Probably nothing that couldn't be cured by a kind word from a beautiful woman

The train into work got stuck at signals awhile. I'd been staring at something on the embankment for a good five minutes before I realised what it was. It was an elm sapling. I can't remember when I last saw an English elm. When I was a kid the main road was an avenue of old elms, green and sticky with sap in the July sunlight.

I do miss elms.

On the way back home I got the bus to Manchester. I was followed onto the bus by an epicene figure in a white safari jacket. I wondered if he was Death. I chose not to ask.

A few stops down, a pink Mazda cut up the bus. It was the shade of pink I've only ever seen in NHS children's spectacles.

The chip shop further down the street turns out not to have a window blind as I'd imagined. It's a sheet of brushed vinyl pop art wallpaper in faded bullseye pattern.

A gaggle of young girls get on, gaudy in thickly-applied make-up, each with a mobile 'phone clamped to one ear. In my day young ladies were quieter and more demure weren't they? No, of course not. I remember a Sicilian hillside raucous in bawdy song. One of the girls bawled down the 'phone that they were "going lindyhopping." I expect it means something different these days, like dance music.

Next come four mockney diamond geezers. "Just three stops to the Chinese, mate. How much? Is that for all of us?" Welcome to the unsubsidised provinces, mate.

No one was sick and nobody died and the driver got out of his cab to help a lady carry her pushchair off the bus.