choose your own adventure

Okay. You're in London. It's a rainy St. Patrick's Day-ish Saturday night, and in pursuit of cultural authenticity you've spent the evening listening to a seisun and talking to a guy called Eoghan in a pub that's so Irish there are more moon faces than an almanac.

Suddenly you realise that the clock didn't fancy waiting for you to finish singing along to "Dirty Old Town," so you plunge forth into the drizzle and navigate puddled sidewalks to the Wandsworth Town rail station. Your boyfriend may or may not pause on the way to find a non-CCTV-monitored peeing spot.

You run up the stairs to the platform but it's too late - in fact it's way too late - and you've missed the last train by more than ten minutes. So, how to get o'er the river and across the city to your now distant and seemingly inaccessible home in Camden Town?

First you hike to Putney Bridge, scrutinising every bus stop you pass until you find one that goes to Kensal Rise. Not ideal, but it'll work... except it only stops once an hour. Luckily fate smiles, and within five minutes the relevant double-decker pulls up. You clamber on and spend the journey into Fulham scouring the A-Z, trying to figure out whether you should take a chance that the Lancaster Gate bus runs all night or give in and trek to Victoria.

Meanwhile the bus pulls to a halt in Chelsea, and randomly you notice that the stop also serves the 14, which will get you almost all the way home! Back on the sidewalk you realise you're on the wrong side, and when you glance across the street there's a bus already pulled up. "Which is it? What does it say on the front?" "Warren Street! GO!" You shove your boyfriend into oncoming traffic and, thanks to a girl who is rooting through her purse to find her Oyster card, you're safely on the 14.

It's a long ride through vacant South Kensington and around Hyde Park, past dark, imposing embassies and silent shops, and as you approach the eerie flickering neon of Piccadilly Circus an American girl squawks into her phone, "So I was like, you don't even like me a little bit, do you, and he was like, it's not that, but it's like, I just think I'm like, too crazy for him, you know?"

When you stop at Warren Street you sprint for the convoy of two Camden-bound buses immediately in front, and even though they see you running - because you know they see you running - they pull away from the curb, smug and cold. So you wait, trying to forget that the rain has shrunk the canvas in your shoes so you can literally feel the blisters forming, and telling yourself that at least the 29 stops really close to your house, as though that will make up for the fifteen minutes of vomit, fights, and mobile phone music that is more or less guaranteed at this point in the night.

The light changes and you squint down the road, certain that the approaching double-decker will be a totally useless 88. As it draws nearer, however, and you make out the number on the front, you think of Ovid, of Phaeton, of Apollo's golden chariot climbing high into a cloudless blue sky...

...it's the 134.

In fifteen puke- and chav-free minutes you've safely arrived on Kentish Town Road. As you disembark, you hear a Spanish girl note that taking the bus is very scenic. Her English boyfriend replies, "Oh yeah, it's way better than the Tube."

soundtrack: Fat Children - Jarvis Cocker

stages i have crashed

February 2003: The D4 at Maxwell's in Hoboken, NJ

June 2004: Black 47 at Connolly's in New York, NY

June 2007: Brakes at Mercury Lounge in New York, NY

February 2008: Dropkick Murphys at Brixton Academy in London, UK

soundtrack: Margarita - Brakes