My bus home was going thankfully quick at the tail end of peak hour. Then luck ran out — we hit a traffic plug five minutes from home. Another red double decker bus (with the same route number as my bus, in fact) had stopped diagonally across the road and was choking traffic.

I went back to my newspaper but was then disturbed by passengers leaning over me to look out my window. I looked up at them, then followed their eyes out the window too. There, lying in the middle of the road was a cyclist and a bike. His fluorescent yellow jacket was splattered with blood.

As we inched past the unmoving man and the cops, I saw that there were still people on the immobile double decker. They, too, were gaping out their windows onto the road.