Hold very tight please: the C11 bus test

Brace yourselves, ladies

Here at the Ham&High we're always looking for ways to make the website different from the newspaper, rather than just a straightforward reproduction of what you can buy in the shop. 

A couple of weeks ago at our annual editorial conference, one of our sports writers suggested the future of the website might, in part, be to act like an online version of the BBC's Watchdog programme: a sort of local aggregator of gripes and groans, all carefully watched over and, where necessary, investigated, by the Ham&High newsroom. (Do you think this sounds like a good idea? (Say so) 

So it was in the spirit of Anne Robinson that I ventured on to the C11 bus earlier this week, to test out the alleged 'misery' for myself, and see if it was all as bad as the Ham&High's letters page suggests. 

Armed with a copy of Metro and a Global Positioning System (GPS) I plotted my route from Gospel Oak station to Swiss Cottage. 

I'm pretty well jinxed in general where public transport is concerned, so it came as no great surprise as I emerged from Gospel Oak station to see the bus pulling away from the stop, with no chance of my sprinting across the 20 yards from the station exit in time. 

I settled in for a long wait and was pleasantly surprised when another C11 approached not three minutes later. It wasn't crowded and I got a seat. No misery yet. 

No misery, in fact, for a full ten minutes, until we got to the stop outside the Royal Free, where the doors broke: the back set wouldn't stay shut. I'm familiar with colourful language, and while the bus driver didn't add anything to my vocabulary while struggling to close the doors, he gave it a jolly good go. Five minutes of jiggling the lever in his cab, pressing the button above the doors and holding them forcibly shut finally succeeded, and we were off again.

Next obstacle: Englands Lane. Why do they run the bus down this narrow alley of a street? This, I expect, was what the lady driver of a particularly shiny silver Jaguar was thinking as she reached out of her window to pull the wing mirror in and save it from a nice new coat of red paint being applied by the side of the bus. 

No more misery except for the exceptionally long phase of those traffic lights on Adelaide Road outside the Marriott. This can't be blamed on the C11 bus or its driver, but probably can be blamed on TfL, so I'm leaving it in.

I'm afraid I wasn't very good with the GPS, and I'm therefore not able to give accurate figures on kilometres per hour, but I did manage to get through the Metro from front to back, which means the journey from Gospel Oak to Swiss Cottage took just over 20 minutes. 

Misery level: a bearable, if not ideal, two grimaces out of five. 

Am I missing something? Is there a certain stretch of the route which is particularly terrible? (Let me know) 

Next week: I voyage upon the good ship C11 from West Hampstead to Swiss Cottage.