I shall shut up about buses now. Not permanently, but certainly for a while, because I have been overdoing them of late. Indeed I've been overdoing them this year, in the same way I overdid the tube last year, as a kind of recurring feature.
But then it's been The Year Of The Bus, TfL's intermittent festival of all things bus-related, and I've merely been jumping on the bandwagon. As the year progressed they opened up bus garages, they slapped stickers on bus stops, and they pretended the New Bus For London had been called the New Routemaster all along. Probably best of all they closed off Regent Street for a whole afternoon and filled it with a century's worth of buses, which is the sort of thing that ought to happen more often, but not too often else it wouldn't be so special. The whole YOTB thing peaked somewhat in midsummer, being much more low key before and since, but in reality every day's an important bus day in London.
I've taken you on three major bus odysseys this year, not as some form of low torture but because there's no better way to see the capital. And that's the whole of Greater London, including the bits where most people live rather than the flashy tourist stuff in the centre which most of the media generally focuses on. First I took you all the way around the edge, which took 25 buses in total, then I whizzed you round the North Circular, which took only five. Most recently I've treated you to 16 different lettered buses, selecting my routes to give as wide a geographical spread as possible, and enjoying the enormous variety they offered. I was amazed how many of these buses took me to parts of London I'd never visited before, but when the capital covers 1572 km² maybe that's not so surprising. Long may TfL's comprehensive, frequent, simple and reliable bus network continue, and let's hope that no butcher ever decides to thin out the service or lop off some outer branches 'to save money'.
There's no need to read all that lot again, obviously, but I like to make sure that all these series are safely stashed away in the correct order somewhere.
For the same reason, here's a complete list of ten years of route-by-route London bus reportage pulled together in one place, to act as a useful index. I've ridden and written about nearly 100 bus routes now... and, sorry, there are still so many more to go.
