A few weeks before Christmas 2010, as I neared the end of my time living in a hotel (nowhere near as grand as it seems), I rediscovered an old bus route from my mid to late eighties school days in Battersea. These days the 170 was a single decker, and began its route in Victoria where I'd board and stay on until Clapham Junction.

The Junction wasn't too far away from SW1, but the thing I loved about the Roehampton-bound 170 was that it would take a magical and circuitous route to the area where I'd perhaps enjoyed my happiest years working as a Saturday boy at Woolworths in the late eighties and early nineties. Rather than go up through Vauxhall or Wandsworth Road, the 170 would instead snake its way through Battersea and Chelsea, dragging out the journey like a man making a concerted effort to hang onto an unhappy woman by extending the normally brief foreplay, but in the process treating its passengers to one of the most beautiful bus rides in London.

The traffic was always bad, which was great for a man with nothing but time on his hands, as was the case with me back then. I found the journey calmed me down in a way meditation, when I try it, never quite does. I loved it when the 170 got stuck on Cadogan Pier on the north bank of the river. I'd stare out through the window, mesmerised by the Thames just as I had been when I'd first crossed the river with my mum and sibling all those years ago. I'd gaze at the moored houseboats wondering what kind of life its owners lived. I've always hankered after a houseboat and had come to regret not buying one with all the money I'd made from my twelve years on Kid Cop.