Columnist Hanzala Fayaz thought he’d be late to uni because of traffic. Turns out he was late because a woman gave birth in the bus next to him on the inner ring road. Only in Leicester.
There are many legitimate reasons to be late for a university lecture: alarm didn’t go off, missed the bus, or getting trapped in the Starbucks queue behind someone ordering a drink that sounds like a dessert.
What I never expected to add to that list was: a woman giving birth in the bus next to me on Vaughan Way.
Let’s go back.
It began as the kind of morning where nothing dramatic is supposed to happen. My brother was driving me to DMU as per normal, and I was half-awake in the passenger seat, scrolling through messages and wondering why 10am lectures exist when we live in a supposedly civilised society.
Then, halfway down Vaughan Way, the traffic froze. Not the usual sluggish shuffle of rush hour.
Frozen. Static. Leicester, paused.
Naturally, I assumed roadworks, because at any given moment in this city there is at least a 70% chance something is being dug up.
But when I looked to the right, I realised the bus in the middle lane had not simply stopped. It had shutdown entirely. Lights on. Doors sealed. Passengers gathering towards the front like it was the final evacuation from civilisation.
And there, in the aisle, was a woman very much in the process of delivering a whole new person into the world.
I did not mean to stare. I promise I didn’t. But there is something about being two metres away from a live birth that overrides all social training. Instinct takes over. Curiosity elbows guilt aside. You look. My brother and I exchanged the kind of glances that siblings specialise in, a silent conversation of horror, awe and the shared understanding that absolutely none of this felt real.
Traffic remained frozen. People were stepping out of their cars. An Uber driver to our left had given up and begun narrating events to the passenger in his back seat.
The deliver driver ahead of us was filming, because of course he was. There’s always someone filming whenever something big happens.
A man on a Deliveroo bike parked himself on the pavement and was just scrolling on his phone with the air of someone who had accepted his fate.
Eventually, an ambulance pushed through the wall of vehicles and the paramedics boarded with the calm focus of people who have clearly seen everything.
They put up a large screen at the front of the bus to protect the mother’s privacy – finally. A thoughtful move in theory.
In practice, the entire length of the bus remained proudly transparent. Clear windows, clear view. If anything, the screen acted like an announcement: nothing to see here at the front, but feel free to observe from the side.
So, there we all sat. A involuntary audience. Witnessing the miracle of life through an Arriva bus window while trapped on one of Leicester’s busiest roads. It was the most surreal thing I have ever seen, and also the most Leicester thing I have ever seen.
When the paramedics finally escorted the mother and her newborn off the bus and into the back of the ambulance, relief rippled down the line of traffic. Engines coughed back to life. People climbed back into their cars, suddenly remembering they had places to be. I arrived on campus 40 minutes late, sprinted into my lecture red-faced, overwhelmed and silently rehearsing my explanation.
I did not give it in the end. My lecturer already knows that being late is a norm for me.
But I knew, as I sat down and tried to pretend nothing extraordinary has happened, that I had earned a place in DMU lateness folklore. Because very few students can honestly say, even once in their lives: I was late to class because someone gave birth on the way to uni.
And fewer still can say they saw the whole thing.
