taking you somewhere, fast.
Get any group of Stoke citizens of a certain age together for long enough and inevitably talk will turn to the glory days—just as Bruce Springsteen predicted. They won't be reminiscing about misspent youth or lamenting lost time, however. Oh no! Instead, they'll be eulogising the bygone bus routes that helped cement a place for express express in the Staffordshire transport industry hall of fame (figurative). Routes such as these:
Stoke central bus station (née Stoke bus stop) is, put simply, a hovel: a veritable shitbed of squalor, illegal drug-taking and incorrigible wood pigeons. "coooooooooooo", the wailing call would greet you, if you'd the misfortune of wandering in there circa 1986. fellow passenger, or just another pigeon? Impossible to say. You'd perch on the damp floor and chat with a couple of down-on-their-luck prostitutes: "how's business?". "Not good".
Curiously, Stoke central bus station technically doubles as a sovereign nation—though today no other state formally acknowledges this—and in fact, for a few years in the late 1980s, printed its own money.
This makeshift currency (dubbed Stoke Pavuki, or SP) enjoyed niche popularity for a time, during the height of the Cold War, as a way for more globalist-minded Soviets to trade with the Staffordshire region with reduced fear of government scrutiny. The various denominations of SP break down as follows: 1 kistka is worth 0 nohy, 8 nohy are worth 1 pavuk, 2–3 pavuky are worth 1 pavutyna. In modern day currency, the kistka, noha, pavuk and pavutyna are valued by most economists at somewhere between 3p exactly and 3p approximately (both GBP).
Nowadays, the bus station (Stoke's only such facility) is home to a good-natured but massively illegal gambling society, a virtual pig race-powered "casino" of sorts, born from the ashes of express express's bus-based business. Where once would-be passengers staked their dream destinations on the outcome of these porcine stochastic events, they nowadays stake their very livelihoods. What once stood as a pillar of the Midlands public transport industry is today little more than a sombre hymn to loss.
*We guarantee this in the sense that one might guarantee brickwork or horseplay, which is to say that we fundamentally don't know the meaning of the word.
We don't choose between Hyderabad and Leamington Spa because it's easy. We choose between Hyderabad and Leamington Spa because it's difficult. Despite Leamington being some 6,000 miles closer, that particular contest was chillingly bloody and surprisingly close.
75–76, exclusively.
This one sounds like a joke, and for a while it did have a punchline, but nowadays we of course use the channel tunnel.
We're not quite sure what the word "guarantee" actually means, but it seemed safer to claim that destinations aren't guaranteed, so that there would be less for us to do. If it turns out they are guaranteed, then we'll just say we didn't know what the word meant—which is true, because we don't.
Are we fast in a world of high-speed rail, Starbucks and 6-week MBAs? Of course not. But are we fast in the world of commercial coach travel? My child, if everything was just as people say it is, then what wonder would be left in the world?
Why does a tortoise have a shell? Why would Krysztyna Jablka become so confrontational after another halycon evening abusing methylated spirits? Two words: defense mechanism.