An Observation:

An observation:

In Swansea, when you get on a bus, the driver will literally sit at that bus stop and block the traffic if need be to watch you, hawk-like, on the bus cameras as you make your way to a seat. This is normal service. We must all be seated before the bus takes off. Very occasionally they might start driving while you're still standing in front of your seat, having reached it but not quite sat down, and the sudden inertia makes you instantly hinge 90 degrees at the hips and collapse into the chair like a doll in Toy Story when a human enters. We all have a good laugh. "Quick off the mark, isn't he?" an old lady will say. "Not even sitting, you weren't!" she will cackle. This is high entertainment. Her week is made. Your forced seating is a rare treat, a moment of human connection. You still thank the driver as you get off the bus.

In Edinburgh, the bus drivers have never heard of the very concept of waiting until the passengers are seated. Half a picosecond after your card is tapped the bus driver punches a nitro injection button and stamps on the accelerator. You are instantly hurled to the back of the bus, where you are thinly laminated to the back window. Time unspools into the traffic behind you. A local tuts at you, because you should have known to hold the handrail. After several seconds you manage to unpeel yourself, only for the driver to slam on the brakes for the next stop, flinging you at speed through the windscreen and onto the road in front of the bus. Ashamed, you get up and re-board. It costs nothing extra, because Scottish public transport is cheap and convenient. The driver actually pauses, because a woman with a cane has boarded. You seize your chance. You try to run up the stairs to a seat before she sits and the bus moves again. You are out of luck - at the top step the driver spins out into oncoming traffic at 87 miles an hour from a standstill, and you tumble like a house of cards impacted by a bowling ball, thrown down from the Olympus of the upper deck that you, in your hubris, thought you could reach. You rattle around in the aisle like a discarded can. The woman with the cane laughs at you. Some children kick you towards the back. You lodge under a seat, and cling on until your stop like a terrestrial limpet.

You still thank the driver as you get off the bus.