And if you get it wrong you'll get it right next time

'Shocked, so I am,’ I said.
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ Grange Girl replied.

It’s not often I get Grangey on the back foot so I pressed my advantage.

‘Shocked to the core.’
‘All right, don’t overdo it.’
‘But fancy you getting the 28 for the first time without consulting me.’
‘I don’t know what I was thinking. You are the Bus Oracle.’
‘Can I presume that your failure to properly plan your expedition resulted in disaster?’
Grangey stared at her toes. ‘It did.'

She looked so mortified that I softened. ‘Tell me all about it.’

Turns out Grangey had made the basic schoolboy error of thinking that the bus station was the correct place to catch the bus.

‘Oh Grangey!’
‘I know. How could I be so stupid?’

Luckily a helpful bus driver pulled up outside Waitrose, saw Grangey loitering confusedly on the wrong side of the street, and gently signalled to her by yelling, ‘Oi luv!’

Grangey darted across the Most Tricky Road To Cross In Lewes and, weeping with humiliation and relief, managed to buy her city saver. There was no further incident.

‘Well Grangey, if only you’d come to me,’ I said, fixing her with a Paddington hard stare. ‘I could have told you that the bus station is owned by a development company who are struggling to get planning permission to turn it into shops. That they wouldn’t let Brighton & Hove buses use the station for anything less than twenty grand and buses had to drop people off precariously on East Street, the Narrowest Pavement In Lewes, but that they have seen reason and the bus now stops there en route to Tunbridge Wells, though not on its westbound journey.’

Grangey sighed. ‘Yes, but I probably wouldn’t have remembered any of that. In fact I’ve already forgotten the beginning.’
‘All you have to remember is: next bus trip, speak to me. Promise?’

Grangey crossed her heart and hoped to die, and there we left it. Her to go home and brood over her rare error; me to hop smugly on the next 28 that juddered to a halt outside the British Heart Foundation. Twenty minutes later I was in a city where a banner announced a ‘Festival of Shopping.’ I joined in with a whoop.

Later I easily caught a 29 from outside M&S, and drifted off into a self-satisfied reverie about how much I knew about public transport. I awoke with a start to find that we were going the wrong way, heading through the Cuilfail Tunnel at great speed, rather than towards the prison. Apparently, explained the driver when I shouted at him, this was to avoid some silly roadworks. I would have enjoyed the irony of having to get out at the bus station had I not been so cross. I trudged home all the way across town, avoiding passing Grange Girl’s door. I’m sure she wouldn’t have gloated, but I couldn’t take the risk.

Beth Miller, 24th May 2011. Published in VivaLewes.com and in Viva Lewes magazine, August 2011 issue.

Oo-hoo, everybody’s talking ’bout the new kid in town

‘I’m really liking this hip new Lewes’, said Hoxton Mum, raising a blue and white patterned cup to her lips. ‘This Lewes 2.0’.

‘What are you on about?’ I looked round to try and pinpoint the source of this newness. Sure, we were in Baltica, which had only been open a few weeks, but I couldn’t see what was so 2.0 about it. We were there because Hoxton Mum had put a temporary veto on Bills, her habitual hangout, owing to a recent skirmish over the amount of tapenade in a goats cheese and sunblushed tomato panini.

Hoxie waved the July issue of Viva at me. ‘Have you not seen this?’ She flicked through the pages. ‘Hush-hush cinema? Can’t believe that’s come here. We used to go to Secret Cinema in Shoreditch.’ She sighed. ‘Happy days. Even though we saw rather a lot of Andy Warhol films. And lookie here: this Hollywood red carpet thing with cabaret and burlesque.’

I scanned the magazine. ‘It seems to be taking place in the bus station, Hoxie.’

‘Yeah, totally edgy. And then there are all those parties down at the Zu Studios.’

‘What parties?'

Hoxton Mum, Cycle Girl and Absent-Minded Girl exchanged little smiles.

‘I tell you’, Hoxie went on, delicately slurping her Polish soup, ‘Lewes wasn’t gritty and cool like this when I first moved here.’

‘That was less than two years ago’, Cycle Girl pointed out.

‘So? That’s a lot longer than plenty of people who think they own the place. Why, there’s a mum at Django’s school who’s still unpacking, and she keeps banging on about the creeping gentrification of the High Street. There’s another family who have yet to sign the contract on their Wallands house, and they’re already big in Transition Town.’

I asked Cycle Girl how long she’d lived in Lewes. ‘Ten years. Practically a native.’

Absent-Minded Girl spilled tea onto her shoes but didn’t notice. ‘We’ve been here six years but of course, we’ve got cousins in Brighton so we’re as good as indigenous.’ She might be a bit vague but she knows some big words.

‘I’ve been here since 2005’, I joined in, ‘But we were in Barcombe before that for seven years and that counts double. And we used to come to Brighton on holiday when I was a kid, so I’ve basically always lived here. Apart from twenty years in Essex.’

There was a silence.

‘How long’, asked Hoxton Mum quietly, ‘do you have to live here before you’re accepted as a Lewesian?’

‘Ten years’, said Cycle Girl.

‘Six years’, said Absent-Minded Girl.

‘Three generations’, I said.

‘Anyway’, said Cycle Girl, ‘the correct term is Rook, not Lewesian.’

‘I knew that’, Hoxton Mum said quickly.

Then Born and Bred Boy walked past, saw us sitting at the window table and came to join us.
‘What are you talking about?’ he asked.

‘Nothing’, we chorused, in agreement for once.

Beth Miller, 29th June 2010. Published in VivaLewes.com and in Viva Lewes magazine, August 2010.