This is a bit of a “you had to be there” thing but...here it is anyway. Its my blog.
This evening a bus in Artarman, on the North Shore of Sydney, inexplicably burst into flames at the rear on the Gore Hill Freeway. It was a very small event constituting about 3 lines in the news. But it suddenly and vividly put me in mind of something that happened to me 15 years ago. I’m still chuckling thinking of it now, as if I was there.It vividly put me in mind of the White Horse Pub half way up Brixton Hill in London. It’s a great pub, some doors up from The Fridge Nightclub and across the road from the church there. It was an evening after work and we were outside the pub near the road – drinking away our spare time as you do in London in your twenties.Anyway, it wasn’t one of those ordinary evenings. There was a not inconsiderable riot going on just down the hill in the centre of Brixton, near Electric Avenue and the Tube. It wasn’t one of those Brixton riots you understand. Not one of the cataclysmic riots of the 1980s that seemed to stop the nation and raised the spectre of racial warfare and a breakdown in law and order. No this was quite Mickey Mouse by comparison. This was to that what mini-me is to Dr Evil. No this was far more meagre. It was, nevertheless, a riot . It made all the usual riot type noises. Police sirens, shouting and screaming, garbled orders barked down megaphones. Occasionally you could hear (I think) glass smashing and things being thrown about, but I could be imagining that. We responded to this civil collapse the natural, responsible way you do in your twenties. We were getting drunk and laughing.Anyway, quite late in the evening and as the perception was that order was beginning to prevail, the strangest and most incongruous thing went passed. A deep red, No.2, double-decker bus – that great London icon...
