I live in south Devon. Last week I went up to north Devon, to visit a friend who was renting a cottage on the coast for a week. Devon is a big county. I decided to go by train to Barnstaple and then by bus. At Exeter the train caught fire, however, and we were herded off and packed into an old charabanc that could barely get up the steep Exmoor hills.
At Barnstaple, finally, I waited at stand J of the austere bus station. Punctually, a minibus drew up and six of us climbed on: a blond lad with airline tags on his backpack; a man-mountain in a baggy suit carrying a guitar case; a middle-class woman who greeted the driver with genial condescension; a pair of teenage lovers, she showing as much as possible of an exciting pair of thighs; and me. The driver had long hair and looked like an old biker. There was something irredeemably unofficial about him, as though he’d stolen the bus for a laugh after a drinking session. ‘Oh look, a millionaire!’ he exclaimed as I riffled through my wad looking for something smaller than a 20.
The hour-long journey cost three quid. I sat at the back and read a discarded North Devon Gazette. The only reported crime that week was an all-girl brawl on Minehead seafront. One sustained bruising to her head. Soon we were barrelling across a high hogsback road with rich, rolling farmland on either side. A gale blew violently through the bus, buffeting our hair this way and that, and I totally lost control of the North Devon Gazette. The driver threw the bus around in a swashbuckling, exhilarating manner while shouting a conversation against the wind and the engine roar with the middle-class woman.
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