Surviving Bus Journeys - For Fun!
The source of Surviving Bus Journeys - For Fun! (sometimes referred to as SBJFF) was the No. 83 Midland Red bus, upon which JTA used to travel from his home in Hadley to get to Adams’ Grammar School in Newport between 1996 and 2001.Forced by the rules of AGS to wear a maroon blazer, which made him stand out like a person from a different school amongst a bunch of other kids, he was cruelly picked on by the other passengers, most of whom came from the Burton Borough where blue was the blazer colour of choice.
With his usual flair for turning deep psychological trauma into comedy, JTA created SBJFF in an attempt to show his contempt, his higher status and his dignity, in contrast to those people on the bus who repeatedly mocked him. Also, they smelled.
Publication Content
SBJFF turned out to be a short booklet, which crammed into its ten-or-so crumpled A4 pages nearly three years of grudges, satirising the inane nature of buses and a form of transport in themselves, attacking the lack of adequate shelter provided at bus stops, and recording faithfully a totally stupid conversation held between him, a girl JTA fancied, and a friend of the girl, who was both called Alex and rather odd.
Failure, Dismissal and Collapse
SBJFF was a publication that, in many ways, never “made” it. Instead, it joined Betamax video recorders, the webpages written for WAP-enabled telephones, and Robert Killroy Silk’s “Veritas” party as one of those ideas that was fun to go along with, but of no real use to anyone.
Instead, after JTA created a brightly-coloured front cover for the book in Microsoft Publisher - a file so large it was forcibly deleted from his AGS computer space by the IT technicians - and began writing up the handwritten notes for SBJFF which he’d scrawled over many long and depressing bus journeys, he predictably lost interest, and the publication was never completed.
Even to this day, Surviving Bus Journeys for fun is a mere footnote in the history of The Statto-JTA Publishing Corporation, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be found at their ktab.co.uk website at ktab.co.uk/slowsuicide.
Somewhere, it is believed, lies the original notebook into which JTA poured his opinions of the bus on which he travelled, and there is an age-old legend (begun by a smear campaign in May 2000) that the book, if found, must never be opened, lest it unleash a demon of untold horror upon those who attacked JTA so many years ago…
But that’s probably just wishful thinking, so anyone who finds the damn thing is more that free to read, burn or eat it, because it’s pretty much worthless anyway.