I’ve spent a lot of my life on buses – quite right, too, seeing that omnibus means everything – it’s a universe, a world, all human life is there. I don’t drive, never have, and you can read on a bus, snooze on a bus, though not with any comfort, and, of course, you can miss your stop, and I have.

But much of the time I look, I listen (alright, eavesdrop). I observe. Because you see all kinds and conditions of people on a bus. I skate lightly over the annoying individuals who WILL sit next to you on a double seat when the bus is three fourths empty; I say even less about why these invaders are nearly always of … politely speaking… ample girth. Strange and unnerving encounters happen on a bus.

I still worry about the two young men, on separate occasions, who became offended because I was carrying a briefcase, and because I was reading a book. Why did they find this threatening, why become so enraged? Their abuse, while vehement, was disappointingly unimaginative.

Then there was the man in the adjacent double seats who, all the way from Wakefield to Leeds on the 117, carried on a heated quarrel in Polish with the man opposite – who wasn’t really there, but pursued his side of the argument enough to keep his antagonist in a state of fury that led him to seize the other by his imaginary lapels and give the air a Glasgow kiss. I’ve rarely been so pleased to see Leeds Bus Station.

Then – and I don’t need to tell you, you know – there are the ones who, no sooner seated, reach for their phones in, I think, an existential funk at the idea of having no-one to listen to them. They have …. (and are you one?) … no volume switch, leaving the innocent traveller awash with confidences they would much rather not know.