Promotional bus

A few days ago, perhaps as long as a few weeks ago, in the margins of returning a trolley to Waitrose, I came across a double decker bus parked in Epsom market square, jammed up against the hoarding which divided our area from the contractors' area.

A double decker bus which was painted Deliveroo blue, involved a lot of Deliveroo branding, some Ask branding and came accompanied by various enthusiastic young people.

One of them explained to me that it was a pop-up promotional activity with the bus travelling around the land, popping up in places like Epsom market square. I inquired whether it was a kind of travelling circus, with the staff sleeping in and around the bus at nights, having taken a well earned beer fest around the campfire, but it seemed that this was not the form. The bus travelled independently with its driver, and the enthusiastic young people reported to the bus each morning, wherever it might be. No doubt under the orders of their mobile phones.

And anyway, the bottom of the bus was full of stuff for delivering pizza to be handed out and the top of the bus was full of games for children. Play the game and you get a slice of pizza sort of thing. No room at the inn for sleeping.

A friend turned up at this point, clearly far more important than I, so I did not get to find out how Ask got into this story. All I can say being that there is a branch of Ask at the other end of the High Street, a place which used to be called the Old Bank, which BH and I used to patronise before eating out, before they turned the music up so high as to scare all the older people out. This used to happen at 2000 sharp.

A public house which at one point had an old copy of Morley's three volume biography of Gladstone sitting in lonely splendour on a shelf out the back somewhere. I am sure that if I had slipped the barmaid a fiver I could have it, but as it was I had to wait until I could borrow it from the library at H.M. Treasury, it being in the days when such places ran to quite fancy libraries, carrying all sorts of interesting antiquities. Now sold off.