Peshwari Naan

Ross Levere writes on 3rd February 2009...

I woke up early, hitched a lift to the station and purchased a ticket to London Victoria where I was to board a coach to Cardiff and then basically get drunk. Simple, easy, I wish. Arriving at Victoria I follow the signs to the coach area and find the National Express no.509 that I need. I stand there in the cold waiting and watching the driver consume a packed lunch of vile looking sandwichs, he saw me shivering and read his paper. With the coach due to leave at 12.30 I was confused as to why I was still not aboard by 12.28 and decided to ask what the plan was. The answer was not what I wanted to hear!!!! I'm told that the departure area is over the road and that I've been waiting in the arrivals park, now had I taken stupid pills or was I misled by the fact that the SIGNS at the station told me this was where I needed to be. Running over the road I find my coach as the bastard starts up and leaves without me. Even my frantic attempt to flag him down and show him my ticket through the large glass door was met with a shake of the head and tough luck expression. Returning to the ticket office I'm then informed that I cannot simply board the next coach, the ticket applies to one coach only. I'm going to have to pay for a new ticket. £36 lighter in the bank account I wait an hour for the next coach and finally get on my way to Wales, a little late but on route. Relaxing a little I listen to the new Ricky Gervais audiobook I downloaded that morning and watch as london passes me by.
After 3 1/2 hours my legs ache but I'm able to stretch them for a few minutes as we arrive in Cardiff and I call Benedict so that he can come pick me up. Wrong again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! After 15 minutes he still hasn't found me despite being at the coach station as planned, it turns out the coach had made stop somewhere else and I was miles away from him. Where was I????? I walk into the centre of a town so vile and run down it makes Barking look nice and ask a woman in a newsagent where I am. Confused she (eventually) answers my question - 'Newport'. Luckily there's a train station, not where the sign says but after 5 minutes I find it and have to pay another £3.40 to get to Cardiff.

Liam Mullone writes on 31st January 2009...

Mangabus v Nashanu Esprezamu

It’s the fight of the year! For I have arrived home safely via Megabus: my first Megabus adventure. I am now in a position to compare the relative merits of Megabus with those of National Express. To anyone with a car, or train fare, this will seem like trying to decide between two piles of parrot poo, but for the sake of anyone as poor and as mobility-retarded as me, I’ll go ahead anyway. I’m awarding shite points: the higher the score, the shitter the service:

First, COMFORT:
Filthiness of toilet: Megabus 5 National Express 3
Poo and bogey smeared on seats: Megabus 3 National Expess 2
Degree of overpopulation with maniacs Megabus 4 National Express 2

As you can see, National Express is streaming ahead with only 7 shite points to Megabus’s 12. The sheer cheapness of Megabus has meant that its services are always teeming, meaning a greater number of people wiping their kids’ bums on the seats. And at £3 a ticket, where is Megabus going to find the cash to pay a toilet cleaner? It’s not. Can Megabus catch up? Exciting isn’t it?

Second, SPEED AND ECONOMY
Expense Megabus 1 National Express 2
Pointless stops at revolting shithole towns where nobody even gets on Megabus 1 National Express 4
Pointless one-hour rest stops at service stations that are three minutes from your intended destination Megabus 1 National Express 5
Tendency to stop dead on the motorway and tell the passengers you’ve run out of petrol Megabus 0 National Express 5

Crikey, what a turn-around!Megabus is holding fast at 15, National Express is racking up the shite points at 23. If they cared, National Express management would surely be wondering whether it’s wise for EVERY bus going north to stop at Milton Fucking Keynes, and whether they need that Health and Safety law that requires them to change drivers every 40 miles, or as soon as he runs out of racist comments (whichever is sooner). Moreover, that little trip to Birmingham last year when the passengers had to offer to pay for petrol has really hit the company hard this round. It’s just a mercy that the management don’t actually give a flying fuck about people, or this scoreboard could really sting. Can National Express turn it round in the last chukka? I, for one, simply cannot WAIT to find out!!

