You wait hours for a bus ticket and then ten come at once

Saw this ad on the tube yesterday. It's advertising bus tickets, available via ten interest-free monthly instalments. Unreal. This form of credit has become an epidemic here. Yes, I'm happy to see that the payments are interest-free, but what about the the actual ticket price, is it higher than it otherwise would be ? And what about financial planning ? How on earth can people keep track of so many different monthly payments ?

We took the metro during rush hour, never a pleasant experience. Unable to get on a train we finally went to the "special needs" part of the platform - supposedly reserved for pregnant women, the less able-bodied and those of us with pushchairs - but still found packed carriages. Since most of the people on board looked perfectly able rather than requiring assistance, we asked the uniformed but not very active platform guy why this was ? He said there are only three stations which have this "special needs" area, and that even in those ones it refers to only one of the two carriage doors ! So the same carriages are both restricted and unrestricted depending on which tube station and which few feet of the platform you stand on. Again, unreal. But he said it with such calm friendliness, as so often in this country, that I found myself unable to get more worked up about it. After almost six months here I remain a stranger in a strange land.