I could have had more girlfriends if I hadn't been over-reliant on buses

I've been catching buses a lot lately.  And it's been working out okay.  Because my house is at one end of the 10 minute bus ride, and Waterstone's in Middlesbrough is at the other end. 

The only bit that hasn't been working out is that some of the buses have these shiny new seats, and it's impossible to stay on them when the bus goes round corners.  I mean, why make a seat out of shiny stuff? It makes no sense.  There's no friction.

When buses don't work out, is when they don't join up places you want to go to.  This hampered me a lot during the ages of 15 and 17 when I wanted to go out with girls.

It would have all been different if I'd gone to the local comprehensive, because girls would then have been walking distance away, but most of the ones I met were through school in Leeds, and they all lived miles away.

Looking back though, and considering the miniscule percentage of girls I liked that would actually go out with me, it seems incredible to me now that I was put off by the lack of a direct bus service, but I was.

It was only when I started riding my bike long distances in the last few years, that I realised how easy it could have been for me to get to girls' houses.  Especially when I discovered with the aid of Google maps, that most of the ones I'd been put off going to see, lived within a 12 mile radius of my house.  That's an hour on a bike!

It all started to come home to me how lazy I'd been last year when I rode home from my mum's in Leeds, via York (an 86 mile trip).  Only 4 miles into this ride I found myself in Sherburn in Elmet, where Rachel Waterfield had lived 27 years before.  4 miles!  I could have walked that, but in 1983 after meeting Rachel at a party, I managed to let things fizzle out badly during my follow-up phone call to her because of the lack of a direct bus service.  Why didn't I just get on a bike, I could have been there in 20 minutes?

And Joanne McAndrew.  She lived in Alwoodley which was 10 miles away from Garforth on the Leeds Ring Road, and there was a bus that went from about a mile away from my house to hers, but I couldn't be bothered to walk the mile.  In her case I did once ride it, on the 5 speed racing bike that I had then and didn't like, but it was when I worked at Rawcliffes and having no fashion sense I had bought some terrible sweat gathering jogging outfit which I cycled there in.  The fact that I was wearing that was probably reason enough for the relationship not to get off the ground, but again I felt the difficulty of the transport options was a factor.  The ring road is quite a busy road, and there's a lot of roundabouts, and I just totally failed to persevere either with the cycling, or the walk to the bus stop, even though she was funny and attractive.

And Susannah Baynard.  Admittedly I didn't help my case with her, by not dancing very well at the disco with the Germans in 1983, but she lived in Linton which I'm not even sure was on a bus route, and it all seemed so impossible at 15.  But I've just Googled it.  It was 12 miles, in an almost straight line from where I lived aged 15.  I could have been there in an hour!

Bloody hell, people have relationships these days whilst living on opposite sides of the Atlantic.  What was I thinking?

Even my most successful teenage relationship, with Joanne Phillips, could have benefitted from a winning combination of bike riding and map reading.  I say successful.  It worked out, in the sense that we did go out for a while, and I thought she was the one, but then she decided hanging around with me was interfering with her A Level studies, so she dumped my ass faster than you can say Cheese Single.

It was one of those dumpings that was mitigated by the old chestnut of 'Oh, we'll still be friends', but those words were accompanied by body language which roughly translated meant 'I hope you get shot into space, and don't come back'.  I didn't get shot into space, but I did go to Germany for a while.  She lived in Boston Spa, which again was an hour and three quarters away on two buses, but on another ride home from my mum's (this year) I rode from Garforth to Boston Spa in less than an hour.   It's only 11 miles away.  Once again, I thought, I could have saved ages timewise, if only I'd got a bike.

And the thing about all these girls is, I went or nearly went out with all of them in the summer, when it doesn't go dark until about 11 o'clock at night, and it would have actually been quite pleasant riding a bike in the evenings or on a weekend then.

Unfortunately I just didn't think in bicycles when I was aged 15 to 17.  I was a teenager.  I thought about buses, and I thought about getting lifts.  And to be honest I didn't think about getting lifts much.  I had a step dad who was either drunk or his car had fallen to pieces or the engine blown up, or he was in the police station getting done for drunk driving, so I mostly thought about buses.

You would think logically that travelling by bike is quite slow, but it has the advantage that you can go directly from A to B, and you don't have to stop for old people and women with buggies.  And you don't have to do laps of every village on the bus route.  Buses go all over the bloody place, and if you work out your average speed on some bus journeys it works out at about 5 miles an hour, which is barely above walking speed. 

Hooray for bikes, and hooray for girls!  Especially ones that are easy to get to.

Then we came to the end, but not quite.

I'm getting fired from my job at Waterstone's in 3 weeks.  It's not the first time this has happened.

Before I got fired by Waterstone's the first time, I used to review books for their website.

And I once won £100 in book vouchers for writing a review for head office about reading Murakami in Mevagissey, which is harder to say than it is to type.

They may have deleted me, and turned the branch where I worked into a Poundland, but my reviews are still there, which is somehow comforting.

My reviews 

It's strange reading things I wrote a few years ago, because not only do I not remember writing some of the reviews, I don't remember reading some of the books. 

Of course I still remember clearly Timequake, Brilliant Orange, Football against the Enemy, the Life of Pi, The Cruellest Miles, Seabiscuit, Stasiland and the Wall.  They're not just books, they're unforgettable, life-changing events.

One of the last books I read before I got fired, was called Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris.  It's a book about getting fired, and not long after I read it I got fired.  Luckily, I am able to separate fiction from fact, so I resisted the urge to go back to my old workplace dressed as a clown and blow away my colleagues.  It wouldn't have worked in my case anyway, as I'd have only ended up making a mess of some strangers in Poundland, since the last day for me, was the last day for the shop too.

Sometimes when I look back, particularly at the good ones, I think, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut 'How the hell did I do that?'

I don't read much these days, mostly because my eyes are now full of super glue, but I used to do it a lot, especially in the days when there were only 3 channels on the TV.

Life was simpler then.  I used to alternate between watching TV, playing football, playing with toys and going to the Library.  I can't remember owning any books in those days, but I was in the Library every week.  I went back in recently.  It's had a refurb and an extension and it's even got a coffee shop now.  They let me use the internet there when my mum was ill.  I tried to talk to the woman on the counter about the olden days, when all of this were fields blah, blah, blah, but she didn't seem as interested in my monologue as I was.....