Live anywhere long enough and you’ll start to find your own way around a place. In those parts of the country where cars are the only real transport option certain road names become as familiar as those of neighbours or colleagues, their status and wellbeing affecting the events of an otherwise ordinary day. The introduction of a 30 speed limit on a collection of rural backroads can double the length of a commute. These are boring things, in theory, but they are also the ones that shape the pockets of time that make up our lives. Minutes spent getting somewhere are ones we can’t use for the things we may otherwise want to do; delayed trains can be the difference between seeing our loved ones before they fall asleep, or not.

People spend more time talking about travelling around the city in London than I think they probably care to admit. Ask anyone who’s used public transport here for more than a year or two and they’ll have their own opinions on the different Tube lines (Victoria: efficient, hellish in summer. District / Circle: baffling. Central: mind the gap. Metropolitan: quaint joke. Northern: the worst necessity of them all. I just played this game with M and his responses were tellingly different). For a tremendously diverse city, London has always been tried to be divided on binary lines: north or south, east or west. To this I add another: bus, or Tube?

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M, who grew up in Zone 3, is a Tube creature. He has spent his adulthood navigating London’s subterranea like a Tube mouse (undeniably the best thing about the Tube), travelling to the city’s different corners to see plays in its many theatres. I have been known to spend 40 minutes trapped in an Escher-like loop between Elephant and Castle, Kennington and Brixton, but he knows which end of a platform to wait in most stations, on most lines, to be closer to the exit of our destination.

I am a bus person, and quietly proud of it. It’s only since moving a couple of years ago that I’ve even lived within walking distance of the Tube, the previous decade spent in some of the many pockets of London where overground trains and buses trundle people about. For many people, a home or neighbourhood being “on the Tube” is a non-negotiable. I’ve always spent that bit of the budget on having tall windows or a nearby park. The unexpected pay-off is the mental geography that comes with seeing where you are travelling every day, whether on track, or two wheels, or four.

I suspect bus people are harder to find. It’s funny: if you don’t live in London, you may well be charmed by its red double-decker buses. If you do, there’s a good chance you see them as the worst transport option in the city.

I have been pushed close to existential meltdowns on a bus - often in the rain or the blistering heat, when the temperatures inside the top deck (always better than the bottom) are maddening and someone is having a loud conversation, or someone else is slowly losing their mind, and everyone is stuck in traffic that simply refuses to move - but they have also held some of the best moments of my time here. Of watching a full Harvest Moon rise above the Thames after a fancy party, heels tapping on the lino floor, carton of Maccy D’s chips in hand. Of sitting in the front seat as it rears up one of Hampstead’s hills, golden light splintering through the scratched glass. Of making your way out, or home, from a night out, everyone more beautiful than they should be beneath the fluorescent lights simply because you love them so much. Take a bus at the right moment on a Sunday morning and you will have it all to yourself, a chauffeur-driven ship upon rare quiet seas.

We may live within walking distance of the Tube now, but I still think of taking the bus first if I’m not cycling somewhere. The bus stop is over the road, the Tube is not. Even after all these years, it still feels vaguely spectacular that I can leave my house, walk 200 yards, and be transported to Regents Street or Liverpool Street or Euston for £1.65. The Tube is quicker, yes, but what you gain in speed you lose in charm. Making time for the bus is making time for other things: a stretch of reading a book, of watching the sky fade from pink to grey, of simply looking out the window and seeing all the other lives unfold around you in a place that can feel so lonely, sometimes. Where else can you really see the city, from a split-second of another life through somebody else’s window, to Tower Bridge, than from the top deck of a bus?