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.

One man’s collection of 3,500+ photographs taken in the highways and byways of London, including my area and beyond. A wonderful find, and recommended viewing for anyone who lives in or loves our capital city.

I’m having a bout of bus-driver hatred. If you travel on buses in the capital, you’ll know why: the arrogant indifference of so many drivers; the marked tendency of some white bus drivers to drive past black people at bus stops (and vice versa); the even more marked tendency to drive past people of all races, ages and states of infirmity; driving like Ben Hur and using the brake pedal with the sensitivity of a rhinocerous gatecrashing a party for flamingos; swearing at and abusing passengers; shifting the blame for all mishaps; and so on, and so on…

The two things that have really got my goat this week, though, are these:

1) Trying to get a pushchair off a bendy bus. The driver aligned the doors perfectly with a tree so it was impossible for me to get off. “Would you mind driving forward a bit?” I asked, pleasantly. “You should get out the other doors,” said the bus driver ever so helpfully, before resentfully driving forward a metre or two and thus (reluctantly) doing his job properly.

2) This article in the Metro about bus drivers who like nothing better than to slag off their passengers.

Well, drivers (and I particularly mean the men amongst you - I yearn for a London in which most buses are driven by women), two can play at that game. You have inspired me to burst into song:

The London Bus Driver

The checkout girls in Morrisons might treat you with contempt,
And most GP’s receptionists are wholly charm-exempt,
But if you want your peace of mind to fully take a dent
Then look for human kindness in a bus driver.

The wheels on his bus go round and round,
Till he slams on the brakes and old ladies topple down,
Splint’ring their bones as they hit the floor:
Three dead in one week, that’s the high score.

The so-called broadband helpline staff will leave you in a rage,
Because they’re full of bitterness at their paltry wage,
But if you want a lunatic with no brain to engage,
Then have a go at flagging down a bus driver.

The doors on his bus stay firmly shut,
Unless you are his boss, or you are dressed like a slut,
And if he is white, and you are black,
He’s sure to drive past and not look back.

If you have small children, it is hard to find a place
Where you can all share lunch and not have doors slammed in your face,
But if you want to learn the outer limits of bad grace,
Then try wheeling your pushchair past the bus driver.

The front of his bus is never near
The lip of the pavement, so don’t for an instant fear
You’ll get on safely before you find
“No fucking prams – get the bus behind”.

Being vile to passengers is just one sickening perk
For people to whom misery is just a chance to smirk
If they applied the expertise they use for skipping work
Then perhaps we wouldn’t hate the scumbag bus driver.

The wheels on his bus slam to a halt
As he hits a lorry that is carrying coarse salt.
He knows you can’t prove it was his fault.
You never can with a bus driver…

As the camera phone photo suggests, we went to the Royal Botanical Gardens yesterday to look at palms, water lilies and some rather sensuous Henry Moore sculptures.

I hadn’t been to Kew Gardens since 1999 or 2000, when I visited the nearby Public Record Office (now the National Archives) to dig out some facts from records relating to the Bloody Assizes. Little had changed over the intervening years. The area round Kew Gardens was mostly unchanged, bar the addition of a Starbucks and a Tesco Express: for the rest, the middle classes were still snorting around in herds.

We met up with some friends in The Railway pub and headed off to the Botanical Gardens after a quick pint. It was a good pint, and the gardens were excellent. But both palled when compared to the journey home.

Where we made our mistake was leaving the Gardens at closing time. Sadly, most of the visitors seemed to have homes to go to and decided to leave, en masse, at the same time. A good number jammed up the pavements on the way to the station, doing that irritating thing of walking four abreast, braying loudly and stepping leisurely in the manner of gnus scratching their gonads on the tips of the long grass.

But even gnus can be startled and dispersed with the aid of a pushchair, and we soon found ourselves back on the station platform along with a few hundred people. From time to time a tube train would come along and suck up a chunk of the crowd, and eventually our overground train appeared.

I took charge of the pushchair and nipped the sleeping boy into a space in the vestibule. My wife managed to bag a seat. I looked up and discovered the primary catalyst for the overcrowding: three bicycles propped against the opposing door, the opening frame of a health and safety inspector’s snuff movie.

The warning beeps for the train doors started playing and then, just as the hatch was snapping shut, someone jammed a massive pushchair in the gap.

This was no ordinary pushchair. It wasn’t a zippy runaround. It wasn’t even one of those display cases on wheels, much favoured by those Stoke Newington parents for whom parenthood is a lifestyle and fashion option. No: this was a big, fuck-off charabanc of a thing, with at least two chairs and an additional, bolted-on car seat. It was being wielded by two energetic Frenchmen, one with the haughty beak and tweed jacket of a holidaying notaire. Both looked as though they had stepped in quicktime off the set of Zazie dans le Métro.

Train vestibules are not normally very spacious, and those in Silverlink carriages are no exception. Any Englishman who sees such a space, already filled with one pushchair, three large bicycles and assorted human beings would take one glance at his big, fuck-off charabanc of an infant travel system, give up and stand swearing as he watched the train disappear down the tracks.

