The Only Girl in the World – Arcola Theatre, 8^th May 2008

We started this journey with (or rather, without) some cancelled trains. Fortunately, another train was late, and turned up at the same time as the cancelled one. They should just have kept quiet about it; I wouldn’t have noticed.

But I did notice a splendid bit of stock public transport theatre. It was a warm night, and as we waited for our late/cancelled train(s), two young ladies joined us on the platform, clad in immaculate, not to say glaring, white. They walked towards the seating and gave it a very close inspection, and decided they would have to stand.

I had again jousted with the TfL journey planner. And I won! At least I thought I had, but it planted a sting in its tail, of which more later. TfL wanted me to go mostly by bus. The journey planner site ought to have a tick box to say whether you’re a native-born Londoner or not. I’m not, and going somewhere I’ve never been before by bus is very stressful: how will I know I’ve got there? On the train, it’s easy to tell when I get to the right station. It’s usually easy to identify the preceding station. So no stress. But buses, at night, in strange places? No, thank you.

Which is why I got to see the new bridge outside Liverpool Street station from underneath. And how the Planner planted a sting in my tail. It will show you an interactive map of the interchanges and walks. But it will only print a different map (I think). Which is how the dirty swine landed me outside Hackney Downs station knowing I had only to walk North-west to bump into Stoke Newington High Street. Actually I needed to walk West-north-west to bump into the right bit of Stoke Newington High Street. So to see this splendid performance, I really did have to go the extra mile. One day, I will put the TfL planner in its place.

On this unexpected diversion, I discovered another thing that the planner had been ominously silent about. It wanted me to take the 149 bus most of the way. I spotted one on my detour, and it’s a bendy bus. Now I am always game for an adventure, but a chap should be warned about such things.

‘The Only Girl in the World’ subtitles itself ‘A Play of Jack the Ripper’, which was helpful, since it was a blend of real life and history, with rather more real life than history. The subtitle allowed the history to be suitably unobtrusive. There was enough tragedy in the real life without overemphasising the awful bit. I thought it was rather good.

It was in ‘Studio 2’ of the Arcola. I must go back and see the main venue, because Studio 2 is exactly my idea of fringe: 50 seats at most, round 2 sides of the room, with the distinct sense that beyond the crumbling walls, everything else had probably already crumbled.

There was a cast of three. Well, two and a soundtrack, actually. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a play with a sound track before, but the integral fiddler worked very well (and played very well, too). The leading lady, playing a lady of the night, took a little while to win me over, but, in the end, she did the trick. The hero was a Billingsgate porter (foreman, if you please), and it was a diamond geezer of a performance.

Afterwards, inspired, no doubt by the diamond geezer, I decided to practice being a native Londoner and risk the 149 back to London Bridge. After all, I could hardly miss London Bridge. And so I did. My first trip on a bendy. I thought at first I had encountered a really cavalier driver who was simply not going to stop, but, in fact, she seemed to judge which bit of this very long bus was emptiest, and stopped the nearest door beside us.

It was a talking bus. It lied all the way to Shoreditch High Street: “route 149 to Edmonton Green”, it repeated insistently (probably just to unsettle me). Until our lady driver, showing her mettle, unceremoniously strangled it.

At which point it silently transported me down Memory Lane. As I gazed out the window in the midst of some terrible traffic jam, I slowly focused on a pub: the ‘Woodin’s Shades’ on Bishopsgate. And a moment of high farce and awful shame from 40 years ago came flooding back. The Shades is on the corner of Middlesex Street, which is, or was then, known to everyone as Petticoat Lane. Where I got my first job with the then great and mighty IBM: ‘Big Blue’ itself.

Although I joined just as they were leaving, so-to-speak. My first day was their last in Petticoat Lane, before moving to the swish new London Wall. So I joined for a farewell party in the Woodin’s Shades. It was probably the mixture of youth, career excitement, and first-day nerves, not forgetting a quite substantial quantity of beer, but my over-indulgence of the buffet re-emerged shortly afterwards in the Gents. I thought I was discrete and tidy, but the washbasin (no way I was going to put my head near a pub loo!) shared its outlet with everything else in the Gents. As I paused to wipe the cold sweat from my brow, the urinals flushed; and flooded all over the floor; accompanied by a recently liberated helping of slightly-used buffet. My last discrete and tidy act was to slip silently and unostentatiously into the night. And nobody ever knew.

A man who can survive a career start like that need have no fear of bendy buses.