More and more often, a bus has waited at an empty stop for me, because the driver has spotted my frantic running and decided to be kind. Obviously they’re not obliged to do this, as it’s my fault for not being at the stop. So by way of returning the kindness, I now make a point of taking home other passengers’ litter, the kind left on seats or on the floor. Free newspapers, empty drinks bottles rolling around, that sort of thing.

I have somewhat less kind thoughts towards a group of passengers on the 134 the other Friday evening.

It’s about 8pm, and the bus is heading from Euston to Camden Town. I’m on the top deck, left hand side, about five seats ahead of the back seat. Which I can hear is occupied by a group of girls, giggling and being loud and raucous in the perennial Friday Night way. Then one girl starts throwing pieces of banana peel down the aisle, getting more laughter from her friends. As all the seats face forward, it is impossible to see the throwing, just the peel.

Then she throws some directly at the head of another passenger. It’s a thirtysomething man sitting with his girlfriend, on the seats opposite and just in front of me. He ignores them.

They do it again. This time, he turns round and asks the girls to stop throwing banana peel at him. He has a foreign accent – French, possibly.

The girls shout back. ‘It wasn’t me!’ ‘I don’t even like bananas!’ Then their tone turns quickly, from unconvincing schoolgirl protest to ugly, second-hand prejudice: ‘At least we’re British, mate. At least we’re meant to be here.’

The Frenchman says, ‘You are nuzzing, you know that?’ And he turns back. His girlfriend whispers to him what I imagine is the French for ‘leave them, Marcel, they’re not worth it.’

The girls get worse.

‘What did he say to me?’ ‘Hey, YOU are nothing, more like. Yeah.’

I put my headphones on and pretend to be listening to music. I’m terrified. I’m hoping this doesn’t get out of hand. I want to intervene and tell the girls off, but I am not that sort of man. On top of which, I think of the man who was stabbed to death on the 43 a few years ago, for asking someone if they’d stop throwing chips at his girlfriend.

They throw more banana peel at the Frenchman. This time, it misses and hits the man sitting directly behind the couple. He’s thirty-ish, unshaven and bespectacled in that Owns Box Sets Of The Wire On DVD way. He turns around and glowers at the girls. English accent. Firm, threatening, every year of his age.

‘Hey. Stop throwing shit. All right? Stop throwing shit.’

‘We wasn’t.’ ‘Wasn’t me.’

The girls now sound resentful, small, put in their place. It seems to do the trick. No more banana peel.

The bus pulls into Camden, and the girls cackle their way down the aisle, down the stairs, out of our lives. I finally get a look at them. Dressed up, made up, and all of 19 or so. I was expecting 13.

The rest of the journey home, I think sadly about the Back Of The Bus dynamic, how nothing has changed since I was at school. The back seat is where loud kids go to be naughty and daring and controlling. Yet cowardly with it, because the other passengers can’t see them. I wonder if the Back Seat does something to them: the psychology of perceived power. A temptation too far. It’s like the attraction of posting anonymous abuse on the Internet.

When I am king, all the buses will have no back seat. They’ll go on into infinity.

I wonder about the girls. They’re not only playing up to an idiot cliche, but they’re too old for it. I wonder about their lives. I wonder if they’ll grow up, and when. I wonder which among them is the Main Girl, which ones are her doting deputies, and which ones are just tagging along out of fear.

I feel ashamed on behalf of the Frenchman. And I feel envious and hero-worshipping of the 6Music-y man who spoke out. Not just because he dared to turn around, stare them out and tell them off, but because he knew how just to say ‘shit’ to mean ‘stuff’, and not ‘excrement.’

It’s a usage I was blissfully unaware of until about the mid 80s, when I saw the hip film ‘Repo Man’ on video. Harry Dean Stanton’s character uses it in this way, and constantly. I remember being incredibly shocked. In fact, it upstaged the rest of the film for me. Movies are the lessons they don’t give you at school.

A few weeks ago I watched an episode of Skins, the popular UK drama. In that, Effy, a middle class, Southern English teenager is in a dream sequence. She meets a younger version of herself who won’t speak. ‘Don’t give me any of that silent shit,’ she says.

In 1985, to hear this from a British girl would have made me implode, frankly. Now it’s just used to make Effy sound like a typical teenager. So I guess it’s now official: the term has caught on.

(Typing this up, I check the OED definition. The usage is in there, but only just. It’s labelled ‘Draft Additions 2009’. Earliest known appearance, 1934, ‘Tropic of Cancer’ by Henry Miller.)

I envy how the man on the bus can speak Fluent Youth back at the girls, and that he can mean it, whereas for me it’d be hilariously out of character.

He’s like those teachers at my school who would use the occasional bit of swearing in their crowd control. A tactic that implied, ‘I may be a teacher but I too can do intimidation and slang. That’s the only two weapons you have, and I have them too, and yet I’m much older. That’s right, look scared.’

I come away from all this with a renewed respect for bus drivers, teachers, the French, and men of my age whose usage of youth slang I normally find unbecoming. Now I want a man like that on my keyring.

