The Maintenance of Headway by Magnus Mills
While those who commute daily by bus hardly need reminding of the vagaries of travel timetables, which appear to run according to the principle of feast or famine, jaded passengers will find plenty to amuse them in Mills's appealingly absurd novella. Set in the self-contained world of bus drivers - a job the author knows first-hand - it observes their route-related dramas and eavesdrops on their conversations, most tellingly those with the jobsworth transport inspectors. There is an air of Pinter to these clipped, oblique and faintly intimidating exchanges ("There's no excuse for being early"), whose thinly veiled verbal power games are often forcibly diverted back to the inspectors' almost Kafkaesque idea of "maintenance of headway" - an