Free Boswell's Bus Pass by Stuart Campbell Page B

can get aff at the next stop. And nae blaspheming!’
    With the deceleration of a Hercules transport plane the bus embarked on a controlled plummet towards the hidden fishing village of Johnshaven. The war memorial was in a neat line with an impressively-sized public convenience and a playing field. War, death, emergency relief and football. We stopped just short of the point where the cottages with creels and clothes lines threatened to stagger into the sea. No one got on. No one had got on for several decades.
    At a remote stop on the main road a party of ramblers boarded with sufficient outdoor gear to make the south face of K2 at least a possibility before they reached Aberdeen. They were adults with special needs and their carers but such was the shared hilarity it was impossible to separate those with the needs from the wounded healers who accompanied them. As their joy became ever louder they elicited much tutting from a lumber-jacketed, baseball cap clad Neanderthal at the back of the bus. Sunken into a prematurely obese middle age he had failed to match up to the exacting standards demanded by the Kincardineshire Aryan Front and had no alternative but to join the White Doric Purity Party whose selection criteria are less rigorous. Had the bus been mine I would have torn up his ticket and thrown him off.
    There were surreal elements to the conversation as the party reminisced over previous social highlights; ‘Do you mind the power cut in the church when we had to start the pew in the dark?’All of them joined in the memory apart from a woman in her forties with Down’s syndrome. She sat morose and remote from the others. It seemed unlikely that her plight had gone unnoticed. Even when they reached her stop she left the bus without anyone saying goodbye. What had she done up the hills that merited this heavy sanction?
    When the next member left she had shouts of ‘Nae pubs Nancy!’ ringing in her ears.
    The bus drew into a lay-by for no apparent reason. Perhaps Black Eye wished he had used the facilities in Johnshaven or else his mistress was a gypsy traveller. The truth was less mundane: it was a secret rendezvous where drivers swapped the road kill they had collected en route and discussed recipes. Not too fanciful if you look at an archived review from
The Guardian
:
    ‘For most, a squashed hedgehog or flattened badger lying on the side of the road is a tragic sight – for Arthur Boyt it is an opportunity for a free, tasty and nutritious meal. Mr Boyt has spent the last 50 years scraping carcasses from the side of the road and chucking them, together with a few herbs and spices, into his cooking pot.
    The retired civil servant has sampled the delights of weasel, rat and cat. His most unusual meal was a greater horseshoe bat, which he reckons is not dissimilar in taste to gray squirrel, if the comparison helps. Fox tends to repeat on him. He has tucked into labrador, nibbled at otter and could not resist trying porcupine when he came across a spiky corpse on holiday in Canada.’
    The idea of finding a dead porcupine in Aberdeenshire is of course, silly. The reason for the stop was soon apparent. There are fewer rituals more elaborate than that performed when one driver, his shift finished, hands over to a colleague. Log books, badges, keys, secret nuclear code, papal secrets and best wishes are exchanged with all due solemnity. Why this happened in the middle of nowhere remains a mystery.
    Boswell was bored by the journey to Aberdeen; ‘We had tedious driving, and were somewhat drowsy.’ Johnson seems to have endured the final 25 miles with more equanimity; ‘We were satisfied with the company of each other – as well riding in the chaise as sitting at an inn.’
Aberdeen
    Johnson may have regretted the comparison as there was not a room to be had at the New Inn at the junction of Union Street and King Street in Aberdeen. It was only when some minor lackey recognised that Boswell was the son of the