Pop goes the school boy
 The small boy exploded eight stops away from home.  A torrent of prepubescent boy innards spewed over the bus in a spectacular shower of gold and copper crimson burnished orange and the inexplicable bits of carrot.  He was a multicoloured tee-shirt of sick.  The other commuters looked away with Britishly polite indifference.  The sqeamish scrambled for the doors.

And so I walk home, eight stops away, with a hole in my foot.  When I can walk no longer, I limp, and when limping fails, I trudge.  Two buses, three, four, go past.  But when you have trudged a certain distance, the obligation is upon you to trudge the rest.  For you have joined the ranks of Great Trudgers.  Those who have trudged the slow weary depressing walk of a man who has nothing left in his life except the impulse to soldier on, or something similar.  Tiny hobbits trudged towards the promise of manly ring fun.  Chaucer trudged brilliantly naked in a wonky hollywood adaptation.  My father trudged many drunken trudges, once all the way down a rabbit hole and then to Casualty.  For that is what they do, these heroes of the bygone days before night buses and oysters: they trudge.  Through rain, sleet, lager, dogs and southall.  Trudgers don't get on a bus.  They spit on buses.

Bus maps, incidentally, are a great thing.  The reduce the world to a series of thick coloured lines, like simple children have drawn them with crayons.  Like the Tube.  They take away all the bends.  It is the bendiness that gets people lost.  You can't get lost in a straight line.

It is a nice way to sightsee, trudging.  An oft overlooked aspected of the classic trudge.  Hounslow has a spiritualist church, apparently.  It is yellow, with Polite Notices in the window large enough for the gaggle of mad old women to read when they congregate on a sunday to nag their dead husbands.  People put up strange notices.  The local park asks that one does not play ball games on the grass (which is fenced off with spiky metal railings just in case) with a quick addendum not to fuck up the swings.  Isleworth fire station invites one and all to pop in for some fire safety advice, but just how cheery would they be if i descended on my way home demanding tea and smoke alarm explanations?

And that, essentially and a tad more generally, is why small children shouldn't be allowed on buses.  It is not the shouting, the skateboards, the grease-oozing pores or the music.  Like dogs, the danger lies in their tendency to rupture.