  Gale force winds in London last night. Flash floods. Five centimetres of rain in five minutes. Five seconds. Umbrellas out in force on the Strand, twisted inside out like broken bat wings in the breeze. Stuck on the top of the 91 it didn't feel like a hurricane. Stuck in traffic, true, trawling through the back streets behind Euston and Kings Cross at a creep.
Buses are huge beasts, cars should give way or be crushed. Instead they block the lanes, parking across the red tarmac, glared at by drivers and passengers and barraged by blaring horns. The symphony of long honks and sharp toots and beep-beep-beeeeps, stacatto, and the thumping percussion of hands smacked on steering wheels. The tick of the indicator as the double deckers pull out into reluctant streams of commuters: give way, we have a valuable cargo on board. The crawl up Caledonian Road. The engine was switched off as the driver ejected a troublemaker, and there was near-mutiny on the upper decks. Fuck's sakes hissed and sighs heaved, restless shifting jostling seat pairs. When I got off at the bus stop on Seven Sisters Road I was gasping for rain-fresh air. Pounding headache from the air pressure hardly soothed from pressing my forehead against the cool, vibrating glass. Pushing past glum passengers waiting for alternate routes and crowding round the doors as they creaked back, jumping on through the exit only when the driver stopped them crushing through at the front. The road was clear as i started to cross, lights green in the distance. And growling white, bright, hurtling towards me as I trotted across.
Pausing midstep at the whine of an engine, the rumble of tyres on smoothed surface. It came fast, powerful, as I gaped and dragged my feet round and skipped frantically to the other side. Full throttle, headlamp beam blinding in the heavy grey air. I swear it swerved before it reached me, milliseconds later, sucking up the intervening space like a vacuum. My hair blew in the wind and the empty space of its passage. 
