As it stands, I'm burnt out - I don't live in London any more and I don't miss living in London, but I'd miss the writing; a lot of the appeal of this crazy game has been in the ability to go to the various parts of town at wherever the news is happening, meet up with lots of people doing the same as me, and being able to cover it. It's as close to being a 'conventional' journalist as there is, and probably a lot preferable, because with the London Bus Page I'm not bound by deadlines or editorial approval - I write when I feel like it, when something major happens or just to fill space. I've never wanted to be a critic and never really had to be until the RM debacle started, and that unhappy story, just coming to a close, is what has stopped it being fun - I haven't been able to wisecrack or satirise, which is the other half of my writing style (which will be more familiar to those who know me personally).

If I am persuaded to keep going, I want to return to my roots, as it were - i.e. trying to weave a readable and vaguely meaningful story around what to others may just be dull facts and numbers, and put some smiles on faces again where there haven't been any for two years. This mad pastime was always more to me than just standing on a corner with a notebook - it's history, culture, geography and cartography; engineering, design and ergonomics, labour, capital and politics; sociology, demographics and psychology; collection, journalism and photography - the lot, really. For any of those often-tiresome 'why?' questions that the 'civilian' public like to ask (usually when you're right in the middle of lining up a once-in-a-lifetime shot!), that's the answer.

So I'm going to throw it open to the readership (all half-dozen of them refreshing the pages eight times a day, as I like to joke sometimes).

Should I stay?

• I'm having thoughts of either adopting a weblog or harnessing some sort of blog-style software so that I can make the pages more interactive - there's also the advantage that my readers can talk to each other, thereby taking a little of the pressure off me. Because I feel guilty that I just can't answer all the email I get; I think it happens to every writer or figure that deals with the public once their stuff develops a following. If I answer email, I get less time to write, but with a blog people won't feel that their comments have gone unread.
• With London nothing special any more, I want to take this show on the road - there are still a number of operators who display a sense of history, whose buses' presentation symbolises their cities in which they work and who haven't been lured in by patronising gimmicks like branding or corporate images. Stand up East Yorkshire, Hedingham, Lothian, Brighton & Hove, Dublin Bus, Chester, Cardiff, Thamesdown, Oxford, Bournemouth, Preston, Blackburn and even the more hands-off of the big group-owned ex-PTEs like Travel West Midlands and Go-Ahead Northern. And abroad, there's the Hong Kong trio of operators that I'd love to visit, and the Singapore pair that made a big impression on me when I went there six years ago. I want to look at all of those, and learn a few things I didn't know along the way. Anyway, I wasn't born in London - was anybody who lives there?

Or should I go?

• London's buses are at the lowest point of appeal in their history - to me, under the current set of legislation and conditions the medium is dead in the water, and when you combine that with the average bus passenger's distressing levels of ill-manneredness, it means I simply don't enjoy travelling on them any more, and if I don't want to take the bus I'm not going to be photographing them as much. I believe you ought to want to travel on a bus because it's good enough, not be forced to from being taxed off the road or made to feel guilty if you'd rather not. In the tug-of-war between Tory greed and 'New' Labour betrayal, they've pulled the bus to pieces, taking the ordinary passenger with it.
• Or is it just London? Being away from the place has really opened my eyes as to how much more friendly and normal people behave once you get out of Ken's Third World theme park. London's just too many people crammed into too small a space competing for too few resources, and in that kind of pressure-cooker common courtesy goes right out the window. Sensorily, it's too much; I'm too old for it and it does my head in.

So let me know. Meanwhile, while I'm making myself ill from all the worry (specifically over the crowds likely to be present on the 9th, and the possibility of anybody that's even crazier than me messing the finale up in general), out on the front line Brixton's Routemasters are fighting to the death. Even tax disc expiry hasn't stilled those it affected at the close of the month, and short-term recertifications have enabled another week of service. RML 892 (WLT 892) is the oldest RML left, and is seen on Monday 28th November a few yards out from the first outbound stop in Oxford Street. Imagine this scene by daylight and add a couple of thousand people, and you've got the first paragraph of Friday week's update written for you already.