Bus surfing
p. My bike still [“isn’t fixed”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/blog/archives/000402.html], so I’m suffering a bus ride every day. It’s particularly packed on my way home from work, so most days I have to stand up all the way home. This is annoying but—as I always try to make a virtue of a necessity—it has prompted me to revive a sport I invented when I was about 8 years old.
p. I really liked the idea of surfing or skateboarding, but we lived too far from the sea, and my mum wouldn’t let me have a skateboard. So—whenever I had to stand up on a bus or the tube—I would indulge in the noble art of bus surfing. The idea is this: you try to remain stable and upright solely by shifting your body weight around. When I was younger I didn’t hold on at all, but frankly people get a bit impatient with a grown woman crashing in to them when she misjudges a corner, so now I maintain an ‘emergency hold’ on one of the poles—just in case. One of the keys to success is to read the road to predict the turns and changes in acceleration, but this is much more of a challenge on the tube. When you judge a section perfectly, it can be deeply satisfying. It’s cheaper than surfing (depending on your route), you don’t get wet, and you can do it every day and have a full-time job. You don’t get a tan, though.
