Since Michèle Roberts moved south of the River Thames some sixteen years ago, the pages of her diaries have filled with notes about her bus travels. These brilliantly observed vignettes depict the city in all its rackety diversity as she lends an ear to fellow passengers of all ages and walks of life. Roberts is alive to the eccentric and the mundane alike, as well as to her own changeable perception, and captures the mercurial quality of metropolitan bus journeys in and out of south London.
Fleeting they may be, but these encounters on London buses are recorded with tremendous warmth and wit, and these diary extracts distil a lifetime of literary craft. 'Living in London, I relish travelling by bus. Sometimes sitting upstairs at the front, to get the view, as we zip or creep across the river.
Sometimes sitting downstairs, near the door, to get the fresh air. I prefer a bus journey to one on the tube because our progress, nosing through the traffic, works like a live line drawing, creates a live map, connecting the different parts of the city, letting me see it whole (...) I take a back seat much of the time, figuratively speaking. This is not a memoir so much as a sketch of people moving around our city, whether we feel we belong in it or not.' - Michèle Roberts, from the book's introduction