So, anyway. I went out last night with a bunch of students for my a friend of my girlfriends’ birthday. Living some distance from the centre of Manchester as I do, this necessitated battling with the vagaries of GMPTE‘s wondrous bus network. It’s midnight, I’m in a jazz club just off Oldham St, and I figure it’s probably time I made my way home, or I’m not going to get to work in the morning. I get to the bus stand at Piccadilly, and discover that there’s a bus at twenty past. Fair enough, that’s not a long wait. So, I wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Does the bus turn up? Does it hell. Anyway, there’s another one due at twentyfive to one, which should, by now, be only minutes away. So I wait a bit longer.

And a bit longer still.

You can see where this is going, can’t you?

I was there for about 45 minutes, during which time there should have been three buses. Not a single one of them turned up. I got a taxi in the end.

On a related note, if you ever want to get into town from Chorlton at about 6pm on a weeknight, I’d just forget it, frankly – it seems that at about that time, every single Stagecoach bus in Manchester goes off duty, and they don’t get the next shift out until about, ooh, half seven. I’ve stood there for over an hour before, watching an endless stream of buses all with “Sorry, not in service” displayed on the front drive past the crowds of increasingly despairing punters at the stop.

Of course, the irony is that elsewhere in Manchester, you can’t move for bloody buses – often literally, if you’re in a car, attempting to share that particular piece of the road to hell known as Wilmslow Road. All of which brings us neatly back round to students again, and on that satisfyingly circular note, I shall sign off and attempt to tell my story of true crime and the Halifax in an interesting way.

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