The bus-stop was outside the cathedral. I had been looking at the Mappa
Mundi, with its rivers out of Paradise, and at the chained library,
where a party of clergymen had gotten in easily, but where I had waited
an hour and cajoled a verger before I even saw the chains. Now, across
the street, a cinema advertised the Six-Five Special and a cartoon
version of Gulliver’s Travels. The bus arrived, with a driver and
conductress deeply absorbed in each other. We went out of the city, over
the old bridge, and on through the orchards and the green meadows and
the fields red under the plough. Ahead were the Black Mountains, and we
climbed among them, watching the steep fields end at the grey walls,
beyond which the bracken and heather and whin had not yet been driven
back. To the east, along the ridge, stood the line of grey Norman
castles; to the west, the fortress wall of the mountains. Then, as we
still climbed, the rock changed under us. Here, now, was limestone, and
the line of the early iron workings along the scarp. The farming
valleys, with their scattered white houses, fell away behind. Ahead of
us were the narrower valleys: the steel rolling-mill, the gasworks, the
grey terraces, the pitheads. The bus stopped, and the driver and
conductress got out, still absorbed. They had done this journey so
often, and seen all its stages. It is a journey, in fact, that in one
form or another we have all made.
{decent .pdf} from The Everyday Life Reader, ed. Ben Highmore (London: Routledge, 2002).