Pertaining to the 178. 9pm. Outside my local Chinese takeaway.

I had spent a week in India celebrating the wedding of one of my oldest friends. I had had 6 hours of sleep in two nights, then travelled by every mode other than bus for just over 15 hours. I hauled my dusty suitcase back to my local neighbourhood and staggered into the Chinese takeaway for a duck fried rice. This was now rapidly cooling in my shoulder bag.

A man stopped me at the traffic lights and asked me for a cigarette. He was Ugandan and had lived in the UK since the 1980s. Apparently he was a tribal chief, but hadn’t been home for decades because the Ugandan president had a price on his head (something to do with an assassination attempt – the bullet missed by an inch – no biggie). He now works for the Metropolitan Police, scanning for online child pornography.

We jousted for several minutes about Uganda’s appalling anti-gay laws. Then I noticed that he was wearing an Arriva fleece (non-Londoners, Arriva is the company that runs the city’s bus network). Letting my takeaway get even colder I risked asking, ‘Why are you wearing a bus company fleece?’

‘Oh, my girlfriend is a bus driver!’

Now we were getting somewhere. ‘Which route does she drive?’

‘The 178. In fact, do you know how I met her? I fell asleep on her bus!’ When the driver had discovered him at the end of her route she had asked him where he needed to get to. He lived in Croydon so she took him to his doorstep and so began an accidental but life-affirming relationship. Apparently she is a half-Indian, half-Malawian stunner who stands several inches taller than her man. When I asked him whether the height difference was a challenge he said, puffing out his chest, ‘A challenge? No, I am always the king!’

Who knows what life will throw at us? Next time something doesn’t go according to plan in your life, enjoy the idea that out of the mishap could come something crazy and beautiful.