Well, well, well. It seems the nation that brought you the Fabergé egg and a truly staggering tolerance for corruption has now been gifted the ultimate British export: a clipboard and a spreadsheet of doom. A new report, presumably written in biro and funded by your licence fee, has confirmed that riding a bus in Ukraine is now statistically indistinguishable from placing your head in a hungry wolf's mouth while wearing a pork chop hat.
The most dangerous routes, the report shrieks, are a rolling theatre of the absurd where the only safety briefing is a silent prayer and the hope that the driver hasn't recently consumed a bottle of antifreeze. I've seen more road safety in a bucket of Deep Heat. These buses, my friends, are not transport.
They are mobile memorials, careering across potholed tundra with the structural integrity of a wet digestive biscuit. The British documenters, bless their anoraked hearts, have bravely catalogued every near-miss, every tyre blowout, every moment the driver took a swig from a suspicious flask. It's all in the name of 'awareness', apparently, as if the passengers weren't already acutely aware of their imminent, fiery demise.
This is gonad journalism at its finest: reporting on a crisis that is itself a report. Soon we'll need a report about the report, a meta-document of bureaucratic flailing while real people cling to luggage racks on wheels of death. The only conclusion is that the universe has a dark sense of humour, and it speaks with a British accent and a trembling hangover.
