view from the top deck

I escaped for a couple of hours, to Putney, where there is a Marks and Spencers - a small, unexciting M&S, but one that sells socks and underwear - old habits die Very Hard, and for whatever reason I haven't quite ever got the hang of buying underwear in the US.   And there was the most severe series of thunderstorms - viz, Putney High Street from the top deck of the bus, which had me thinking about the history of women on the top decks of buses (the usual stuff - Amy Levy, Elizabeth Dalloway), and Tony Judt on Putney High, and how this, in every single way, is the most incontrovertibly English of vistas.   What's more, apart, maybe, from the shapes of the cars, it could really have been taken not around 1 p.m. this afternoon, but some time between 1965-72, when this was part of my daily journey to school ...