The 140 at 07:12
Same bus, same seat, same eleven people. Notes from a year of the same commute, and why I stopped wearing headphones on it.
The 140 leaves the stop outside the station at 07:12, unless it leaves at 07:14, which it does about once a week for reasons nobody has ever explained. I have caught it most weekdays for a year. I know this because I stopped wearing headphones on it in January and started writing things down instead.
There are eleven of us. Not officially, obviously. Nobody has said hello. But there are eleven people who are always on the 07:12, and you start to notice the shape of a group even when it has never agreed to be one.
A routine is just a place you visit so often you stop seeing it.
The woman with the green flask sits upstairs at the front on the left, never the right. The man in the hi-vis gets off at the hospital and says cheers drive every single time, even though you are not supposed to talk to the driver and the driver never answers. Two schoolboys argue about football in a mixture of English and Gujarati that is funnier than either language on its own. One of them is always wrong about Arsenal.
What changes
Nothing, mostly. That is the point of the 140. But inside the nothing there is a lot of small weather. The light comes in low from the east from about October and lands on the back of the seats like a stripe of paint. In March the windows fog up from the inside and somebody always draws a face. In June the bus is too warm by quarter past seven and everyone pretends not to mind.
I started counting things. How many people look at the sky when we cross the bridge (usually two). How many shops have their shutters up as we pass the parade (four, then five once the bakery changed hands). How often the driver waits for someone running (more often than you would think, less often than you would hope).
Why bother
Because otherwise the year goes. You blink and it is November again and you cannot remember a single specific Tuesday. Writing down the 140 gave each morning a small handle to pick it up by.
I am not sure what I will do with these notes. Possibly nothing. Possibly they are the work.
Tomorrow, 07:12. Or 07:14.