Ode to the Nitelink

A couple of days ago I mentioned Megabus, which led to me getting tagged by a blogging Megabus driver, which in turn led me to finding the Bloodbus blog which promises:

I am a bus driver in Glasgow, Scotland. When my passengers misbehave, I blog about it!

It turns out that there’s a small but significant subculture of bus driver bloggers, and Bloodbus - blogging about the late night routes - is at the Travis Bickle end of things. A sample:

Mr Face Muncher, the Tennent’s lager swilling junkie, and his miserable smack-hag, The Scream, had just engaged in the kind of blow out that made Hiroshima look like the mere flush of a toilet. The Scream had assured Face Muncher of a quick death as she ran screaming down Jamaica Street and I think she meant it. Now, with Face Muncher lying lifeless on the floor, I hoped that The Scream had fulfilled her promise. How? By dressing up her own can of Tennent’s to look like her junkie foe and jinxing it with junkie voodoo. Right now, she would be squatting in some grotty alleyway, stabbing at it with vengeful zeal while spitting, “I AM a lady! I am NOT a tramp!”

Naturally, it got me thinking about the Nitelink, because those drivers could hold a mirror up to our souls - and what we would see reflected back would be two parts vodka and Red Bull rowdiness to one part puke-encrusted and comatose shame. But I don’t know that there any blogging bus drivers here. In the meantime, and partly because I can’t think of any new ways of saying it, here’s a piece about the Nitelink that I wrote a couple of years ago (hence the McDowell reference. How we miss him.):

In a socially sanitised Ireland, keen to purge itself of hedonism and excess, there is still one place where anything goes. A place where laws of social etiquette are flouted. And where the heating doesn’t always work. It is called the Nitelink. And if Michael McDowell wants to do something about it, he can drive the bus himself.

There will never be a café culture on board the Nitelink. It won’t become a welcome lift home after a hard night of sipping latté at a poetry reading. It is for people who go for one quick pint after work, only to stay for several slow ones and miss every bus and train home until they finally have no choice but to stumble into sense and wobble towards a Nitelink.

It is a party bus. The last venue on a night out, rattling through the suburbs as at least one happy drunk conducts fellow passengers in umpteen verses of ‘Stop the Bus, I Want a Wee-wee’. And Dublin Bus, which operates the service, knows its reputation. A couple of years back, its advertising slogans included such double-entendre delights as ‘At the end of the night it’s a guaranteed ride’ and ‘What comes more quickly than your boyfriend?’

It’s Club 18-30 at 1.30. And 2.30. And finally at 3.30.

As with every party, there are always those who can’t take the pace. Anyone who regularly uses the Nitelink knows what it is like to wake up and have absolutely no idea where you are, what time it is and whether you’re alive or dead. You rest your eyes for just a moment and, the next thing you know, the driver is shaking you awake in a garage at the end of the line, miles from home, at five in the morning and with the rain pelting down outside. There are urban legends telling of passengers who have taken an early Nitelink, fallen asleep and been carried up and down the route until waking just in time to get off at their stop - only three journeys and four hours later than originally anticipated.

Typically, each Nitelink has at least one sober passenger, who will inevitably end up sitting beside the drunkest and discover the delights of having him fall asleep on their shoulder: an immovable lump, dribbling like a baby until he wakes, realises it’s his stop and scrambles over the seats and into the night.

Let’s not forget that the driver is an unsung hero, steering this most obliging of paddy wagons. It’s understandable that he just wants to get home as quickly as possible. There are times when the bus doesn’t stop as such, only slows down just enough for passengers to step off, so that they roll from the Nitelink like cowboys jumping from a train. You cannot blame the driver. He must be getting quadruple pay, time in lieu, extra pension credits and extensive post-traumatic-stress counselling to drive these things. And, no, he will not stop the bus because you want a wee-wee.