How I make use of the time spent waiting for buses which turn up late - Ian McMillan

I’ve trained myself to savour those minutes of lateness because they’re a kind of time outside time, a time that, although I’ll never get it back, is a time I might as well spend looking around.

It was raining earlier but now it’s stopped and there’s a rainbow over Grimethorpe. I stand a little way away from the bus stop it looks almost as though the windmills next to the big warehouse on the bypass are about to slice the rainbow up. If the bus had been on time I might have missed the rainbow.

Mind you, if it had been early I would have missed it.

I glance at the app on my phone again and the bus is still six minutes late. I start to think about the word ‘bypass’ and what an interesting word it is. Maybe it would make more sense to say ‘passby’ but somehow ‘bypass’ sounds better. It feels like an ancient word, one that you might encounter on a byway.

My mind, idling like an engine, starts to play with the word ‘bypass’; I imagine some passers-by sitting in a layby on the bypass before they walk down a byway.

I wonder if a Yorkshire bypass is a Eeeebygumpass and if you spelled it buypass you could also have a sellpass.

I’m still waiting. The rainbow has faded.

Because I’m waiting and my brain is in neutral gear all kind of things flutter through my mind and then back out of the other side, barely scratching the surface.

What was the name of that television programme set in Lancashire that my kids used to love when they were little? It was about a lad and his brother and sister and he had a dog.

The programme’s theme tune was played by a brass band and the feel of the show was homely and cosy and I admit (although I never said this to my kids at the time or since) that I loved it as much as they did, or maybe more.

That’s what happens when you’re waiting: you find yourself involved in a kind of endless pub quiz, where all kinds of questions on all kinds of topics present themselves to you and they get you thinking or, to be more precise, they get you pondering which is like thinking when you’re waiting.

Who scored the second goal for Barnsley when they beat Bradford City in 1997 to win promotion to the Premier League?

I know that Clint Marcelle got the first but who got the second?

And what was the name of that show with the dog and the brassy theme?

Of course I could just go on an my phone and look up the answers but that feels like cheating; this is my waiting time, my time when I don’t really have to be anywhere and my brain can just clutter up like an attic.

I see the bus turning the corner down the road. Waiting time is almost over. Those six empty minutes that I filled with pure nowt.

Johnny Briggs! That was the name of the TV show! Paul Wilkinson! He got the goal!

The rainbow has returned. Time to get on the bus.