London Rental Opportunity of the Week: A Fucking Bus in Brighton

What is it? A fucking bus. 
Where is it? Brighton – but, then, such is the beauty of a bus, isn't it? That it could be anywhere. The possibilities are without end. But you do definitely have to go to Brighton to get it. That is unavoidable. 
What is there to do locally? What, in Brighton? Go to the pebble beach. Eat an ice cream. Go to that good Mexican place. Walk around those bent, sagging, extremely fucked up-looking streets with all shops on them. Have an exhilarating poppers experience in the bathroom of any given pub or bar. Live. 
Alright, how much are they asking? £24,950, which the keen-eyed amongst you will notice is not a monthly rental fee, nor is this opportunity in London. As the days grind by we get ever further from God's Light – God's Light in this case being "the strict format on which London Rental Opportunity of the Week is built". Listen: do you want the content or not? Shut the fuck up then.

Things that happen on buses, an unordered list:

– Cliff Richard goes on an exceptionally wholesome singing holiday;
– Someone embarks on a racist rant and someone else records the whole thing for posterity and the clip goes viral and the internet joins forces to find the racist and then find their place of work and then call their boss somewhere between 80 and 100 times an hour telling them they should fire their racist employee for being racist, and then the employee is fired (the excuse given is "for being racist", but truly half the time the sheer inconvenience of answering the phone a lot is what tips it, like if being racist was a fireable offence then half your office would be out on their arse, let's be Fucking Real here), and then the racist does a bleating no-fee interview with a London free paper doing a sulky face and going "I lost my job", and still people never learn; people never do learn not to be racist;
– Every single school child in London eats a chicken wing combo box while sat, all of them, thousands of them, on the exact seat next to me;
– Someone stands at the top of the stairs and rings the bell while waving goodbye to their friend and the bus brakes abruptly and they just fly backwards and down into the wall at the bottom of the stairwell, just absolutely unconscious with it, and the abrupt change in status – from "upright cheerful human person" to "concussed pile of meat" – is so rapid that I cannot stop laughing about it for maybe eight to 12 minutes after the event (Camden, N134, '09);
– If you glean anything from the boasts of the Backseat of the Bus Crew (and as a Frontseat of the Bus loser in the rigid school bus hierarchy to which we all adhere – cool and hard kids at the back, fuckin losers at the front – I can only take their words for it) you have both smoked your first cigarette and taken part in your first fingering on the backseat of the bus; again, though, citation needed;
– Someone lets their kid ding the bell repeatedly for ten stops instead of just buying them a fucking GameBoy like any other responsible parent;
– Some old woman who is mighty and cogent enough to haul like 15 shopping bags all held in her hands at once absolutely demands your seat from you, even though there are available seats nearer the driver in clear view of her that she stomped past;
– Someone sprints for the bus in torrential rain and in the dark frigid swirl of the night, and they are panting, this person, they are clearly cold, their coat clutched around them in drowned desperation, and – click – their Oyster card doesn't work, so the bus driver leans close to the plastic partition dividing Us from Them and bellows "GET TO FUCK OFF MY BUS THEN";
– Dude in suit who smells exceptionally of piss sits next to you (Dalston, 67, Literally This Morning);
– A single beer bottle rolls all along and down the top deck of the bus for the entire hour and 20 commute you have home without anyone picking it up, you included;
– A whole mess of discarded copies of Metro part to reveal they were hiding like 60 torn up ketchup packages;
– You miss your stop and for some reason the next stop is about a quarter-mile beyond where you need to be, and you very clearly rang the bell and made eye contact with the driver in the mirror, and yet still the driver did not stop, and also now the bus is in traffic and he won't open the doors to let you out despite being stationary because "it's the law, boss";

Things that do not happen on buses:

– Tranquil restive sleep.

So to Brighton, now, where on offer to you today is a bus. Now, we must caveat this with the usual "this, if you like that sort of thing, is fine" – different strokes, so the saying goes, are for different folks; and that if you want to live on a converted bus, live the road life! The freedom! A back-to-basics bus life you cannot imagine! – then that is cool: go for it, good. In most LROTWs, we can condemn them because they are a single room in a dank flat, and nobody's lifestyle choice is "have you ever thought about paying £650 a month to not be able to reheat chicken?" But when it's something like this, the edges are more flexible. Some people don't want to live in bricks and mortar. That is OK. I will allow anyone who is not me to do that.

This really pissed me off, though:

Ah: no. It doesn't work like that. Living on a bus is not a decent like-for-like alternative to buying a flat, really, is it? Like yes: if I absolutely had to live on a bus – curse from an ancient witch condemning me and my son and my son's son to be forever locked onto buses and made to sleep there, that sort of thing – then this is an acceptable bus to have to live, sleep and die on. It is nicely furnished, there are wooden floors. You'll never quite escape the feeling that every single surface has schoolchildren's chewing gum on it – or someone has carved their name into every one of your windows with the point of a compass; you will never shake the idea that the back of the bus has seen some gnarly, gnarly stuff, the fumes of which have worked their way into the very panels of it, the floor and the carpet – but yes, you could feasibly live on this bus. It's just things like this always make me wary that we might be looking at a grim flash of the future. Because let us all be honest here: the housing crisis is absolutely out of control and there's absolutely no way out of it at all. That's the good news. And so, eventually, we are all going to have to branch out and find alternative means and ways of living. Essentially, successive governments have fucked up in such a way that we have to redefine the very basic concept of four walls and a ceiling to live in. Buzzfeed recently published an article of people doing just that – people living off-grid in the woods, on a fibreglass boat, in a van – and the whole thing just made me feel really uneasy. These people are the outliers now, sure, but soon they won't be: soon a few tepid footsteps will turn into a stampede. "Just move out of London, mate" isn't quite the solution it once was: scrapping the idea of a house entirely is slowly becoming the more viable option. And then, slowly, we become more normalised to living on a bus. A big fucking purple bus. A purple bus. A purple fucking bus.

@joelgolby (h/t @GraemePeacock)

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