They're gone!!

They're gone, and never even called me (with apologies to Mrs Henry Wood and her 1861 melodrama East Lynne) "Mother!"¹

Well I mean, having lived in London for around ten years, and during the height of their power too, I can hardly ignore the passing of that most wonderful, successful, beautiful, iconic and above all English vehicle: that vehicle that, while by an unfortunate temporal accident, wasn't actually the one called 'A Transport of Delight' by that most wonderful, successful, non-descript, iconic and above all English comedic singing duo Flanders and Swan, though it should have been and, in the minds of all those who ever thought about such things, was: that vehicle that all over the world, along with red phone boxes and blue unarmed cops says, nay screams, "London!"

I mean what do you make of a vehicle that, designed in the early fifties for a seventeen-year life, with production that stopped in 1968, even now has about a third of the 2,876 built still in existence with most of those still running: a vehicle that has books about it; clubs, associations and lovers of it, herds of potential buyers for it, and a whole night of BBC Channel 4 Television (7:30 to 1:20 the next morning GMT) devoted to commemorating its passing.

Ah!! the noble, the now late-lamented RoutMaster, double-decker, open platform bus! Brilliantly engineered to last and last, as it did and did, only to be done in by our sniveling modern wimps-in-office on the usual modern wimpish-in-official reasons that it gave us too much freedom and gave employment to too many people. And now, having handicapped us all, they finally cast off the RouteMaster because it can't deal as well as its vile modern supplanter buses with the handicapped.

Ah!! Freedom! Freedom! What did the joy of that open platform do for you? The RouteMaster didn't force you to comply with the whims of tyrannical bus doors, that noble home of the free and the brave made no demands but gave all the freedom that even the most extreme Libertarian could salivate over.

And Freedom is, of course, a word I seldom use without thinking of the time, of the time, when we were all jumping on or off the RouteMasters' open platforms (grabbing confidently or desperately or, indeed, in extreme cases in extremis for its plastic covered pole) at traffic lights, at stop signs, corners, even on that straight downhill stretch in Wandsworth where the driver at last gets that rare opportunity to 'really see what this baby will do'. So what if an average of three people were killed each year trying that trick, it's just nature's way---a survival of the fittest, or even more important of the luckiest, sort of thing.

And talking of destruction, death and danger reminds me, fondly, of the time I went skating on the top deck of a Number 226 in Golders Green: Oh no, no it wasn't me that was doing the skating, the bus was. You see we don't get that much snow and ice in London, and it always comes as a complete surprise to the authorities (and in passing you should note that most authorities apart from the Canadians and the Russians have had the sense to choose a mild climate for their capitals) but anyway one Christmas-tide we had both snow and ice and to our complete lack of surprise the authorities were yet again completely surprised, and the roads became slipperier and slipperier and of course the RouteMaster we were on kept on, until down one icy, authority-unprepared hill it finally lost traction and proceeded in a leisurely fashion, with its major axis at about thirty degrees to its direction of travel with us on the top deck all frantically and traditional-British-humour-in-times-of-trouble-ally offering to sell each other life insurance. Ah! What pathetic one-man-operated bendy bus could offer memories like those

Cheerio for now and hold very tight please [ching, ching]

from Richard Howland-Bolton