Flat Earth: Bussed-up

HEY listen, we think we know this guy] In Italy last week a coach driver was arrested after a passing motorist spotted a sign in a coach window that read 'Help, drunken driver. Call the police]' while the coach zig-zagged down the autostrada. 'The driver was blind drunk,' said one of the passengers. 'When we told him to drive more carefully, he took his hands off the steering wheel and laughed at us.'

That's the bit that sounds familiar. Flat Earth once made the mistake of catching the 'Magic Bus' from Athens to London. Apart from the filthy tempers encountered along the way in Yugoslavia, the two drivers in turn fell asleep at the wheel on the autobahns, had a fist-fight on the outskirts of London and eventually pulled into King's Cross after midnight and many hours late. The passengers included a thinly clad and elderly Romanian woman who wept with joy to be in England for the first time.

'It is the centre of civilisation,' she said gazing lovingly at the junkies and St Pancras's dread silhouette.

At that point one driver appeared at the door and looked down at the passengers waiting for their luggage. 'This is yours, I think,' he said, emptying over our heads a black plastic bag of the trash collected from the coach. It will be hard to forget how the flow of Romanian tears ceased, to be replaced by a look of utter bewilderment.