After a long day's data-entering, I stood at the bus-stop waiting for the 40D to trundle me home through the wilderness of Dublin's North suburbs. The stop was located on Parnell Square, where old and new Dublin converged into a melting pot that often bubbled over.

The old woman waiting beside me smoked incessantly through sour, wrinkled lips. Her squinty eyes darted about, eager for some gutter gossip, irreverent to how obvious her ogling stare was.

A bus pulled up, not mine, and the potential passengers swarmed towards it, bundling in with disregard for their shared humanity. I watched with the deep-seated malaise of a long-term commuter as they elbowed and shoved, grunted and grumbled. The last few stragglers waited to board; a couple of rowdy teenagers and a suited, booted black guy with what looked like a medical case.

The sour-faced old biddy beside me shuffled closer. I smiled at her. Smiles here were rarely returned but I was determined not to let that kill the habit. She leant towards me and nodded in the direction of the briefcase-bearer. Then she pursed her lips into a pious O and whispered in my ear, serpentine;

"They're everywhere, aren't they?"

And I, in a rare well-timed comeback, replied - "Who? Doctors?"

Suffice to say that she was not best pleased. And that I revelled smugly in my minor moral victory all the way home. Sarah: 1

Vile racist buslady: 0