The joy of travel

Or not.

Yesterday and today I have used public transport for the first time in around a decade.

I don't know about you, but I get jittery if more than about half a dozen people are anywhere near me.

The bus held around 50.

Knees crunched in to the hard plastic back of the seat in front, back pierced by the narrowness of my own.

I read in today's Independent that the 'safe' gazing range for passengers on the tube was from foot to chest. This strikes me as patently absurd. Are we meant to spend our public journeys staring at each other's crotches?

If we close our eyes, we may miss our stop, our get slapped. If we look out the window we may catch someone else's attempt to avoid eye contact by their reflection.

Thankfully it's back to the car from now on...

Coach Trip!

What a joy of a programme this is. Avoid the hell of it all and park you brains at the door, 'Coach Trip' has returned to C4 for a 50 date tour through Europe.

The intelligentsia certainly make up some of the passengers.

'World war 2, who was that against?'

'The Germans'

'Hitler?'

'Hitler'

'So who was World war 1?'

'The Germans'

'So who fronted that, Hitler's dad?'

You have to feel for Brendan Sheerin, the Coach Trip leader. He is an absolute legend and if saints existed, he would have all their patience.

Hilarious to boot.

As Jean Paul Sartre wisely wrote,

'Hell is other people'

Deal or no deal

An appalling government driven billboard ad has appeared in our town with the slogan 'Don't be a dealer'.

It portrays a hoodie wearing young person of indeterminate age, but looking around late teens or earlier twenties, shiftily passing over a supposedly illegal substance to some teens marginally younger than he.

The fact that tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds of tax-payers money has been skimmed off to front this ridiculous and misguided campaign is nauseating to me.

Here's just a taste why...

The 'illegal' substance in question is wait for it, heroin? Nope, cocaine, er, no have another go. Grass then surely? Wrong again, it that most evil and gateway drug ALCOPOPS. Orange flavoured Bacardi Breezer by the looks of it.

What it should have portrayed in my humble opinion, is the seedy, middle-aged men who hang around primary and secondary schools, making a living selling drugs to kids for chrissakes...to show a young person in a hoodie passing over a 4% alcoholic fruit drink, not only makes a laughing stock of more serious matters, but demonises all young people as being shifty and untrustworthy oh and evil beyond comprehension to boot.

What idiot in a suit thought this one up?