remote cards

I’m trying to park, it’s a Sunday, so parking is free. But its getting harder all the time to find a space. I find one in Hope St, in front of that bus stop where S parks all the time. The space is big enough, but traffic is heavy, so I make a mess of getting into it. Ideally I would come out and try again, but with the buses, and traffic, its easier to make stop starts back and forth till I’m in. A bus stops killing my visibility. A bus stops and people flood off, wandering around me, behind me. So I have to wait till they clear, till I can be confident I won’t hit anyone. I’m touching curb, and I’m not happy about it. Nothing I can do about it till its clear. The two shuffling old women getting off the bus stop at my car and wave at me, they point at the curb, they think they are being helpful. I throw my hands in my air, in a yeah, tell me about it fashion, and mouth I KNOW! They smile and wander off, and I can get the space to park properly. That done I wander off. I go to see a film, I buy some books, I have dinner, I go see a film. I come back to the car, hours later. Its dark now, late, the street is clear. Just my car, and the bus stop, and a couple. He is standing in the road, about a car length behind my car. She is standing behind the glass of the shelter, and you can hear her a mile off. She is shouting, a familiar scene, one I’ve seen too often - I want you out of my life! I’m sick of you! I want you to go away! I don’t mean for now! I don’t mean till morning! I mean forever! I want you to fuck off! People stop at the junction and look down. I get in my car. I lock my doors. I drive away.

Labels: bus, bus stop, couple, fighting, glasgow, old women, sunday

A woman sits in the bus shelter. Long dark hair. A haggard face. She wears a white top, something blue beneath that. White jeans. She sucks on a cigarette, watches for the bus. He rakes through a bag, back to the street, standing by her side. She has a big blotch of blood at her nose, covering her top lip, but she seems entirely too casual for that.

Labels: blood, bus, glasgow, stop, waiting, woman

There is a great loop of a road, running parallel to the railway bridge, with a side street cutting off from there to another part of the loop, a strange off shoot caused by the one way system. This side stretch is unassuming, there is a shop for house hold stuff, fire places that kind of thing. Next to that a motor bike shop. Then on the corner, leading to the major roads again, is a church. On the other side of the road, there is a red brick building, an old factory. For years it stood empty, going to waste, the ground beside it a parking lot turned to wild bushes and weeds, really over grown. In the last year they finally did something with it. They cleared out the car park, put in a new gate system for entry. They scrubbed they building up and its now some esoteric arm of local government or something that works from there. Beside that there used to be a tool hire company, but ironically as they renovated the old factory the tool hire shut up this branch, moved it somewhere else. In the summer, mornings like this, at the back of 7am, when its nice and sunny, you find odd crowds forming. Random cars and taxis pulling out of the building work traffic, and people climb out with suitcases. They used to do in front of the old factory, gather there in the summer, rain or shine, huddled. But now they’ve moved down, so they don’t block the building, built a new bus shelter for them. And at the right time, the coaches pull up, long distance luxury things, that’ll take these people on their summer holidays. A lot of the people there seem to be older, grey, though not always. It seems such an old fashioned idea, going on holiday by coach. In these days of “cheap flights” that make the whole world so accessible. But there are still these people who get on a bus, and travel for 100s of miles. When I was a kid, when of the first holidays we did as a family was the South of France. Catching a coach like this and driving all the way down to somewhere like Dover, getting in a hovercraft, going across the Channel, getting another bus and driving all the way through France. I remember the stops on the way down during the scorching daylight, the endless white stones of graveyards. On the way back home, hitting Paris at some absurd time in the morning, and bleary eyed we all climbed from the bus, stepping over my brother’s body, sprawled and asleep in the aisle, so that we could touch the Eiffel tower at something like 3am before getting back on board. People still do that.

Labels: bus, coach, holiday, memories, paisley