Waits and measures

Everybody knows that the top three things that France has ever offered the world are croissants, Vanessa Paradis and the word 'triage'. The last of these comes from the verb 'trier' meaning to pick, choose or sort and refers to the system employed in accident and emergency departments all over the world in order to ensure that any patient wheeled in at eighty miles per hour on a gurney, accompanied by ten family members and a hauntingly morose hooded figure wielding a scythe, gets priority over some fool who needs his ears syringed before giving a concert he thinks is important but nobody else does (it's a long story but I genuinely couldn't hear a thing).

All of which brings me to bus stops. Fascinating places aren't they? Not least because they're so often the scene of what we might justifiably call 'bus stop triage'. This is a kind of choreographed dance routine which happens smoothly and organically because everyone instinctively knows the rules: it's first come first served unless things happen which mean that it's not first come, first served.

Just the day before yesterday I was waiting for a bus in the El Palo district of Malaga. Initially, it was just me and a teenage girl in gargantuan headphones. She'd arrived first, so that was easy - she'd get on the bus first. Then the fun began. An old woman with a walking stick hobbled into view. I duly gave her my seat and the teenage girl flashed me a glance that said “I know, I know, I'm second in line now.” Or it might have been, “Are you staring at my headphones, baldy?” Not sure. Anyway, next it was the turn of a young mother with a baby in a pram and a toddler in tow to turn up. Headphones - that was her name by then - was third in the queue now and we all knew it.

Soon after, the bus appeared on the horizon just as a man who was ninety years old if he was a day, wheezed in. Crumbs, this was a tricky one for the young mother and the old woman - bus stop triage angst of the highest order. Meanwhile, Headphones and I were comfortable in defeat. The bus pulled up. We stepped aside. The three people in the podium positions nodded and gesticulated at each other very nobly, if for a little too long before the old woman made her move and took gold, the old man settling for silver and the young mother bronze. I followed Headphones up the step to pay the driver and we all five found a seat, poised to go about our respective days.

I decided to go for coffee and a croissant. God bless the French.

www.peteredgerton.com