The Bus

Many years ago I found a job in the manufacturing department of a company. My job was in turns both very boring and very stressful, but the worst part was the commuting. I spent a total of six hours travelling by bus every day. At first I looked out of the window to see whether there were any interesting landmarks but soon got tired of the scenery.

Soon I was so tired of commuting that it made me sick. I started reading the newspapers but found that they mostly contained the feats of one great man or another. It seemed some people were doing really well in this world, unfortunately I was not one of them. In despair I wondered what I could do, then it struck me - I would read novels.

But when I visited book shops I found novels prohibitively expensive. I visited second hand book shops and found that some of the better books were unreadable because they crumbled in my hand page by page as I read them. There were many books but to find a good book in that untidy mess you had to be very lucky. Among the gems I found were – 1984 by George Orwell, Collection of short stories by W. Somerset Maugham, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, The Great Gatsby by Scott F Fitzgerald and Brighton Rock by Graham Greene.

While reading these strange stories I also became interested in reading about the authors themselves and found that their life stories were even stranger than the fiction they wrote. So many of them had mood disorders that I wondered whether this in fact helped them write better. Sadly most of them died young and some of their lives like Virginia Woolf’s for example ended in tragedy. For a while I toiled with the idea of writing a book called “The Strange and tragic lives of Great Writers” but found it too depressing to write. It is a thankless job to write ill about the dead, especially those who have given many months of reading enjoyment. Instead I decided to try and write a novel

Apart from reading I also had another strange idea. I am an amateur artist and I wondered whether I could sketch in the bus looking at the scenery outside. Unfortunately the bus moved too fast for me to do this and there weren’t many interesting landmarks I could sketch. Then it struck me - why not inconspicuously sketch interesting elements from different parts of the journey in my small blank note book and put it all together in one composition back home.

So I sketched a tree from one part of my journey, and a vegetable seller in another, and a building from another area and put them all in one picture. This presented problems of scale, perspective and logic but when it comes off right it looks spectacular. Many people asked me where in the country there were such unusual scenery and my answer was always “everywhere”.

Written by: RJX