I can see live bus maps as art

Can you? Go look for yourself…

Paul Besley in his last post (see https://substack.com/@headingfortheexit?r=svzuc&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=profile) mentions in passing waiting for buses. To quote:

I work at having a comfortable life, not too hard, but enough to make a difference to my day. Small things like having bus timetables on my phone so I’m not waiting long for the bus and stoically waiting for the next when it doesn’t turn up

Now me being a bus person this naturally caught my attention. Paul and I both have pulmonary fibrosis. Sadly, Paul is further along than me and writes about his experience of the condition and life in general with far more eloquence than I will ever be able to muster, but I know well the consequences to my health if I do not wear a mask when travelling on a bus or a tram. Back in the days of lockdown, Susan made masks for family and friends, all themed to their personal interests and, of course, I got five printed cotton ones showing London Routemaster buses in the absence of trolleybuses, which I still wear and never go anywhere without one in my bag. If I find myself in a crowded place, I put a mask on.

Me, this morning, showing off one of my masks. I never go anywhere without one.

This Lucky Old Bunny believes he is here because he has followed the advice he has got from his consultant, nurses and physiotherapists from day one back in 2015, when the prognosis was ‘Three years. Five years if you are lucky .’ We cried in the kitchen together. The same doctor at Nottingham City Hospital in May 2015 who examined me picked on the fact that I had a problem with my aortic heart valve and sent me for a scan of my lungs and heart, with the result that, with my lung consultant’s support, I was able in February 2017 to have open heart surgery lasting eight hours and an ‘o ring’ fitted in my aortic valve. Somehow I managed to live nearly 73 years with just two cusps instead of the usual three in my aortic valve, and here I still am telling the tale. Three men about my age who I have known indirectly, all diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis and having open heart surgery, have gone before me, two seemingly unable to cope with the magnitude of what had happened to them if their relatives are to be believed, and I have no reason to doubt them.

So, perhaps, you can see why I now think of myself as one lucky bunny before I think of myself as Robert Howard or Kevin Burke, had my mother been married to my father when I was born in 1944. Instead she was a single young woman who left me to grow up with her parents and then started a new family without me when I was eight. Of course it was not as simple as I make it seem, but on the surface, and today, this is how I see it. Tomorrow I may tell the tale a little differently, not that the facts will change. It will just be my interpretation!

I have a favourite website called www.bustimes.org which I use to track buses using its ‘live’ map. In my mind it is also a work of art. Just before mid-day today I captured three views of where every bus was in and around Sheffield, including the city centre, because this is where Paul lives. The numbers are of the bus routes and where they are. Look at the maps in real time later today or close to midnight and there will be very few buses about.

I should add that in Greater Nottingham most bus stops have excellent display boards telling you when buses are due and the minutes you have to wait. The minutes even go backwards if your bus is delayed for some reason. When it was introduced, I was at a meeting where someone asked how it worked and a bus driver present described it as ‘Fag paper technology.’

Finally, after three years on substack I have twigged how make link buttons to other substack accounts I have, plus a couple of blogspot ones too, which you will now see at the bottom of every post.

Regards Robert 🐰