The Ups and Downs of Any Coach Journey

A necessity for some and a last resort for others: the humble British coach journey, a tradition-cum-self-inflicted-torture-device. Opinions on coach journeys in the UK fluctuate somewhat, varying from "Fuck All the Way Off" to "This is going to be an actively enjoyable experience" – a Stockholm Syndromesque hangover from growing up a child of divorce and spending your adolescence shuttling from parent to parent on a very tight budget.

We have all – even the very richest of us – been trapped in the purgatory of a coach journey before. The mild egg smell. The skin flakes. The lurid bleach-blue of the chemical toilet. Is it a good idea to actualise that journey, hour-by-hour, possibly bringing to the surface repressed memories of all those times you got stuck at a grey standstill on the M1 and had to be sick into a rough sack folded up out of your coat? No. But we’re going to do it anyway! Step by step!

There are a total of two entirely separate pre-coach-journey experiences. Which of these you have the privilege of living out in real time depends on whether or not you are departing from London Victoria Coach Station. If you aren't, I can only assume the few hours prior are blissful and carefree – a morning so perfect that it might as well be filmed through a rose-tinted lens and be turned into the music video for a Train song.

Otherwise, the likelihood is that you will have a painfully long encounter with Victoria Coach Station, situated a "short walk" (absolute bullshit, more on this later) from its sister train and underground station, a hell-hole of an art deco building that will laugh at you as you run ungracefully through it, your suitcase slipping out of your sweaty hands and slamming onto the ground behind you, taunting you as you turn back to pick it up in a fuming red-faced rage. If you can't relate to any of the stuff in the below list then I can only assume that you are a secret angel blessed by God himself, and I plead with you to never, ever take your holy luck for granted:

– Spending at least an hour-and-a-half getting to the fucking place, only to drive almost directly back past your house when you're on the coach itself.

– Paying 50p to have a shit, which is always very dehumanising, but doubly so in Victoria, somehow.

– Not realising that the coach station and train station are entirely separate entities, possibly because it's your first time here, possibly because you've just forgotten, and even though the map says it is "across the road", the coach station is actually an awkward six-minute uphill walk from the tube station, yet you still forget every time, making the walk a fun will-they-make-it-on-time-or-will-they-not game you get to play with yourself while dragging two more pieces of luggage than is ideal for this sort of thing!

– Arriving at the bay 45 minutes early but still missing your coach!

We have been through our entry-level trauma. We are now prepared to board.

You categorically cannot fuck about when deciding where to sit on a coach. This is not a train-esque paradise where you have the option of reserving seats: this is every man for himself; this is hell; you are in hell; welcome to hell. The educated will know that it is essential to arrive exactly half an hour early to stand at the front of the queue and secure a window seat that a) is not too close to the toilet and b) has a view unobstructed by the giant self-satisfied pixelated face of the Megabus daddy.

Once you have decided on a seat, if you are cruel, you can pile all of your possessions carefully and precariously on the seat next to you and either glare menacingly at whoever walks past, hopefully terrifying them into sitting somewhere else, or – for a more foolproof method of ensuring that you remain undisturbed – pretend to be asleep, flailed across both seats, giving the impression of someone who is so deeply exhausted they have passed out inelegantly within two minutes of sitting down.

(Speaking from experience, acts of such egocentric evil will inevitably be served by karma, probably in the form of an exhausted-looking mother dragging her small child onto the coach 23 seconds before it's scheduled to leave, resulting in you obviously giving up your extra seat along with your own because you're not that much of a cunt, and ending up a metre from the stinking toilet.)

It normally takes about half an hour of your head vibrating painfully against the plastic window before you start to stir with boredom. Something about long, bland stretches of travel stirs up a strange urge within some people to Get Things Done – for example, read that massive book about the human condition, or finish that overdue homework, or perhaps get started on that spreadsheet – I'm assuming here that literally every person who doesn't work behind a bar or in retail has a job based entirely around making and distributing Excel spreadsheets – and this urge to get things done usually lasts around half an hour.

Half an hour spent valiantly attempting to be productive in a coach seat – possibly the least conducive environment to productivity on the planet – brings us elegantly into hour two. This is where all aspects of the journey start to fall slowly but surely apart.

Your attempt at productivity relies on using a laptop or tablet, which is in danger of running out of battery. Part of the thrill of getting a coach is never knowing if there will be plug sockets. Usually Megabus provide these as standard, but even then there is around a 30 percent risk that none of the sockets have any power. Other things holding you back: you didn't plan for the lack of tables attached to the back of seats; a sweating man opposite you is eating an unappetising-looking ham sandwich and staring at you while he does it; you forgot you have really bad motion sickness, so spend the rest of the trip trying to both resist vomiting and resist remembering that time on the M4 when you were pungently sick under the fluorescent lightbulb of the toilet.

Your mind is now free to fall into an abyss, and you can spend the second hour in a nether-zone of mild pain, neck starting to hurt but having only a three-centimetre radius in which you can move it without actually leaning on the shoulder of whichever stranger you’re sitting next to. Your carefully downloaded mellow playlist is starting to grate on you now. Still two more hours to go.

You've got that unpleasant feeling in the valley-like cleft between your butt and your thighs where the fur of the seat you've been squirming in has superheated to a sort of volcanic lava-hot groin unbearableness. You always think, 'Ah, £16 plus booking fee is a good deal,' and forget about this bit, don't you? Where every second takes an hour and every hour takes a lifetime. You're in a hole than even prayer can't save you from.

Everyone on this coach is now experiencing deep discomfort on one level or another, and it’s starting to show. It’s likely that you’ve hit some traffic and you’ve been holding back from checking Maps to see just how long this trail of hell will continue for, but fuck it, you might as well know what you're in for. Ah! Brilliant! Stationary for the next four miles!

There is no camaraderie here. So here you are, for the foreseeable future, surrounded by horrible strangers, and you're the worst; you're more horrible than all of them. The rear end of a coach journey is for self-reflection and self-hatred, and for absolving all your sins. Wallow in both your neck pain and your abandonment issues. When you arrive at your destination, walking off the coach in a slapstick pins-and-needles-induced stagger, you'll be a stronger person. A changed person, yes: a person with a rift-like fracture in the shape of a Megabus carved hollow through the centre of them. But a stronger person, nonetheless.

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