Wednesday 14 March 2012

200words: boris bus

London's wedding day is coming, we are betrothed, our carriage awaits. Over the horizon of twenty twelve comes our prince, just a short bus-ride away everything will be made right and every broken thing will be regenerated, and the weak will say 'I am strong', and the hungry will be fed, and the mayor will be re-elected, and East London will be made whole, and His kingdom will have no end, and all from an instant of nuptial ecstasy. But. This Olympian prince will endure no limping lover, and old whore London has weathered too many wars to woo her saviours undisguised.

Embarking the Number 38, at last, it is the smell of the new that shocks, and this olfactory novelty permeates all aboard the NB4L, the fragrance saturates virgin upholstery over not-yet chewing-gummed, not-yet kebab tagged back seats. But the (Luke 7v37) cracked alabaster jar of it all is the air-conditioning, ironic in an open-back bus, it is an expensive forgetting of London's air. Do we consider the poor whom we could have housed for the price of this wedding white elephantine melange of brazen asymmetry and LEDs? I, however, will not despise Heatherwick's joyride of a bus, but only let all our public transport be so playful, only let us delight to make such details even when the world is not watching.

london.gov tfl

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