Minor details

Donald Pleasence hasn’t been driving the buses I’m on lately. The only way to catch him is to work late and take the 5.45. One day Phil and I sit at the front and keep him company as he drives us home. You see things differently from there, the vast expanse of the windscreen in front of you with the backs of nobody’s heads obscuring the view. We go over the main motorway and looking down we can clearly see the traffic backed up for miles, a twisting ribbon of red lights and frustration in the growing gloom of a late winter afternoon. Highway to Hell by AC-DC is playing on the radio. Donald chuckles. “That’s your highway to hell right there.”

It seems he likes our company and he spends the drive wisecracking to us, muttering dark warnings about other drivers and pedestrians (the only people he seems to dislike more than other drivers) and singing along to Neil Young’s Kermitesque croon on Heart Of Gold. The next week we hear rumours that, caught in bad traffic, Donald has taken the law into his own hands and decided to drive his bus all the way down the central reservation. Word has it that the bus got stuck and Donald wasn’t able to turn it around. The consequences were dire; people had to leave the bus, shimmy over the barriers and walk to the nearest station. We all hear unsubstantiated tales that people take four hours to get back to Reading, and there are even whispers that Donald might get fired.

His name is cleared when I tell the story to Wendy one day on the way home. “That wasn’t Donald!” she says. “It was the guy who’s driving this bus. I wish it had been Donald, he would have got us home on time and in one piece.” I have an image of the traffic parting for Donald like an automotive Red Sea, Donald as a latter-day Charlton Heston.

“Have a nice Dave” looks slightly different at the start of the week when we board the funbus. His top lip is patchily covered with a wispy growth. It’s the sort of facial furniture that would glisten with sweat on a muggy day – not that “have a nice Dave” ever sweats. Not like us, all sweltering coatless on the bus home every day, the heating turned up full whack while Dave sits there, fat and insensible, in the driving seat with the window yawning wide open. It could be an attempt to grow a moustache, it could be that he can’t be bothered to shave, but none of us knows him well enough to ask.

Gemma is still struggling with names for her wedding planning business. She tells us the front runners over lunch. Iain and I both smirk over the suggestion of “Champagne Nights”, which somehow sounds rude even though it’s almost certainly not. For a time “Purple Rose” was the preferred choice; I manage to find that suggestive too (because I can only think of one purple thing that rises) but it gets scrapped because another business has bagged that name already.

My suggestions of “Up The Aisle” and “The Secret Chamber” (both almost completely tongue in cheek) are vetoed with impressive speed, even by Gemma’s standards. She is pretty well tuned to my smut by now; one time early on in what I like to think has become our friendship she sent me an instant message saying “You’re just disgusting pretty much all of the time, aren’t you?”. I sent her a simple response, just four words: “END OF LEVEL 1”. Her search continues, both for a name for the business and for whether there’s any substance to Level 2 – whether, in fact, there’s a Level 2 at all. I’m not one hundred per cent sure myself.

We don’t see Cornish Rob on the funbus any more. He passed his driving test and now he makes his own way to the office most days. The last time I saw him he was talking about applying for other jobs, maybe moving out of town. It’s sad but not surprising - he’s never liked Reading as much as the rest of us, despite our attempts to convert him. Soon he might leave us all behind. Out of the blue on Thursday, I get a message from him on a slow day at work. “I have the paperwork for the Cornish nuptials”, it says. After months of trying to wangle an invite to his wedding, of wheedling and offering to cover it for the blog, I gave up and he invited me anyway. And nobody had to die first.

Iain returns to the office on Friday, surprisingly perky after a two day work trip to Dublin. The catering at his meetings is done by the charmingly named “Little Bites”. A few weeks back he asked them for an order form and they sent him a piece of A4 with the words “Order Form” at the top in an official looking font. The rest of the page was completely blank. When it gets to lunchtime, it becomes apparent why they didn’t give him a range of options, it’s because they like to think outside the lunchbox. One of the sandwiches on the tacky tinfoil tray is the conceptually disturbing chicken and egg sandwich. The more you think about the implications of this lunch offering, the wronger it seems to get. If nothing else, it renders the question of which came first rather a moot point.

Iain’s colleague picks one up with scepticism. ”That’s two generations in the same sandwich right there.” he tells him.

“You never seem to write about me on the blog any more,” says Mikey in the pub at the end of another baffling week, “It’s all Iain this and Gemma that.” It’s sweet that it bothers him. He excitedly waves a paperback under my nose. It’s about the mod scene in the early 90s and there are pictures of Mikey captured at a variety of mod gatherings he was almost certainly far too young to attend. It’s crazy that I look at them and think that he’s unbelievably skinny while simultaneously knowing that I used to be that thin as well, a long long time and another person ago. He was cooler as a teenager than I will ever be.

“Look, I’ve been published before you.” he says, not without affection, “Not by long though.”

Finally, the minorest detail of all: my blog was one year old yesterday. You don’t need to have bought flowers or a card, but do feel free to drop into the comments and say hello – especially if you’ve been lurking.