Given that I’ve recently spent a fair amount of time sticking pro-Boris leaflets through my neighbours’ letterboxes, I thought it might be a good idea to go and listen to the man speak. If nothing else, I was pretty sure I’d get a good laugh.

And so I did. This morning I rolled up to The Gymnasium, Pancras Road, to lend an ear to Boris as he launched his transport manifesto.

It’s a nice venue, where 19th-century Germans used to have fun wrestling, fencing and doing various other physical jerks. That meant there was plenty of space for all of Boris’s supporters, chums, journalists and PR people, not to mention all the folk from Hackney I spoke to or saw there. The first people I spotted were my friend Graeme and his partner Keith: local activists who were celebrating the first anniversary of their civil partnership (there’s dedication for you). I also spotted fellow Hackneyite Dave Hill, who is busy blogging the mayoral campaign from an anti-Johnson, though not necessarily pro-Livingstone perspective.

It’s not an approach that has endeared him to Boris. After the launch, the candidate selected Dave to give the last question.

“My name’s Dave Hill,” said Dave Hill, quite reasonably. “I’m a contributor to the Guardian and I write an independent blog on the mayoral campaign.”

“Oh yes,” said Boris, with the air of one who has trodden in something. “I’m familiar with your work.”

Dave asked a good question about how much it would cost to put conductors on uber-modern Routemaster buses. Would it be £8 million, or £80 million as Ken had claimed?

“What did you call him?” began Boris, disarmingly. “King Newt?”

“I called him Ken Livingstone,” said Dave.

“Oh,” said Boris, before launching into a wonderful spiel about why he needed to improve the buses for mayor Livingstone, the only one of the three candidates who will be eligible for an OAP’s Freedom Pass on May 2nd.

Anyway, I digress. As always with Boris, his transport speech was a cheerful mixture of the sensible and the hilarious. Perhaps his best laugh came when he told us with great gravity that London enjoyed the same amount of good weather as Paris.

“In London,” he said, “it rains 94 per cent of the time. Just like in Paris.”

Howls of laughter.

“I mean. In London it doesn’t rain 94 per cent of the time. It rains just six per cent of the time. Just like Paris, where it rains only six per cent of the time. Not 94 per cent of the time.”

Luckily, although he invoked the weather, he didn’t claim to control it. And he did have some serious planks to his transport strategy. The anoraks amongst you can find them here, but the ones that struck the greatest chord with me addressed things I have experienced a lot, and written about both here and on my earlier blog. Sure, I haven’t a clue what to do about the Blackwall tunnel (Boris wants to “reinstate the tidal flow” and oppose toll charge increases at the Dartford crossing), but I sure as hell agree with these ideas:

1) Spending less on press officers and more on police officers to patrol the network - increasing their presence on buses and station platforms in outer London.

I’d rather have had a couple of coppers than any number of press officers when I took this journey:

I hopped in the sliding doors of the 149. Straight ahead a mother, with child in pushchair and friend at her side. Sitting nearby, facing the side of the bus, a woman of about my age. She was wearing a baseball cap, emblazoned with English national flag, and she was wearing slip-on shoes with a puckered elastic rim, which made it look like a toothless witch was trying to swallow her foot.

Not that there was much chance of that. As I got on, baseball cap was kicking her shoes on and off and intonating in a voice that sounded like a cross between a Whoopee cushion and that bloke with a strange, pent-up voice who used to be in the Police Academy films (no doubt someone incredibly famous, but it’s been a long time…)

“Iyyyymmmnnn airline piiiilot, dontchano..?”

Then, getting up and staring at the mother.

“How dare yyyyyou call me nnnn alcoholic? I PITY you. Yyyyou shhhould just FUCK off. I dnnn’t drink. OK, I knnow what you thinking. I DO drink. I drrink maybe. Maybe. I drrink maybbe, oh, four bottles of wine A YEAR! I bet yyou are n alcollic. I bet you go home with your FUCKING baby and ddrink yoursel sstupid. You fucking MAKE ME SICK.”

At which point she sat down again.

“I DON’T FUCKING DRINK”.

2) Introducing ‘Payback London’, a scheme that will require under-18s who abuse their right to free bus travel to earn it back through community service.

Excellent idea, provided it’s not used as an excuse to crack down on kids who are guilty of being in possession of a 14-year lifespan. It needs to be used against teenagers like these ones:

Back on the 253 today, this time from Euston, up to Finsbury Park and beyond. A bunch of teenagers got on at Holloway with one of those dogs that looks like a pitbull, thinks like a pitbull, menaces like a pitbull - but isn’t. After all, no one round here would dare own a dangerous dog, would they?

They slobbed out (where else?) on the back seat of the upper deck. I was three seats in front. A Jamaican woman with her toddler sat on the seat, back one row, to my left.

So the teens give the toddler a quick speech lesson. The only phrase of which I understood was:

“Say gangsta.”

After a while they get bored of that and realise the dog has zonked out. Trying, largely unsuccessfully, to bring it round by shouting loudly in its ears, one of the more enlightened zit-heads says:

“He ain’t ‘ad mushrooms on the bus before.”

Quite.

Or, even more in need of sorting out:

Only a few months we got on it at London Bridge. A big group of teenage girls got on at Dalston and, a few stops later, dragged out a female passenger (whom they had been baiting) and started laying into her. More a brainless pack injuring one person’s dignity than definite bloodlust, but I got on the phone straightaway and rang 999. Most of the other people on the bus sat still or evaporated into the night. When I was connected, the operator said nonchalently, sounding not a little bored, “Yeah, we’ve had quite a few calls about that already.

3) Getting rid of bendy buses.

A must. Life has been dull ever since they were introduced, as I’ve said before:

I used to catch the double-decked 149 bus from Stamford Hill to Shoreditch, read the paper on the way, shore up the morning brain with a bit of Lucozade. Sure, it was never the best part of the day. It would be all quiet to begin with, slightly more rowdy as you hit Stoke Newington High Street and, in an uncomplicated and predictable way, the nutters would get on at Dalston.

I didn’t like it at the time, but I find myself looking back with sentiment. The sort of lunatics you got then were the ones that needed the full space of a two-tiered bus to give of their best. What’s the point of bringing a bottle of Lambrusco on the bus at 9am if you can’t throw it down the stairs, getting the full, exploding-TV effect on the lower deck? Why bother smoking dope if you can’t do it on the upper back seats, a sort of no-man’s land the driver would never even try to police? These are just few of the things I’ve lost since the new bendy buses took over the 149 bus route. These things are so dull they go up in flames quite spontaneously. I mean, what’s the point of being a Dalston arsonist if your bus is going to do all the work - and snatch the credit - for you? Instead we’ve been given the sort of low-level, grumbling dissatisfaction of people crammed onto an almost-seatless bus, a sort of tube with no tracks. The mode of expression has been lost.

Take today for example. A stinking tramp could only think of offering me his seat in his quest to make a public nuisance of himself. I grouchily refused. A hugely fat woman apologised as she sat next to and partly on top of me. And the nascent heroin addict opposite could merely whisper in a low voice that “that fat cow has got dust all over me fackin’ trousers”. I mean, where’s the fun in that? At least in the old days people would pick on someone much harder and not just bigger than themselves.

Anyway: go Boris. I don’t know how much better you’ll be than King Newt, but it’s certainly time the latter retired to his pond.

UPDATE: Dave Hill has posted an audio transcript of the morning, so if you want to get Boris’s exact words rather than my memory of them, this is the place to go.

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