Londoners travel everywhere by bus. Maybe not exclusively, but it's difficult to get anywhere without taking a bus at one end of the Tube or other. I personally take one for my biweekly trips to the grocery store. (It only takes 12 minutes to walk to the grocery store, but if I bus it I only have to walk a grand total of a block and a half.)

On a recent outing to Whole Foods, I slid my little rolly-bag cart into the handicapped/stroller zone up front out of the way of incoming traffic. There were a couple of elderly ladies sitting close by. I smiled at the old lady wrapped in a head scarf seated plumply across from me with her hands folded primly in her lap. Beside her was a cart to match mine.

At the next stop, another elderly lady got on. She was a rough lookin' old gal with the pinched expression of sour lemons on her face and flyaway hair. Glancing down at the pile of newspapers that's stacked in the front of the bus, she took in the headline. Something new, disturbing, and dismally unsurprising about Trump.

She took a deep breath, filled her powerful lungs with air, and started:

"I can't believe it. [Who can?] Would you look at this?! [I'd rather not.] He just won't stop."

Her accent was a classic, one of those special UK numbers that sound like she had a mouth full of marbles. The old grump went on a full 3-minute tirade as we chugged up the hill about how "that man" was completely daft, she didn't understand at all what the Americans were thinking when they elected him, how her sister lives in America, and she says most people don't even like Trump. At this point, the two little ladies up front had begun nodding their heads, making encouraging noises, and throwing out occasional "Amens" (everyone likes an audience, after all), which only seemed to rev her up extra. She caught my eye a couple times, but I kept a benign look on my face and eventually shifted my gaze out the window. At this point, the maestro was running low on material, it seemed, so she just began muttering things under her breath to try out new themes. We were nearing my stop ("This is all so stupid. He is so stupid.") by the time she enthusiastically hit on her conclusion, one she clearly considered a real golden nugget, as she raised her voice and proudly proclaimed: "Americans are so STUPID!"

I looked her square in the face—I could see she smugly thought she had a new convert—and I smiled sweetly as I said, "Not all of us," in as exaggerated an American accent as I could muster.

Heehee, I thought her eyes were going to roll back in her head. Instead, she just let her mouth hang open as I delicately guided my shopping cart off the bus, being patted in sympathy by the turbaned grandma. I thought about saying something about her not actually having offended me, but I didn't want to spoil the effect; you don't often get to exit a bus with a bang.