And facking redder!!

I'm really starting to think that Ken has it in for me personally. You say I'm fucking paranoid? Explain this coincidence, then. The Northern Line shuts down for 'safety reasons' on the very day that 1) I happen to have a doctor's appointment in Kentish Town and b) my Mazda happens to be in the shop. What do you think the statistical likelihood is that all three of these cock-ups (or two cock-ups and one cock-chafe) happening on the same day is? I put it at about 1:1,760,999.021. So, no tube service means buses in place of trains along the lines, right? Yeah, we all know the drill. Trouble is, I don't know the drill, at least not on the Northern, because the last time I had to take a tube on a down line must have been back in '02, when I lived in Whitechapel, on the Hammersmith & City and District Lines. The upshot is that it was a long time ago, so this morning as I was listening to GLR--sorry, BBC London--over my usual breakfast peanut-butter-on-Weetabix-spread (don't knock it till you've tried it), and I heard the Northern Line would be down and that service would be 'supplemented' by buses I naively thought that that meant the bus would just sort of follow the tube route, you know? Stop at every station on the line. That's what a sensible bloke would assume by default, right? So I leave about an hour earlier than I'd planned to, figuring that this bus-leg of the trip is going to add, at most, an hour's worth of stubble to the trip. I get to the station ('Woodside Park?' you ask. 'Course, YFC!' I reply) and just sort of instinctively make my way for a corner of pavement near the entrance where maybe 50 people are all sort of half-standing, half milling-about, most of them all obviously on the verge of a strop attack. I ask around a bit to see if anybody can tell me when the fucking bus is supposed to show up, but nobody is any the wiser than I am in my total ignorance. So I take a stroll round the perimeter of the station a few times, smoke a fag or two, and when I'm coming round to the front for the fourth or fifth time, I see that a red bendy bus is parked out front and that a queue has just started to form at the front door of it. I step to the end of the queue and climb in with the rest of the hoi polloi, and straightaway I can tell that the bus is already half full and I have absolutely no chance of getting a seat. The driver calls out, 'Everyone move on back, please, lots of lovely room!' and I go as far back as I can, which as my beshattened luck would have it, was right at the join between the two halves of the bus--right at the accordionated bit, in other words. I mean, literally, my right foot was in the back half of the bus and my left foot was in the front. So for the whole trip I felt like I was stuck on that Great Frisco Temblor of '06 ride at Blackpool, the one where the floorboards rub against each other under your feet, that I always used to get sick on when I was a kid. So we pull out of the station turnaround, and straight away I notice something's wrong. My sense of direction is none of the keenest, but it's keen enough to tip me off that, although, assuming we were following the Northern Line we'd be heading south, the street we were on (Woodside Park Road, I presume) was carrying us eastward. I ask the bloke standing to my right--an old-school geezer in oatmeal tweeds and a Lenin cap--to smooth out this little discrepancy for me. 'Well, of course we're headed east, youngblood,' he says, as resentfully as though I'd asked him to explain, say, what he was doing wearing oatmeal tweeds and a Lenin cap in Barnet in 2005, 'That's where Arnos Grove station is.' 'Arnos Grove?' I says. 'Isn't that on the...' 'That's right. It's on the Piccadilly Line.' 'Cor, what good'll that do me? I'm trying to get to Kentish Town.' 'And I'm trying to get to Goodge Street. So I'll detube at Holborn and catch a bus there, or, failing that, walk. You'll have to do the same, get off at the nearest stop on the Piccadilly Line to Kentish Town. It's SOP, dontcherknow, during these suspensions of service, to transport passengers to the nearest stop on an adjacent line.' 'SOP?' 'Standard Operating Procedure.' 