SOMEONE ELSE’S IDEA OF FUN

“You’re not into the whole whacky, forced fun thing then?” I nudged Jonathan, being, as I was, seated next to him at the Christmas Do. Meanwhile Ant (paper-hat, back of his head towards us) stood booming out the answers to the 85-question ‘table’ quiz that had accompanied our dinner. A shower of paper aeroplanes flew past him like heckles in a comedy club.

“No Matt, not really,” laughed Jon. He’d gone one better than me though, I noted, and had worn a flashing Christmas jumper. I suspected it was twinkling with irony.

There’s an element of that forced-enjoyment thing in a lot of Christmas though, I suppose - going along with someone else’s idea of fun: it’s okay, sometimes the fun finds you just the other side of embarrassment, and sometimes just the other side of a Ribena, but fun of one sort or another is usually always there, even if it were someone else’s idea.

I tried to look for it on the bus this morning. 

I was bussing in today because I knew the Christmas Do would leave me in town, and it’s always much easier and cheaper to get home from there if you don’t have to collect your car first.

So, bleary-eyed this morning, I climbed onto the freezing bus, asked for a single, and sat down in the surprisingly empty seats.

You know the drill. The phone comes out, you check the news, your feeds, reply to an email or two, maybe write a snotty one and quickly delete it, or play a soothing game of Tetris or whatever, for a while... and the distraction of the brightly-coloured digital universe makes the world of screaming kids, exasperated parents and people complaining about their doctors, a whole lot more tolerable.

But then two intolerable things happened, threatening both to return me to reality.

First, my phone died. It blacked out - low battery. Blip, and then nothing. I always feel a bit cheated when that happens, as though my phone has tricked me somehow, but of course, it’s my own fault, every time. So I shook it (I don’t know why) sighed, slipped it back into my pocket and peered out of the window into the cold morning sky where the bright golden sun tickled the bare, brittle trees.

It was about then, in a dawning moment of truth, that I realised the second thing that had happened. My face fell open.

I was on the wrong bus.

It was heading exactly in the wrong direction! I groaned outwardly. It was already too late to get off (I knew where I was) - there would be no way back, not without being super-late to work. My only hope was to stay on the bus as it rumbled into town, then catch the train back the other way, to rush to work hopefully before my line manager looked at her watch and wondered (1) where I was, and (2) why I hadn’t emailed/phoned/texted in to let her know.

I rolled my eyes, phoneless and annoyed. There above me was the map of the bus-route, a long snaking line of wrong stops, grinning at me as though it had known all along.

There is a certain irony to having to walk past the place where you’ll be going later to catch a train to somewhere where a coach will bring you back and leave you. I grimaced as I strode by the Christmas-Do venue en-route to the train station.

I’ve always thought that unexpected journeys can include something to learn, something to see, something to do, or something to miss. That (I reasoned to myself) is what I’d probably (pompously) tell anyone in this situation. It would have annoyed me at the time though; I hadn’t been up for learning, seeing, doing or missing anything this morning - even if it really ought to have been the bus numbers, the timetable, getting on, and the wrong bus.

This was not my idea of fun.

I sighed.

“Probably not mine either,” I reassured Jonathan, while Ant explained the “Christmas-anagrams” round, and “which-employee-was-hidden-behind-a-Santa-mask”. I gazed out of the window at where I’d walked hours before.

“Anyone for a glass of Ribena?” I asked.