Don’t ask me how, but I’d got myself stuck in Nottingham one day, nothing in particular to do, but not able to leave. Feeling a bit like Number Six, I decided to console myself with lunch from a deli in Sneinton Market, and unsure of the way, hopped on a bus. In this lazy, directionless mood, I fiddled with my ticket, only noticing after a while a picture of a guy in naval costume on the back. He seemed to be in the act of falling over from too much rum, or perhaps dancing a jig. Some tiny text told me that this character was visiting the city, and I dismissed it all as an insidious example of viral marketing for a local chippie. There was a nagging thought that it was strange for him to be saying he’d be appearing at a bus stop near you, but before I could make any more sense of it I was stumbling off to get my panini.

As I wandered back into town, burning my mouth on hot cheese, I thought I heard a sea shanty playing. I was a bit fazed by the coincidence, half worried that I had indeed fallen into a hallucinatory Village where lost sailors rubbed shoulders with ex-government agents. As I got closer, I realised that this was the Captain from the ticket come to life, reading tales to a shipmate in a salty old sea dog voice. Unless this was a stunt for a pretty avant-garde Fish Shop, something else had to be going on. I watched for a while, but no clues were given away, the sailors seemed in a world of their own where it was normal to be dressed for the sea in the middle of England and talking of the deep and not the shallow.

Trying to get to the bottom of this, I scrabbled around in my pocket for the bus ticket - there was a website, but more intriguingly a tiny drawing of a crow. There must be more strange images to find. Perhaps it was some kind of treasure hunt, a secret trail around the city. I got on another bus, a little thrown off by the driver’s challenge to my quest, but I managed “Two stops, please?” which seemed to work. Sitting down, I enjoyed the artist’s clever mimicry of a standard transport information advert, calling into question the nature of the journeys we are all on, it was so authentic it was… it was… it was just a normal ticket, wasn’t it.

Still, I wasn’t going to be put off, this might be an important part of the initiation process: the secret would only be revealed to someone who persisted. I tried again, a different line, another two stops. Painfully nervous, I turned the ticket over, but instead of gold I just got more of the archaic dot matrix style text that appears on the front of all Nottingham bus tickets. This must just be some gibberish spewed out by a malfunctioning machine. I glared at it, furious that I was being ridiculed like this. My watery eyes seemed to be desperately trying to make sense of the image, as if I could make it resolve by an act of will into something, like an old computer game screen, Space Invaders, or Galaxian perhaps. Hang on, it must be meant to look like that, there was the Captain’s hand jutting into the edge and that same website! I was back on track.

At the stop I scribbled down a map, details about other people waiting, then smiled out my mantra. More joy: an oddly familiar dove became a free-floating symbol of many things at once: capital, transcendence and peace. Surely a sign that I was reaching some kind of understanding, accepted by the forces behind this peculiar game. There were a few duds of course, but I resisted the urge to check with the drivers whether they had the funny ones with pictures on, and made notes on everything, now that I realised it was all part of a much larger picture.

The next showed me a fragment of another ticket from another time, a real or imaginary cloakroom had been guarded with half a paper stag, tangled up in string. All I saw just led me right back to myself, I started to feel I was feverishly travelling the folds in my skull, colour and number coded for your convenience: lilac 23; red 45; orange 36. With too bright eyes and shaking hands I took my next clue. Two things slammed simultaneously into my forebrain: 1) A double slogan: “We are all living / We are all dying” like the logo of some post-Benneton corporation mindfucking us with an Eros/Thanatos double bind; and 2) a tiny drawing of a crow. I’d reached the loop.

Dazed and illuminated, I realised that I didn’t need to find a copy of the last frame with the two birds together: the fissure was more perfect, suggesting thousands waiting in potential. I’d thought this adventure would show me the sights, but instead I had been putting together pieces of a puzzle where I was a part of the solution. Daily scrap had become a gift, but one that attached itself to me symbiotically, giving me as much as I was prepared to offer it back. Think of a whole city of commuters spending their journey meditating on these little poems. Thousands waiting in potential