(If the video screen isn’t the right shape, just click on the post title to see a version with a full-size screen.)
I went over to west West London (White City tube) to record the sound for this, and I’m told it had an airing as part of a bluetooth radio venture over the summer. The recording is an extract from the story ’Dead Angels’, published in Down the Angel and up Holloway. Someone at the BBC provided the video images, which are pretty authentically Angel-like. It was fun. I wouldn’t mind doing more of this some time.
So your laptop is gone. Panic, nastiness etc. What do you do?
You ask around, and someone tells you about the place where the No 4 bus goes to sleep at night. It’s a ten-minute walk away, or a four minute jog in this case. You follow the directions you’ve been given. The further you get from the high street the less sure you are that this secret building actually exists, but finally you round a corner and it looms ahead of you like an overgrown brick shed.
They pack a lot of buses in here, and how do you know for sure that your No 4 bus is one of them? You don’t. It could be driving down some other road entirely…It’s a tense search, up and down a lot of stairs in 17 identical No 4s in search of THE one – but in the end, you find the right bus. How do you know? The bag is still there, exactly where you left it.
If you don’t like happy endings, tough. When your laptop goes AWOL, just like when your hard drive gets fried, a happy ending is exactly what you need.
[OK, this is not the story the BBC recorded - but it is a true No 4 bus story.] It’s about the time I left my laptop on the bus.
It’s your worst public transport nightmare, isn’t it? And you can’t imagine how anyone would… Well, here’s how: the No 4 rambles around north London like a free sightseeing tour, and by the time you reach the last stop you’re nearly asleep. Downstairs the driver helpfully flashes the lights a few times to signal to passengers that the last stop is coming up. He leaves the lights off in the end for some reason, so you stumble downstairs in the shadows, neglecting to notice the bag with your bits and bytes in it. Of course you’re some way down the road when it occurs to you how nice and light you feel, walking along without… without your bag!
