From my esteemed colleague [url=http://www.adelaidecabaret.com/archive/2005/media/pianobar/hughes/]Richard Hughes
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Heckler column Sydney Morning Herald June 28, 2006

JEAN-PAUL Sartre defined hell as "other people". I don't agree, although I'm sometimes tempted to when I'm on Sydney buses.

One recent morning, I got on a Watsons Bay bus at Edgecliff interchange. All seats were taken except one of five in the back row.

Nobody was standing, but two remarkably polite men whom I judged to be in their twenties offered me a seat. Damned cheek - I'm only 74 and have a barely perceptible limp.

I thanked them graciously, though, and moved to the back. I sat down in the one vacant seat after a young college (high school) student removed her bag with no noticeable alacrity. I was then attacked physically and verbally by the cap-wearing sexagenarian curmudgeon next to me (I was sandwiched between girl and churl). "Why don't you take one of those seats up there?" he demanded belligerently, implying that I should have taken one of the seats I had been offered.

It was such a blatantly stupid question that it wasn't worth answering.

He then did something equally stupid. He nudged me in the side with his elbow.

I'm a peaceable soul normally, but abnormal situations demand abnormal methods. I nudged back - and very hard. I used to be a jazz musician and have been known to use my elbows on the piano. I was rewarded with a gasp of surprise and pain from the cap-wearing bumpkin.

I honestly felt sorry for the blighter. I said so when I left the bus, but he did not seem in a receptive mood, not even when I wished him a nicer day than it had obviously been so far for him.

And I excused myself when I moved past him, unlike the majority of ill-mannered window-seat passengers who brush past me when I'm on the aisle seat. I've made myself deliberately awkward for several of them in ways I would rather not reveal. ("Sorry to tell you, but you've got a nasty looking grease mark on the back of your coat.")

The most annoying bus pests are those who are standing and won't let you move to the back, insisting that "there's no room up there". I don't want a room; I want somewhere to sit. Give me space, man.

Two of a phalanx of non-budgers in a bus in Castlereagh Street did this to me one afternoon in peak-hour early this century. They would not be moved, to parody the title of an old piece that Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen played at Sydney Stadium in 1962.

To my astonishment, a man who had a bag on a seat removed it for me instantly. I thanked him, and again when I alighted. "A pleasure," he said. "It's not often that I sit next to a billionaire. Er, you are Kerry Packer, aren't you?"

I didn't like to disillusion him. So I merely said it had been a pleasure. And what a pleasure it was to see the non-budgers still standing.

Readers are invited to apply wit to anything that makes the blood boil. Send 600 words, with day and evening phone numbers, to heckler@smh.com.au. Submissions may be edited and published on the internet.