Whatever else you do, don’t miss the bus!

Americans grumble to me that the price of cabs in London is outrageous, and they are right. I tell them to take a double-decker red bus, but they look doubtful. Too complicated? Certainly, when I am in New York, I hesitate before I take one of those convenient buses that go up and down Fifth Avenue because the drivers are so impatient and sarcastic, and when I fiddle for dimes and nickels to pay them, call out, ‘Oi, oi! Hoy Foynance! Hoy Foynance!’ Reading Thackeray’s Collected Letters the other day, I see he had the same experience with a Manhattan streetcar (horse-drawn of course) in the 1850s.

I now take a lot of double-deckers, partly because I have a free pass, partly because the one good thing little Mayor Livingstone has done is greatly to increase their frequency, so there is now no waiting at stops. But he should not have abolished the old Routemasters, the best double-deckers ever made.