On Board the Dying Slowly Bus

Anyone seen the keys?

It is the morning after the night before and the night before today was our office Christmas party. The Golden Oldies wisely booked this day off well ahead of time, fearing the repercussions of a late night on genteel sensibilities. I on the other hand, am on the Dying Slowly Bus!

This is the term used for the one way trip to Central Hangover. The etymology of this beautiful turn of phrase originates from one cold, dark and ominous night in Croyden, just a few years in my past.

I had boarded a late night bus after a gig. It was close to Christmas, probably as close as it is to Christmas right now. It was bitterly cold, the ground was sheer and sparkley and the lights on this so called bus were very, very low. I sat myself close to the front and cosyed down as much as you can on a stiff and threadbare, ergonomically challenging resting place.

After a short time, a Goth loomed, glowered and plonked himself next to me. I say plonked, he floated toward me as Goths appear to do, even on buses and then landed heavily next to me, as they do, weighed down with all those chains and piercings. 

The night in question took place just moments before the Emo emerged in the evolutionary calendar of mankind and succeeded the enduring Gothic subculture and killed them off like Homo Sapiens killed off the Neanderthals. Or did they? Some, I am convinced, are alive and well and living on my road.

This gloomy glowering Goth smiled a warm and caring smile from a juxtaposed, wan and pale face. He offered me a cigarette, which I politely declined. But he wouldn't take no for an answer, this Goth. He persisted to lean in close to me and emplored me to accept, as if my life depended on it. Perhaps, I wondered, it did. By way of conviction he mysteriously said, with a sideways glance all about the misfit passengers of this doomed and dingy carriage, "Look around you." In my memory the wind howled, tumbleweed tumbled and distant church bells tolled at this point in the story, but that didn't really happen. Surprisingly, everything else is completely true.

"Do you recognise anybody?" He said. I was forced to admit that I didn't, but why should I? I was in Goddamn Croyden! Then he announced to me that "this is the Dying Slowly bus!"

Dying Slowly was one of the bands which had played at the venue that night. I was supposed to be on the Threefortenpound Fun Bus. But before my fate was sealed and I was whisked to hell on a handcart, sorry, I mean Milton Keynes, which is a long way from where I reside, this good samaritan of a Goth, one of the last of his species, not only picked up on my perilous and potentially disastrous and irrevocable error, but he elected to explain to me what a gaff I had made in a manner that would cause me the least amount of pain, shame and embarrassment. "Step outside with me" he encouraged, "and then you can pretend you have just gone for a cigarette and that everything else is on purpose." He saved my face and he narrowly everted my ending up in Milton Keynes, not long before dawn, in a few minus degrees. I might add that I was, at the time, clad in not much more than a very short skirt indeed.

Hence forth, for reasons I have barely explained, a state if inertia caused by rampant intoxication has ever since been referred to as Getting on the Dying Slowly Bus, and that is exactly where I am now.

There is no friendly Goth to save my face right here right now... but a Full Monty Breakfast Baguette has just come to berth on my desk and my god it's enormous!

Hallelujah!