Strange Things By Bus

[fuchsoid]

I spend a lot of time travelling by bus. Preferably, I sit on the upper deck, which is less crowded and gioves one an interestingly detached perspective on the street below. And allows you to see over walls into people's gardens, of course. One of the things only the passenger on the top deck of a bus can see is the stuff on top of bus shelters. Most of the London bus shelters, and all sorts of stuff accumulates on top of them, from the very predictable (bundles of free newspapers, half-eaten sandwiches, stolen handbags), to the slightly odd (seven odd shoes, four loaves of sliced white bread) to the delightfully odd (the little cardboard diver I mentioned last year).

But in the last few weeks I've noticed a series of completely inexplicable and numerous items. They are roughly oval or spherical, either brightly multicoloured, golden or black, and studded all over with what look like either cocktail sticks or cotton buds (sometimes coloured as well). At first I thought they were balls of some sort of modelling clay, but now I think they are probably potatoes, especially since some of them are sprouting. So far, I've seen them on Farringdon Street, Holborn Circus, Southampton Row and the Bethnal Green Road (rather a lot of them there). Mostly they are solitary, but I did see two on one shelter in Hackney. What the hell are they, and what are they doing there? Are they some sort of new thing that Young People are doing? Some sort of conceptual art project (the least interesting possibility)? Alien spores? My hope is that they're some sort of interweb-based scheme to detect highly intelligent people by seeing who notices them first. Over the weekend, I hope to take a few more bus routes and perhaps find a few more. I've been rather hugging them to myself as my own little secret, but feel that now I can share them with the world.

I have taken to photographing them, since I always have a camera with me nowadays, so here are some pictures.