Booze Banned on Buses

Sobering times for party people in motion

For Marcel Proust, it was the taste of a Madeleine cake that drew him irresistibly back into reveries of his childhood. For me, and many other Londoners, it is the smell of alcohol on the bus. It’s not quite as romantic as Marcel’s memoires de temps perdus, but the heady, sticky smell of a bottle of alcopop, combined with gentle swaying motion of the top deck, creates an instant jog of memory to giggly teenage journeys into the West End.

At this fledgling stage, we couldn’t afford the drinks in the bars, so we had something on the way there instead, and great fun it was too (certainly more enjoyable than the later part of those evenings, which generally involved standing in Zoo Bar being leerily chatted up by middle-aged drunks).

Boris Johnson’s official line is that banning booze on buses and trains is a ‘zero tolerance’ crackdown on ‘intimidation’. He seems to believe that the worst thing about public transport is the sight of a sleeping tramp cradling a Special Brew, or a group of tittering middle class schoolgirls, proving how grown-up they are by drinking bottles of WKD.

Aggressive drunks on buses and trains are, of course, a real nuisance, and it would be lovely to get rid of them. But the tube and bus drivers’ union have already said that their members get more than enough grief in the course of their duties, and they certainly won’t be enforcing this new rule when they don’t fancy it. In other words, they’ll happily tell groups of harmless teens to put their booze down, but when it’s a squad of skinheads in Chelsea shirts necking Stella and vomiting on the seats, they’ll develop a sudden blind spot.

So just when teenagers have been granted the right to travel for free, they’re having one of the great joys of teenage travel removed. It’ll be back to sitting on benches in Leicester Square for the pre-Zoo Bar drink, until someone bans that too.

Spitting DNA Images

Bus Drivers are to be given DNA kits to help catch people who spit at them, in a repulsive, but probably very effective initiative to reduce anti-social behaviour. The ‘spit kits’ (yuck!) are already in use at Tube Stations, where recent delays have created something of an epidemic of bad-tempered spitting incidents. All 7,000 busses in the London fleet are to carry the kits. Hopefully, they won’t come up with a new verse for ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ to describe them.

Livingstone Radio Show

It’s a long tradition for talk radio hosts to divide their audiences, usually by being outrageously right-wing. LBC’s latest pundit, however, will be infuriating listeners from the other half of the political spectrum, in the three-hour-a-day Red Ken morning special. The former London mayor describes his show as an opportunity to ‘detox’ after listening to the poisonous Nick Ferrari.

EU Ban for False Quotes

Ever wondered why the dreadful musical you went to last night had such glowing reviews on its billboard? It’s because of a popular practice known as ‘cherry-picking’ in the PR world, or ‘lying’ to everyone else. Classic examples include the review of Guys and Dolls: “Frank Loesser’s great musical from 19560 is hilarious… Grandage’s production often falls flat”, which appeared on the billboards as “‘HILARIOUS’, Independent on Sunday”. The practice is being outlawed by new EU directives, so promoters are going to have to find some new way to cheat us out of our money.

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