Old friend Valerio is in Rome visiting his mother who’s 99 years old + 3 months (+ 9 days when he texted today).
Waiting in a café for the mother’s residential home to open before he could go in, he found it too cold, so he decided to dive into the underground system to keep warm.
This reminds me of what my eldest sister (deceased) said to me on my visit home in 1993 (after a 14-year-gap).
She’d hop on an air-conditioned bus and stay on it all the way through — from her stop in the eastern suburbs to the end of the route (downtown) and back again, maybe even over and over and over again. This way, she could have a nice snooze in cool surroundings — all for the price of one bus journey (S$0.20 at the time for air-con bus, S$0.10 for non), and saving some money on her electricity bill.
It’s not as if she was adding to the bus company’s running costs. After all, the bus would be running even if it was empty. If anything, she was contributing an extra S$0.20 to their till.
I have since been considering doing that in London, both on very cold winter days and unbearably hot summer days, especially now that I have a Freedom Pass (free* travel for old people on all transport systems in all the travel zones of London).
*For the record, it’s actually not “free”, because:
- I’ve paid taxes (Income Tax and National Insurance) over all my decades here, so it’s my money (ditto for health services that we supposedly get free, whether you use the services once a decade or every week/month);
- I’m still paying taxes (council tax every month for local government services, which include travel, not just rubbish collection, etc.) — not waived for OAPs (old-age pensioners). State pension is taxable as well if it makes one’s income go over the Personal Allowance level.
(Rome, 2024; Singapore, 1993)
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