Waiting for Godot - and the Wightman Bus

In a recent 'Irish Times' piece columnist Fintan O'Toole slates planned bus service cuts as affecting mainly areas with large numbers of elderly residents for whom Dublin Bus receives a fixed State subsidy: since those areas are not a potential source of extra revenue they have a low priority for the bus company.

"Leave aside the bare necessites of life like food and shelter. Leave aside the tangled emotional thickets of love and affection. Otherwise, what is the single biggest cause of mundane misery for (Irish) people? Buses. Or rather the absence of buses.

Waiting for the bus that doesn't come isn't traumatic. It doesn't cause you physical pain or leave you emotionally scarred. But, repeated over and over, day after day, it is a powerful source of cumulative depression. Standing there in the (Wightman) weather, with a hypodermic wind injecting a metallic chill in your bones, you feel wretchedly, desolately forlorn.

The misery isn't just about the waiting, though there is something peculiarly unpleasant about the combination of tension and stasis. It is about the casually contemptuous message of powerlessness.

This is a public service that you're paying for twice, through your taxes and your fares. It is, literally, a connection to your city, your society, your country. And when it doesn't function, your society is telling you something. It is reminding you that you don't really matter, that even in the small, apparently banal things of life, you are a person of no importance. Public transport, in this respect, is a function, not just of an economy, but of a democracy. A decent service is a form of public respect. A bad one is a form of public disregard . . . ." And a non-existent one? Ah for that, my friend, you must reside on Wightman Road!

Yesterday, on my way from the corner shop, I was chatting to a couple who moved into their present Wightman home in 1957. They were told then by "some chap from the Council" that there would be a bus on Wightman within the year. She is in her 70's, her husband some years older and suffering the results of a fall from scaffolding about twenty years ago. They are delighted to have the W5 for regular trips to the Whittington. 'But tell "them"', she said, 'that we've been waiting 52 years for that bus on Wightman Road.'

Well, as Sam Beckett suggests, Godot may never arrive - but there again, s/he may well be on the Wightman Bus. Unlike Vladimir and Estragon (and indeed that elderly couple) most of my wightmaniac neighbours may not have been waiting together for half a century: it just feels like that. We meet daily opposite Mattison or Duckett or Pemberton, never sure whether we're just waiting to cross the road or for something more metaphysical, like the W1. In our joint exercise of fond hope to stave off bleak experience we stand and fidget with our orange covered badges of shame and identity.

'At least we have these,' says Neighbour 1. 'Vlad and Estragon would've been glad of these.'

'Oh yeah, our effin' Freedom Pass. Sure if they'd had their Freedom Pass Beckett might never have reached Act II - that's if an effin' Freedom Bus had ever turned up.'

'"Paid for by Your Local Council"', reads Neigbour 2. 'Isn't that very good of them?'

'No, it bloody well isn't. We're paying for it. £207.50 a month from me and the missus. But maybe you're one of these scroungers, on a state subsidy from my Council Tax?'
Neighbour 2 shifts uneasily and drifts off into a discourse on the concept of freedom.

'Well,' offers Neighbour 1, 'they give us the wheelie bin and the green crates ... And then there's Glyn and a couple of CPSOs and the odd chubb lock for free. That all costs a bit.'

'So, that still leaves £200 a month for this bloody pass. What use is a Freedom Pass if you're not free to use it on your own road? I'm off to look for a 29 or 141.'

[Exit OAE in an easterly direction. Neighbours 1&2 look after him nervously, then retire to the safety of their front rooms, gloomily content with their state of stasis.]