Third, DRIVER’S ATTITUDE
Need to tell people about the seatbelt law 40 times in a series of incomprehensible guttural snorts: Megabus 1 National Express 5
Need to talk to bus full of adults as if they are five and behaving naughtily Megabus 0 National Express 5
Need to swagger about bus imposing will on helpless passengers regarding their luggage, hot food, phones or anything else that occurs to them Megabus 0 National Express 4
Need to scrutinise ticket, shake head, say it’s not compatible with me own list, like, make people at front of queue wait til the bus is full, then make them sit near the toilet Megabus 0 National Express 3

FINAL SHITE POINT SCORES: Megabus 16 National Express 40

Fuck me with an over-sixties Funfare, Megabus has walked home. A lifetime of comments such as “A BOTTLE of POP has just flown past my head. This bus is NOT a skip! I will stop it by the roadside and you can all clean it for me if THAT’S going to be your attitude!” have made National Express the company to avoid for any poor traveller with even a microgram of self-respect remaining. The extraordinary behaviour of Megabus drivers - just getting on, closing the door and driving the fucking bus - has pretty much handed them this competition in a hubcap. An extra mention must surely be made for them not demanding that anything larger than a handbag must go in the luggage hold, where it can be stolen by a junkie in Doncaster.
On the whole, I’ll take the crowds and toilet whiff just for the pleasure of being allowed to pretend, for the first hundred miles anyway, that it’s okay to be on a coach in one’s late thirties. That it’s not demeaning and horrible. And that my faith in humankind won’t be whittled down to a bleeding quick before I face 200 strange faces in the glare of an unforgiving spotlight.

NELL FRIZZELL writes on 28th January 2009...

The Megadeath, The Nazi-onal Express, Cagecoach – they’re all hell on wheels.

As if it wasn’t punishment enough to have to spend five-and-a-half hours sitting in a chair designed for a dwarf amputee, with the person in front leaning so far back they might as well be using my cunt for a cushion, while the person next to me munches through a sandwich that smells like putrefying maggots mixed with cheese and onion crisps, I had the misfortune this weekend of being driven by a total psychopath.

Peter, my Neanderthal National Express driver, was covered in home-drawn tattoos (I didn’t get close enough to read them but I imagine they said stuff like “Live by the road, die by the road”), walked with the kind of limp usually reserved for shell shock victims, drove like a blind man and had a voice like a drain full of tar. When he breathed, it was like a hydraulic engine full of soup.

He steered like someone had just poured molten Marmite on his lap. Which was ironic, really, because as soon as the other driver had taken over, Peter promptly spilt his garage-bought coffee all over his legs and spent the rest of the journey loudly and obscenely rubbing his crotch and arse with a tissue right at my eye level, wheezing on about how “everything is sticking to me legs now”.

When the new driver asked Peter why he hadn’t turned his lights on (so we had, in effect, been driving like an invisible 5 tonne stealth juggernaut since Golders Green) he mumbled that he’d spent ages scrabbling around but just couldn’t find the switch. Oh great.

By this point I, and several other passengers, were muttering low, whimpered prayers to the effect that God was indeed great for sparing us a bloody and painful death in the middle lane of the M1.

Now, if this was an isolated event it would be one thing. But the coaches of Britain are, almost universally, like Dante’s lost circle of hell. The toilets never close, so the smell of stagnant piss permeates everywhere, anyone over five foot tall will end up welding their joints together from sitting like Quasimodo, and they are miserably, grindingly slow and you usually get dribbled on by the person sleeping next to you.

I’m not saying murder is right or anything - I’ve never yet had the urge to saw off someone’s head and eat it - but I can sort of see why people are driven to acts of wild and animalistic violence during these journeys (if you never want to sleep happily again, then read this).

And as Britain’s economy sinks and the recession hits Britain, you can be sure many of us will soon be Megabus customers. I’m going to go and write my will.

NELL FRIZZELL