Five Minute Free Write

I decided to go freestyle today and leave the prompts alone. This is a sketch of an incident on the bus the other day.

I got on the bus with my son and we sat down only for a woman to begin shouting at us. She was distraught about something but all I caught was that we were looking at her with 'black eyes'. She wandered to the front of the bus and began to yell at the driver who waited patiently and asked if she wanted to get off the bus. It became obvious that she didn't but she carried on shouting and swearing. Naturally, being British, we all sat with our eyes downcast and listened. Nobody seemed to know what to do or even if doing something was the right thing to do. She eventually went upstairs and the bus drove off. We then heard her yelling and loud noises which seemed to be her hitting or kicking the side panels on the bus. The driver radioed some message to the depot but we carried on. Every now and then there was another thump and more swearing from upstairs. Two young professionals got on, asked the driver some questions and went upstairs to speak to the woman. She came down and got off the bus, cursing and punching the bus as she did so. The young people seemed to know how to deal with her and phoned for someone to go and make sure she was OK.

It was obvious that she was in some sort of crisis and I guess that the young people who spoke to her were mental health care professionals of some sort. The driver said she was a regular on the route so they knew what to do. My point is that in an ideal world someone would have been looking after her and she wouldn't have been wandering around on her own in obvious distress. But this isn't an ideal world and unless a crisis is reached little seems to be done to help those who are vulnerable. They are left to their own devices and picked up when they become a danger to themselves or a 'nuisance' to the rest of us.

I hope they found her and helped her. I hope she had a better end to her day than the beginning seemed to be. I hope she had a quiet and calm time later that day. And I am so glad there are people like those two young people to care for the most vulnerable in our society.