Not these chaps. In less time than it would take to utter allez-oop, they had the wheeled monstrosity on their shoulders and the doors had closed behind them. Then, listening to them all trying to work out what to do next, I realised the intruders were part of a party, which included the women and children behind the glass screen on which I was leaning.

M le Notair and his ami couldn’t go forwards. They couldn’t go backwards. And if they had tried to go sideways they would have been stuffed. So they did the first sensible thing since I met them and rested the end of their machine on the three stupidly parked bicycles.

Next job was to unclick the car seat from the rest of the frame. There was a small baby asleep in it, and I suppose they wanted to hand it over to its mother before it woke up and started calling them names. I gave them a hand at this point: after all, it wasn’t the child’s fault to be connected with such a bunch of goons.

At moments like this, high art demands that a bovinely stupid busybody enters the scene. We weren’t disappointed.

“Excuse me,” intoned Bovinely Stupid Busybody, as she barged her way towards the melée. “Please don’t rest that on my brakes.”

“?” said both Frenchmen, silently, as they exchanged glances.

“Don’t rest that thing on my brakes. You’ll, you’ll, you’ll… cut them.”

“?”

“You can rest it on the seat. That’s okay. But not the brakes. I don’t want you to cut them.”

“?”, said both Frenchman in that ‘?’='who is this crazy bitch?’ sort of way.

But they lifted up their machine, clearly considering what the hell to do next.

Luckily for them, they didn’t have to consider for long. We pulled into the next station, Gunnersbury, and one of the women behind the glass screen (who had been scrutinising the route map) yelled that they were on the wrong train.

Now, if it’s hard enough getting a pushchair with the dimensions of an ocean liner into a crowded vestibule, it’s even harder getting it out of another door, especially when that door is blocked by three large bicycles and you are accompanied by a screaming party of pissed off women and children.

But they managed it. As the doors were closing, M. le Notaire jammed his machine in the doors, freeing up his companion for some bicycle shifting. Mrs Busybody helped out with a bit of shouting about her precious bike, but was roundly ignored. And then, having spat out all trace of crazy French situationists (they must have been, surely?), the remaining occupants of the carriage heaved out a collective sigh of relief.

Mrs Busybody decided it would be safer to guard her bike, and was soon joined by her two friends.

“I just can’t believe those people,” said one to the others. “It was so obvious there wasn’t any room.”

Silly cows.

Two men sleeping outside York Hall, Bethnal Green, this afternoon. I liked the way the nearest man manages to keep his bag suspended above the pavement.

I’ve just discovered some old files lying around on my computer, one of which is a pre-blog attempt to write the kind of thing I later posted at Hackney Lookout. Most of it isn’t very good, and some is distinctly cringeworthy, but one or two snippets still have the power to raise a smile. Like this:

Saturday 23rd November, 2002: …Went to many other pubs in Hammersmith area and met a great comedy Irishman in the Duke of Edinburgh near Holland Road. “I’ve been coming to this pub for 30 years now. Used to be a gangsters’ pub. But it’s all changed now. I like it. I’ve been a plasterer for thirty years [looks at filthy palms], and I must say it’s good money. I drink and I gamble, but me wife still loves me.” Bill talked to a Norwegian brought up in Ireland: “So what do you think of all these fuckin’ paddies then?”

Yesterday, after I wrote about the driver who had to decide whether or not to drive his bus through St Botolph’s church, Kris pointed out that the “149 is loathsome” and asked “Why do you do this to yourself?”

The best answer I can give is this: I was off to see the dinosaurs. Not the huge, carefully reconstructed bones in the Natural History Museum, but the hilarious and endearing stone monsters in Crystal Palace Park. Created in the 19th Century by the foremost dinosaur expert of the time, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, the sculptures, which were looked upon with scorn as early as 1895, filled me with cheer, not least because I learnt that visiting Americans often come expecting an experience of Jurassic Park proportions and go away feeling that they’ve just seen the garden gnomes of the dinosaur theme-park world.

I don’t care, though. I love that sort of early and sincere amateurism, and nowhere more than in the Horniman Museum’s overstuffed walrus. Who needs wrinkles, anyway?

If any of you know what it’s like to travel on the 149 bus route at night, with the ‘K’ Cider enthusiast slurring and swaying next to you and spraying you with his spit, the bus driver jamming on the brakes for fun 50 metres before each stop, and the Hegel-reading Bloomsbury fantasist opposite giving you disapproving looks, then this is the post for you.

Yes, that’s a photo of a 149 in trouble. We were all on it this morning when the driver announced, somewhere in the Shoreditch area, that we needed to take a diversion. The idea was to go down Commercial Road and reappear near Liverpool Street.

We did. On Bishopsgate. There were roadworks to the left of us. Traffic islands to the right of us. Taxis behind us hooted and swore like bastards. And St Botolph’s was immediately ahead, barring the way.

“Ah”, said the driver over the tannoy. “I’ve made a mistake”.

The scene reminded of that children’s book, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.

We can’t go UNDER it. We can’t go OVER it. OH NO we’ll have to go THROUGH IT! (Crash, tinkle, crash, tinkle….)