy of late 1800's building boom and there is much fine architecture to be admired.

But the bus is the thing - I still get great, child-like enjoyment from my top-deck eyrie much to Mary's amusement. She was less entertained by my rendition of the final lines from Flanders and Swann's Transport of Delight which features the line (oh so true) "We like to drive in convoys - we're most gregarious"

Cue: Music, Maestro!

"If tickets cost a pound a piece
Why should you make a fuss?
It's worth it just to ride inside
That 30-foot-long by 10-foot-wide
Inside that monarch of the road,
Observer of the Highway Code,
That big six-wheeler scarlet-painted London transport diesel-engined 97-horsepower, 97-horsepower omnibus.

Hold very tight please! Ting-ting!"

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