Before I get off the bus, I pick up the banana peel.

A few people have asked me if my mother is aware of the major exhibition on British quilting at the V&A, which opens this week. There’s something similar on at Liberty’s too.

Well, yes, Mum is aware all right. She’s up in town to attend both, staying with Linda Seward, who spoke about quilting on Monday’s Women’s Hour.

Mum says some quilters are slightly chagrined that the V&A show includes works by Grayson Perry and Tracey Emin. These are, after all, famous artists who’ve occasionally made quilts, rather than quilters per se. It’s fair enough, though: I’m a firm believer – as is Mum – of the rubbing-off factor of galleries, and the Emin and Perry quilts can only encourage serendipity for the uninitiated. They’ll bring in people who might not otherwise have gone, and who could well leave with their minds’ own patchwork newly illuminated.

Links:
Slideshow of the V&A exhibition with audio commentary (BBC News site).

Podcast of Women’s Hour, 22.3.2010 (mp3 file)

Tues eve: Mum and I have dinner in Islington. She tells me an anecdote from me and my brother’s childhood that sums up at least one difference between us. Tom once told some playground joke to a room of other children, and everyone laughed. I apparently tried doing the same – with the same joke (I’m assuming at a different occasion, though it wouldn’t surprise me if I did it immediately afterwards). Most of them didn’t laugh, and someone left the room in tears.

Yesterday, I look on Twitter and – catching the mood of the hour – find myself trying to think of a topical gag about David Cameron’s wife becoming pregnant. Then I stop myself. Much as I love satire, if I ever managed to write something pithily hilarious about an item in the news –  a straight gag – it would feel strange, even out of character; a snivelling attempt to join the cool boys’ gang. Which just isn’t part of my patchwork.

I receive an email from someone who says they’re a literary agent, mentioning the words ‘book deal’. And suddenly the world gains new colours.

Hopes at ground level, of course. But it has galvanised me into author-shaped action, making me dig out the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook, scribble ideas, and generally Take An Interest In Life again. As opposed to just being interested in sleeping. And sleeping again. And sleeping some more.

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Just when I’m in the mood to write, it’s getting on for time to go to the night shift. I’ve promised a short story for someone’s collection. It’s due on Monday. Have it all worked out, am terribly pleased with the idea, and want to write it now. But it’s  time to go to work. And although I have taken tomorrow night off, it’s in order to DJ at someone I don’t know’s wedding. Still, presumably that won’t go on all night. I shall just have to steal moments with my notebook wherever I can get them.

If you have the nerve to call yourself a writer, you’re meant to learn from experiences of being thrown in amongst strangers. Observe, note their conversation and so on. Except I’m hardly the fly-on-the-wall type. Too often, I AM the subject of conversation. ‘Hey, look at him! What’s he writing? Look at his hair! Oy, mate, are you gay?’ And so on. So much for eavesdropping. My ‘Overheard By Dickon Edwards’ book would be filled entirely with comments about me.

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Boys with bikes in King’s Cross the other evening. Shouting at me from the other side of the street.

‘Oy, blondie!’

I keep walking, and don’t look over.

‘OY, blondie. Blondie. Hey, Prince Charles!’

(Prince Charles…!)

That makes me look up. They grin, and put their thumbs up.

I grin back and nod in what I hope looks like ‘Yes, I do look funny, don’t I. Heigh ho!’ Without sarcasm, though. It’s hard work.

Walking in the street is improv class. You pretty much have to cast yourself in the role of a person walking in the street. No one ever tells you this.

Because my appearance isn’t particularly outre compared to the proper human peacocks of Camden and Shoreditch, I’m convinced part of My Problem is in the way I carry myself as much as my clothes and hair. Or in the way I don’t carry myself. I’ve never quite managed to convincingly play Bloke Walking In The Street. Or even – crucially – Arty Bloke Walking In The Street. Neither fish nor fop.

Sunday morning. Sitting in Waterloo Station Starbucks, still recovering from the queasy swaying of the overnight ferry from Guernsey. The Japanese girl working behind the counter is playing her own mix CD in the shop. Entirely 1980s UK indie. New Order’s Age of Consent. OMD. Echo & The Bunnymen. The Cure (it’s always The Cure – they should get a Queen’s Export award). And best of all – some Durutti Column. On a Sunday morning in Starbucks.

I’m quietly enjoying the music, reading ‘Sark: As I Found It’ by a rather eccentric character called Captain Ernest Platt, published 1935. Can’t decide whether he’s real or a pastiche, a joke. Googling him later reveals he was both: a British Fascist. Common experience when reading old books, of course. So much latterday forgiveness has to be factored in. Even Mervyn Peake’s 1950s ‘Mr Pye’ refers to a burning match looking like ‘a hanged negro’.

Just then, there’s a knock at the plate glass window. A couple of men I don’t know, pointing at me, laughing, before moving on down the street.

This ability – or curse – for attracting attention. No, not attention, curiosity. It has to be worth something in the cut-and-thrust world of marketing new authors. Has to help. I’m hoping to find out.