Could London's knife crime epidemic be solved with a simple cuppa?

What a night filled with adrenaline, burritos, and much tea! As usual on the first Tuesday of each month The Bridge goes out to serve the homeless and poor of London a bit of love n food, which was the occurrence last night. On the menu was bean, rice, cheese, peppers & onions, and chicken-for-the-carnivores BURRITOS! We were skilled with the production and rolling of these puppies, all 9 of us! We got a bit of a later start than usual, but we headed towards our bus stop and hopped the 29 towards Charing Cross, our destination.

Two of the girls settled down chatting with two blokes who turned out to be homeless, the rest of us were standing somewhere near the second set of doors. About 5 minutes into our journey I was speaking to Rob about whatever when I caught the glance of the dude sort of behind Rob. I say the glance... it was more of a menacing stare and I wasn't sure if it was a 'what the BLEEP are you looking at' or 'you're so hot I could pin you down right now' look. Either way I wasn't terribly comfortable with it and paired with my motion woosieness whilst turned around on a bus, I decided it would be best to look forward.

Minutes later we see this dude being slapped in the face by some other guys who were sitting behind him. To me it looked like they'd attacked him for no apparent reason, but perhaps I brushed off his eerie stare too early. The skuttle continued on up the road as two drunk women got involved, one shouting 'She's a lady' or something to that effect. The guy ended up jumping off (or sort of forced off) at the next stop, dragging the women with him. We all rubbernecked as we pulled away to see what was going on at their drop-off point, but I couldn't tell what was happening.

We get probably two stops up, having been held up by lights and traffic when we see this dude run along the side of the bus, pounding at the driver's side door to get in. Thankfully the driver had sense enough not to let him on and nobody bothered to get off. We trucked on up Gower St and the pace of the bus told me that the guy would very easily catch up if he was running. One of the guys involved in the skuttle earlier boasted something to the effect of '... I'll kill him.' We shook our heads thinking, come on guys, this is lame.

Pretty suddenly, the doors of the bus opened and this angry and scorned bloke ran onto the bus, shoved his way past us, and I mean just past us, like right in front of 3 of us is where his entry ended. I couldn't see much because his back was directly in front of my line of sight, but people towards the front of the bus, our group included began making a quick exit. One of our guys next to where I was standing, who was directly in the middle of whatever was going on started being very pushy and clear that we needed to MOVE UP NOW. The two homeless dudes who had been conversing with two of our gals jumped out and shouted to us 'Move forward now girls!' So we promptly scooted our selves up and outta the bus only to find that the guy was in some showdown with the other guys on the bus, knife in hand.

It appeared as if there was some intervention by some other guys in the back of the bus to cause this guy to chill out. The driver would let nobody off the bus at that point, and safe in his little driver's cubbyhole, he drove away presumably to the awaiting police with his make-shift jail cell.

Fortunately we jumped onto a bus that happened to be behind ours, and the guy had been on that bus previously, fidgeting and brandishing his knife. The driver wasn't impressed.

Adrenaline pumping, we all shared our new war story with one another, headed on our way to give our burritos out to those in need. While we feared that it would be a dull night, following a big snow, thinking people wouldn't be out on the streets and hard to find, we encountered a bigger group than ever before. It was amazing and we gave out everything we had and could have used more.

Good times.