Bare cheek: Have your say

Ticket prices on buses have increased in price again, the third such increase in the last 18 months, despite passenger numbers increasing year on year, and many people are questioning why this should be so. But what do YOU, the Bare Cheek readers, think?

When I was a boy you could get from Crawley to Woodingdean on the bus for a halfpenny. Mind you, you could buy a house for a pound back then and a state-of-the-art Lear Jet only cost fourpence.
Miranda Percival, Coldean

I am proud to say that I always walk to work. Unfortunately I work in Dundee, which means that each daily “commute” takes three weeks, but that’s life!
Graham Jobs, Aldrington

I’d like to suggest that other disgruntled Brightonians do what I have done, and buy their own bus. I purchased one, a British Leyland 1985 double decker, last year and now I drive myself to work in it every day, charging myself a very reasonable fare.
Simon Amis, Hove

Perhaps the solution is to make buses much smaller, with fewer seats and no driver. These miniature buses could be privately-owned, with the passenger driving just himself and perhaps a member of his family or a friend to their destination. These new mini-buses could be known as “cars.”
J. Clarkson, Woodingdean

I have worked out that by getting a “short hop” fare from Mile Oak Community centre and running the three miles to Churchill Square and getting another “short hop” to St. James’s Street I am able to save 20p a day. I save these 20ps in a large jar in my bedroom and when I have enough I’m going to blow the lot on the strongest pornography legally available.
Greg Merryfield, Patcham

It is surely only typical that we don’t have a price hike for ages and then three come at once!
Mark Friendless, Kemp Town

More reasons to be cheerful

Let’s face it again: times is hard, things look black – harder and blacker than they did when we wrote the first one of these – and the flickering lamps of our future are blowing out one by one… I don’t mean the lamps are having a slap-up feed. I mean blown out by the wind. Anyway, we here at Bare Cheek realise that our first attempts to cheer you all up were perhaps not wholly successful. But, never ones to be downhearted, we’re at it again with another list of indisputable boons to help rally you round and gird up your loins.

1 Closing your eyes, putting your hands over your ears and stamping your feet while going ‘Nah nah nah!’ is quite an effective way of shutting out the world for as long as you’re prepared to keep it up.

2 You know Toni Basil – of ‘Hey Mickey’ fame? Well, she also played a bit-part in the Mardi Gras sequence of ‘Easy Rider’ long before she was famous. And bloomin’ lovely she was in it too. You should check it out. Skip the rest of the film, though.

3 Because of the depression, there’ll probably be a lot fewer British films made for the foreseeable future. Almost none.

4 That automaton in the cobblers’ window on Hove’s Church Road is still hammering away at the same bleeding nail he’s been hitting for nigh on 20 years with no progress – bless him! He does make me laugh.

5 Al Read’s routine about the bloke with the big dog. If you haven’t heard it you should track it down on Youtube or something.

6 Every so often, just occsionally maybe, the man or woman you see on the bus/train/tube whom you momentarily fancy is thinking the same thing about you. Very rarely, but it does happen. Unless you’re Jeremy Clarkson.