You wait for ages, and then two turn up at once...

There can be few frustrations in life to compete with it. It's enough to make grown men burst into tears and to make small children yell abuse at those around them. Or should that be the other way around?

I refer, of course, to that phenomenon known as Waiting For Buses. Now, I'm not exactly a true petrol-head, and if you were to ask me which I'd rather have out of the Vauxhall Something TDi or the Peugeot SomethingElse LX, I really couldn't tell you. I could, of course, express a preference between, say, a brand new Aston Martin DB-9 and my seven year-old Skoda Felicia. However hard we owners of such vehicles protest that, despite years of mocking, the Skoda is now a serious option as a car (rather than as a car-shaped lump of metal sitting on the drive), how the input of VW's engineering expertise has turned a farce into one of the best value for money cars out there, and how in recent years they've ranked highly in terms of reliability, improved in terms of style, and retained their low insurance group, we still find ourselves longing for slightly more than 47 bhp. It's not that it's insufficient for anything in particular, it's just that having, say, 325 bhp might be somewhat more fun.

However, I do know that, when faced with the choice between getting on a bus and getting into a car, I'd far rather take the car. I'd far rather take a bike, to be quite honest. I think it's something about public transport, and I've come to the conclusion that it's, well, the public. Now, don't get me wrong. In some places (preferably far away) buses may serve some useful purpose. They may be cheap, and cost less than the car (it's a novel idea, I know). They may not be smelly, and may be driven by someone who knows which side of the road the rest of the population will be on. They may stop and wait for you when you're three meters down the road in a thunderstorm, and they may not be populated by teenagers whose IQs are, even at their tender ages, outweighed by their shoe sizes. In this Utopia, such buses may exist. All I know is that it's not here.

But surely one of the cruelest torments about buses is the invention known as the timetable. Timetables are devices which serve two purposes. They force one to rush manically to reach the bus stop before the time at which the bus is due, and then force one to wait in ever increasing despondency as the minutes tick past after this time until the bus actually does turn up.

However, one thing about buses that you can rely upon is their ability to arrive in pairs. Like adolescent girls, they seem unwilling to travel alone, and prefer instead the companionship of another bus. And, of course, to prevent loneliness, both buses will be "serving" (note the irony) the same route.

So this is why buses are like spiders. Particularly three-inch wide black spiders with horribly hairy, well, things (I don't know - antennae?). I've lived in my flat for a year now, and despite having to face many creepy-crawlies of varying species, I've managed to stear clear of the arachnids. Until yesterday, when in the morning there was one in the bath, followed by, in the evening, one in the corner of my room.

Why? Don't they have timetables?

Gosh, it's amazing how you two connect...

Wires.

I read recently that the combined length of the wires used in the manufacture of the new Airbus (the double-decker monster that makes a 757 look like a child's plaything) reached a grand total of something in the order of 500 thousand miles. Now, even accounting for the mass of circuitry that must be needed to let the captain know if the wing's about to fall off, and that needed to power the TV screens, that's a heck of a lot of wiring.

Which led me to thinking about connections. Train connections, even (please noooo...) bus connections, connections between people, connections between wires. In the same way that just one failure in the connections in the mass of wiring in the Airbus could have catastrophic consequences (Business Class could miss out on freshly ground coffee again), connections play a vital role in our day-to-day lives. Which, I suppose, is why we moan and gripe so much when they fail. That day the bus gets held up in a traffic jam, meaning we miss our next bus and arrive at work late for the meeting. When the trains all curl up and die because somewhere near Putney a small leaf has had the temerity to fall within 100 miles of the track, causing us to miss our best friend's wedding.

So imagine, dear reader, my frustration having spent the last six hours trying to persuade four differently colour-coded wires to connect to their opposite numbers, in a game called "Set Up The Equipment To Do A Day-Long Experiment." You'd have thought it would be simple, but through admitting this, you reveal yourself to be anything but an experimental scientist. For our equipment is notoriously unreliable.

Let's hope the Airbus is somewhat less temperamental.