A Night Bus Narrative

It's a rare occasion, in my case anyway, that I get a sober trip home on the night bus, but last night I got one. I was headed home from a (somewhat disastrous) evening in central London, where a group of friends and I had one of those nights where you have walked all over the place just to hear last rounds called in just about every pub! And so, after the loss of a phone, we decided it was time to head home, and so I ended up on the bus with very little drink taken.

As per usual there was a host of weirdos and drunkards on the bus, and for once I was able to properly take in everything going on around me. There was a guy with his face painted (very professionally) as a tiger, some mandarin faced chavs with bruised looking eyes, and a group of friends giving their evening a thorough post mortem. After a few minutes, however, it seemed that the majority of their stories seemed to centre around one particularly colourful character called Dan. By the time we had reached the Chelsea Bridge I knew the following about this fellow Dan:

• He has 'political friends'
• Last time him and Andre met, they had each other in headlocks (Andre?)
• He has a gorgeous girlfriend, that his male friends referred to as a 'casual shag' and his female friends referred to as a slag
• He once went to Paris, lost his plane ticket back and had no money so bought a cheap bus ticket and it took him 8 hours to get home through the night
• They were suprised that he didn't try and drag them into some late night den of inequity as per usual
• He often ends up picking up random people and dragging them along for the evening

Everything they said was laced with judgement and disapproval. Now I don't know this hedonist named Dan, but I want to meet him. I just couldn't help but think that this brutal bludgeoning of his character might just be because he is so much more interesting than all of them (they seemed dull, their only interesting conversation concerning this Dan)

As we sailed over Chelsea bridge, the Thames tempting in its evening finery, I though about the friends that I had spent the evening with. Luckily they are all well more interesting than me, so I could be pretty much sure that this same conversation was not taking place on a night bus going in the other direction.