I've never been one to take one bus when two buses, a train and a tube will do. As a teenager, nobody was more familiar with the Maidstone & District bus network around the Medway Towns than I. I would happily take superfluous detours via the Davis Estate (on the 105), Weeds Wood (on the 181) or Twydall (on the 118) just to see what would happen. Any day was improved by the journey home from school if I could catch a 132 from the Pentagon and change on to a 115 somewhere along Watling Street thus skillfully avoiding a detour around the unspectacular sights of Gillingham and saving myself five minutes of walking at the other end.

Even today there is little, that could be classed as a routine activity, that satisfies like getting the better of the public transport system. Those times when the plan comes together and you can rest your M-16 on your shoulder, relight your big cigar and grin wide enough to make the Cheshire Cat look like Panthro with piles. I have wondered if it is not a product of the days when my Dad took my brother and I round the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden and I stared up from underneath the couplings in awe at ancient but monstrous tube carriages. I was certainly always breathlessly excited by the prospect of a train journey to London when I was small (the sound of slam doors and the smell of the carriage - two things that I'm sure if I experienced them today would be as appealing as the spaghetti bolognese sandwiches I used to make out of my dinner) and even now, there's something about the memory of the roar of the buses hurtling around the Pentagon Centre bus station and the rush to sit at the front of the top deck and "drive" home that can distract me from whatever it is I'm doing. Despite the many terrible, overpriced and interrupted journeys I have to make, as if it were my miscreant child I always look for the slightest opportunity to see the public transport system, as the old tube posters in the museum used to say, as something warm and bright.

Thus, tonight, I was kissing the badge and secretly punching the air when I walked on to Charing Cross Road and saw a lesser spotted 176 approaching that could take me all the way home. Sat downstairs at the back, I tucked into my novel as we chugged towards Leicester Square station. Then there came an ungodly noise. It didn't sound mechanical, animal or human. It was the sort of noise that instantly raises your blood pressure and locks your brow into an almighty frown which could only mean one thing: a baby. It was after ten at night and I imagine, if I was that age and still stuck on a bus, I'd be screaming the place down too and I was almost tempted to stay on board just to listen to the incredible variety of sonic effects this thing could produce. Its father slouched indifferently against his seat with a hundred yard stare and bloodshot eyes and its mother occasionally prodded a finger in the direction of its pushchair in the lamest attempt at pacification since the appeasement of Hitler but neither seemed particularly interested in silencing their little bundle of burglar alarm. The thought of spending the next forty minutes locked on board with this sonic torture device proved too much and I decided to use my transport smarts for the benefit of my sanity and contrive a less convenient but more peaceful route home.

My plan was to take the Bakerloo down to Elephant and then take either a bus or train to Peckham from there. It seemed reasonably straightforward. So, imagine my surprise when, once on the tube, I looked up from my book to find myself at Piccadilly Circus bound for Queens Park. I shouldn't be having senior moments before my 30th birthday and I was a bit hacked off to have added extra time to my journey. Getting on the tube in the wrong direction is what tourists do and I sheepishly changed back on to the southbound line and eventually got to Elephant. So far, so so.

I walked through what can best be described as the unique Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre to the station. My luck was in again. The next train to Peckham was due in three minutes. On the stairs up to the platform, I found my route blocked by a man making a pig's ear out of trying to carry a pushchair. A meal has not been made out of so little since the New Testament was a rough draft. In fact, he managed to take up so much room in executing this Herculean task that I did that rarest of things in London and actually looked at him. He started to seem familiar.

Halfway up the second staircase, I clocked, looking over his shoulder in my anxiety to get past, a vaguely familiar looking woman holding the erstwhile passenger of the obstructing pushchair. I was just starting to wonder if it could possibly be when, from the woman's arms, came an unholy but familiar screech.