I was witness to the birth of a bit of gossip today. That is to say, I was there when something happened, and then as both time and people moved on, I watched and heard it evolve into something quite different, culminating in my neighbour telling me the most extreme version of the story as I dropped off a letter which had come to me in error.

This afternoon, I was on the number six bus, on the way back from Oxford Street (a word to the wise: anyone wishing to retain their sanity should really avoid both street and bus during the ten days preceding Christmas. I should listen to my own advice more often). The bus was pretty packed when I got on at Marble Arch, so I was standing up downstairs as we headed down the Edgware Road. By the time we got to Church Road market, about halfway down, there was no room at all, practically. The conductor let a couple more on, and then had to tell the rest of the queue that they’d have to take the next one, sorry, he couldn’t let anyone else on.

One girl refused to get off the platform, saying “where’s the sign that says I can’t ride on here?” and being really foul and abusive to the conductor. She must have been in her early twenties, with a sharp, overstyled haircut and fingernails that announced their impracticality in flashes of silver. The conductor asked her to get off the bus, and she went completely postal on him, swearing and egging him to push her off the platform. He put his hand on her arm to move her off, and she lashed out, screaming “don’t fucking touch me!!” and then kicking and hitting him. She refused to get off. The rest of the passengers were by this point sighing and rolling their eyes in classic British public transport manner, being disgruntled and self-righteous without actually being involved.

To cut a long story short, the driver stopped the engine and got out of his cab. The bus behind stopped too, and its driver and conductor got involved as well. Most of the passengers from both buses got off and stood around in the road, waiting for somethign to happen. The girl, meanwhile, not satisfied with holding up two hundred people, was still standing on the bus platform, swearing loudly at various elderly women who asked her nicely to please get off the bus and let them go home. She also made an enormous show of calling the police on her mobile and reporting the conductor for assaulting her. The conductor used the bus radio to call the police, reporting her for assaulting him. Two hundred people stood around and wondered when the next bus would arrive.

When the police arrived, they dispersed the crowd and got the whole situation under control fairly quickly. Most people got onto subsequent buses, including me. On the number 16, the whole of the lower deck was buzzing with theories about what had happened - why were there two buses and two police cars and a huge crowd of people in the middle of the street on a Saturday afternoon? That’s when I heard the first variation: a conductor had pushed a woman off a bus.

From there, as people got on and off the at stops all the way up Maida Vale, the story morphed gradually within my earshot: a woman had been pushed off a bus; a woman had fallen off a bus; a woman had died falling off a bus; a woman had died on the bus.

When I got home, after attacking the supermarket (Fool! Fool!), I handed my downstairs neighbour his letter, and he said “hey, did you heard what happened on Edgware Road today? An old woman was found dead of old age on the number six. She was sitting in the back seat of the top deck and she had all her possessions with her - she was on holiday from Scotland, I heard. Apparently she’d been on it since Aldwych; the conductor just thought she was having a nap.”

I just smiled.