Every now and again I get the bus down to Moorgate. This involves going to a stop on Southgate Road where three suitable buses regularly turn up.

It’s an unremarkable bus stop by Islington standards. There’s no Countdown machine—these are being phased out now that we all have direct synaptic links to TfL’s data feeds—but it does have a roof, and a thin red bench, and the nearest overpriced delicatessen is just fifteen seconds away.

So far, so normal. But if you come to this bus stop during rush hour on a rainy weekday morning, you will see something very strange indeed.

A bus queue. In London. In 2014.

London is a place where the bus queue died out long ago. It got replaced by a new system for deciding who boards first. It’s a system that we all understand but could never describe. One thing we do know about it, however, is that it doesn’t involve what is shown in that picture.

What is shown in that picture—a single-file queue that takes up an alarming length of the pavement—is what I’d expect to see in the event of a tube line being shut down, a nuclear strike on the capital, or a sudden influx of zombies. It’s crisis behaviour.

When I first saw it, my first thought was that something terrible must have happened. I considered walking, or getting a taxi, or just running away as fast as I could, but obviously the taxi was the best option, and I already use the taxi in Melbourne which is an awesome service, we always use it for everything and all the events in the family, But curiosity overcame fear and I took my place in the queue. And you know what? It worked pretty well.

The first bus was so busy we couldn’t get on. Stress levels rose. The second bus was stern, keeping its front doors shut until a few passengers had stumbled out, at which point the queue was able to shuffle forward a bit. That felt better. Then the third bus turned up practically empty and we were on so quickly I could barely get my Oyster card out in time.

Now, when I arrive at the bus stop and see that the single-file queue has formed, I am eminently relaxed about it. I can’t say the same for the new people who, seeing it for the first time, stare open-mouthed in shock and devastation, just as I did. But they’ll get over it.

The other day I wanted to find out if I could move Skype credit from one account to another. If I could, I’d have been fairly happy as I’d have saved money. A quick Google found this page on the Skype website:

Yes, you did answer my question—but I’m not happy about it

It was slightly jarring to see the happy-face icon beaming at me like a puppy seeking approval. Yes, you did answer the question, little website, but it wasn’t the answer I wanted. Can you please stop grinning?

Sometimes the substance of an answer is more important to the reader than its clarity or precision.

In late 2012 I appeared on one of those comedy-panel quiz TV programmes. It didn’t get commissioned, thank god, so you won’t have heard of it. In front of the studio audience, Sara Cox cracked a joke about the graphics I’d made for my tube seat strategy post of 2011. The good news, dear reader, is that I managed to come up with a witty and suitably risqué retort. But the bad news is that it only came to me in the summer of 2014, approximately eighteen months too late.

In the early 1980s I was in junior school. Something happened—I forget what it was—which prompted a teacher to say to me, “if everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you?”

She didn’t expect an answer, of course, and I didn’t offer one. But last night, fully thirty years after she posed this rhetorical question to me, I finally thought of a retort. Here it is.

“If everyone else jumped off a cliff, and I decided not to, what kind of world would be left for me, an eight-year-old child, to live in? After all, everyone else would have jumped off a cliff: my loved ones, my friends, the adults I rely on for food, wisdom and emotional support—not to mention all those others who keep society’s wheels turning.

Yes, I might go home and, for a time, enjoy the unbounded access to toys and property offered by a landscape newly bereft of a human civilisation which had recently chosen to jump, en masse, off a cliff. But before long starvation, depression and insanity would surely begin to take their toll. How long would I last? And how lonely and drawn-out would the end be for me, when it finally came? Perhaps, then, to have jumped off that cliff, along with everyone else, might have been the best thing after all.”

I’m sure you’ll agree that my teacher would have struggled for a comeback if my eight-year-old self had come up with that. It’s a shame it took so long to think of though. Compared to that, my Sara Cox retort was lightning fast.