My, my. Why I was seeing red

Today’s subject is three little words on the back of a bus. I don’t know who wrote them and I doubt that the author will put up his hand. I was driving the dog to the beach in my unjustifiably cavernous Mitsubishi Airtrek. We turned into the Lyttelton road tunnel. Ahead of us were 1.8 kilometres of radio silence, above us uncountable tonnes of basalt, in front of us a bus.

Now, on principle I approve of buses, the principle being that 50 people on a bus means 50 fewer cars on the road to get in my way as I drive to the beach.

Such an attitude may be tricky to defend ecologically but psychologically it’s founded on bedrock.

For the car represents the independence we all sought when we first took the scissors to mother’s apron strings and the spanner to the trainer wheels on the bike. A car defines adult autonomy. A bus does the opposite.

A car waits for you but you wait for a bus. A car goes where you want but a bus goes where it wants. A car is your will on wheels. A bus is someone else’s.

To be on a bus is to be part of a herd, stock on a stock truck, counted rather than named. A bus is the childhood you left behind, smelling faintly of sick.

So when I say I approve of buses I mean I approve of them for others. And clearly I am not alone in this hypocrisy. Most adults own a car. Most of our roads are full. But buses aren’t. Indeed I rarely see a bus round here with more people aboard than a car could carry.

All of which is by the by. The point of this story is the back of the bus that I had no choice but to study for 1.8 kilometres. Three words were written on it in a jaunty font that simulated hand-writing, three words that someone somewhere had composed and after careful reflection decided were good and fitting and worthy of publication. And noone had said them nay. Those words were My Red Bus.

Close your eyes a moment and listen to those words. Where have you heard their like before?

A bus is the childhood you left behind, smelling faintly of sick.

Precisely, we’re back in the nursery. My Red Bus is of a piece with My Little Pony and My First Colouring-in Book. My is a first person possessive adjective and is out of place here. The slogan’s audience is potential customers, so it ought to be in the second person. It ought to be Your Red Bus. But this is the exciting world of commercial branding which treats the adult customer as if he or she had the greed, the solipsism and the ignorance of a baby in a pram. Note the monosyllables. Note the primary colour. My Red Bus. Oooh, lucky little Diddums has got his own bit of public transport.

Only he hasn’t. With My Little Pony Diddums at least gets an overpriced plastic horse, but with My Red Bus he gets nothing. For the whole point of public transport is that the passenger doesn’t get to keep it. The very word bus says as much, it being a contraction of the Latin omnibus meaning ‘‘to or for all’’.

So here is commercial branding in all its unglory. In just three patronising words the author manages to abuse the language, to insult intelligence and to seek to infantilise the adult reader. Is there any hope?

Yes, of course there is. The three little words hadn’t worked. My Red Bus was empty.