BERLIN (Reuters) – A German bus driver threatened to throw a 20-year-old sales clerk off his bus in the southern town of Lindau because he said she was too sexy, a newspaper reported Monday.

“Suddenly he stopped the bus,” the woman named Debora C. told Bild newspaper. “He opened the door and shouted at me ‘Your cleavage is distracting me every time I look into my mirror and I can’t concentrate on the traffic. If you don’t sit somewhere else, I’m going to have to throw you off the bus.'”

The woman, pictured in Bild wearing her snug-fitting summer clothes with the plunging neckline, said she moved to another seat but was humiliated by the bus driver.

A spokesman for the bus company defended the driver.

“The bus driver is allowed to do that and he did the right thing,” the spokesman said. “A bus driver cannot be distracted because it’s a danger to the safety of all the passengers.”

Here’s an artist’s impression of what he may have seen in his mirror.

I don’t know a Megabus driver who’d complain about that!

I’ve been looking at my webstats and see that I gained a new reader who’d typed ‘why are there plastic bags hanging in trees in majorca’. I did the search on Google myself and this blog came in first position out 52,500 :-) So there is someone else out there wondering the same as me, see my blog of Monday, 2 July, 2007. I still don’t know what they are. Anyone know?

….. it’s not cheefrful stuff but I think it’s important that as many people as possible understand the tragedy of Zimbabwe. To take just one statisic from this little film; average life expectancy in Zimbabwe is 37 years for men and 34 for women. Just think about that. Would you still be alive if you lived in Zimbabwe? How many of the relatives you have around you now would be around you there? You’d be very lucky to see your own child become an adult. If you had to live as portrayed in the film what could you do to make things better? Be honest, the answer is nothing! It’s up to those outside Zimbabwe, those with have a loaf bread on the kitchen table and a chicken in the fridge to do something. And just one of the things you can do is to make as many people as possible aware of what’s happening.

I think it was the Model T Ford which was advertised as available in any colour so long as it was black. Now Ford have such colours as Electric Orange.

Yesterday I saw two of the worst car/colour combinations I think I’ve ever seen. The first was a 2007 Rolls Royce being chaufeur driven through Wandsworth, it was plain old boring blue. Not metallic, not Royal Blue, not a classy blue at all just a solid uninteresting blue.

The next colour was not only entirely wrong for the car but the car shouldn’t have been where it was anyway. A 2006 Lamborghini queing at Tesco’s for fuel! And the colour was ‘white van’ white! Could any other combination of colour and place for a Lamborghini be worse than that? If you wonder what a white Lamborghini looks like click here. I couldn’t find a picture of one queing at Tesco’s pumps, if anyone is any good with Photoshop and wants to add the Tesco forecourt I’d love to see the result :-)

Today 14 brand new Stagecoach buses were running round the City. I even heard that our MD drove a couple of No 1 loops and a television company (not sure if it was local BBC or ITV) were there to record it all. These buses all run on a rather special additive ……… sheep’s piss! Read about that here. Which is why I guess each bus has a sheep related name (groan). I trust that they never run short of the special additive when I’m on an AD day, I really don’t fancy chasing sheep over the Hampshire Downs and then getting them to pee into a bottle for me.

I managed to get these not very good pictures this morning. The first is in the yard at about 06:45 and the second is one of the buses I’m following out of Winchester railway station about an hour later. I took the picture because of the smoke coming out from under the body of the bus. Unfortunately, the smoke was light in colour and doesn’t come out in the photo. The bus didn’t burst into flames so I guess it was just deposits burning off the exhaust system. Or could a sheep have been barbequeing on the exhaust? :-)

I was in Greenline coach Station this afternoon, waiting to drive the 17:00 Megabus to Winchester, when a young lady came up to me and asked where the Newcastle bus was. “Left 5 minutes ago, on time” was my answer. She seemed disappointed but said no more and then spoke to a guy who was with her and then asked when the next bus to Newcastle was. The timetable said 23:00. Then, almost in passing, she said “our ticket is for forty passengers”!! Forty passengers is 2/3rds of the bus! I’m surprised the driver had left without at least mentioning that 40 passengers hadn’t turned up – we have to report our loading figures before leaving but perhaps no one was around. If that had been me I’d have made sure it was known but I’d still have left on time. Waiting for even that number of passengers would have been a no, no for me too – how do you know they will even turn up at all, and how late?

Anyway, Megabus rose to the occasion (problem), the driver was called on the bus ‘phone and he was asked to stop at some place in London (I can’t remember where) and a spare bus was despatched with the 40 missing passengers who would then join the bus.

I wonder if Megabus if have ever had a larger block booking not turn up on time. Or, is this a record?