'Oh, of course.' Right about then, as I was wrapping up my convo with this geezer, I started noticing this really horrible smell, a smell exactly like the smell of an overcooked grilled marmite sandwich. And right after that, I start to notice a plume of smoke hovering in the vicinity of the accordion join right in front of me. And I look round and see that everyone else is starting to notice it too. But contrary to the way you might expect people to behave in the presence of an outbreak of fire, no one is particularly alarmed. All I see in the faces of my fellow riders is a mixture of irritation and resignation, and all I hear coming from their mouths are words like 'Fuck,' 'Shit,' 'Gorblimey,' and 'Dagnabbit' uttered in tones not deserving of an exclamation point. And on second thought, I wasn't in the least bit surprised that they weren't more panicked. I'd already heard on the news of several of these bendy buses' catching fire, and from what I'd gathered from these reports, a fire on a bendy bus was about as unusual an occurence as a riot as a ManCity-Arsenal game. So we lumber on for maybe another quarter of a mile, then pull over at this special bus stop, with an old brick shelter and a mini turnaround of its own, and everybody files out. The bus is smoking out its sides, but, again, nobody seems to feel they're in harm's way, that there's any danger that it'll blow up or anything like that. I turn to my mate the geezer and ask him what happens next. 'What happens next, youngling, is that we wait here for another bus to carry us to Arnos Grove station.' Great. So this here scenario was pretty much a replay of the one at Woodside, except that this time I went through twice as many fags and I had nothing to stroll around unless I felt like braving the traffic to get to the Wimpy's across the street (which I didn't). Eventually the second bus showed up, and fortunately it got us all the way to Arnos Grove without catching fire, and fortunately I got to the platform just in time to jump on a southbound train that was just pulling up. In the meantime I'd lost track of Squire Tweedledum, so I had to figure out on my own exactly how far down I should ride this train. As near as I could tell from screwing up my eyes at a tube map on the wall opposite me, Caledonian Road was my best bet. On the way, of course, we passed through the Arsenal stop; and naturally being a high priest of the church of all haters of the football club bearing the A-name, I crossed myself upside-down there. On resurfacing at CR, I tried to get my bearings vis-a-vis Cuntish Town and my doctor's office. But before I'd so much as taken stock of the name of the cross-street, I felt a faint and by no means unpleasant vibration on my co-jones. It was my mobile. 'Mr McGyver,' the politely stroppy female voice on the other end addressed me, 'Your appointment with Dr Singh was for 2:00 and it is now 3:30. I regret to inform you on his behalf that, in view of your flagrant unpunctuality, he will have to reschedule.' I take a deep breath, count to one, and remind myself that, whilst it's not my fault I'm late, it's not their fault either. Then I say, 'OK. When's the nearest available time?' 'Let's see...March the 25th, 9:15 am?' 'March the fucking 25th? Get Dr Singh himself on the blower, prontissimo.' 'At this moment, Dr Singh is very busy...' 'I don't care if at this moment he's performing a colonoscopy on the Queen herself. I want to talk to him.' 'Very well.' So, Dr Singh comes on and I say to him, 'What's all this about not being able to see me before March the 25th? Christ, I could be dead by then, for all you know.' 'Could be dead, you say?' he says to me, and already I don't quite like his tone. 'Could be dead by then, you say, of an....mmm [I guess he's riffling through, or pretending to riffle through, my chart here]....scrotal rash? I doubt that very much, sir.' And he starts outright giggling, like a little girl. And so I start to scream into the blower, 'Look here, Dr Singh, I lay out muchas isabelas for health care through my taxes, and I think the least that I'm entitled to expect from you lot is...' Here he breaks in and says, 'I'm sorry, Mr McGyver, but I must go. Duty calls. I'm at this moment performing a colonoscopic examination on a person of some eminence.' Then the phone went dead, and I walked over to the first pub I set my eyes on--some shite joint called the Flounder and Firkin, where I got stroppily tanked on a dozen pints of Kronenbourg (my fallback beer [they were out of Stella, and there could of course have been no question of my drinking this pub's speciality, that sickbed piss known as real ale]). I got out of there just barely in time to catch the last outbound Piccadilly train, and to Arnos Grove no less barely in time to catch the last bus to Woodside Park. How long did the trip take? Well, I'm afraid I didn't check the time at any point along the way. I do know, though, that I was sober as an imam by the time I got home. Anyway, the moral of this story is: Fuck Ken and Fuck the National Health Service. Fuck them both through the same Texas-porn-shop-appointed glory hole.