(14 Oct 2020, 11:21 pm)JP6004 wrote I've met a few people who call it the angel as opposed to the 21...young and old. Might be the lower syllable count as opposed to the route number, same as the loop 

Same, it's so much faster just saying The Angel as opposed to the Twenty One.
Then again, I'm also the sort of person that always referred to the X21 as 'The Castles Express X21 Service to Bishop Auckland' (or Newcastle, depending on what direction I intended on travelling) purely because of the ridiculously long name, to the point where my friend that lives in South Shields started calling it that despite never travelling on it

My mother, who has probably been on 10 buses in the last 20 years only knows them by the colours and brands. She knows that the gold and blue one goes to Bishop, and the Green one goes to Durham. She's turned into a right bus spotter, every time we drive past the X21, even if it's in the distance she points it out!

She also refuses to get an Arriva bus because they're, in her words, 'shitey old buses', to be fair though, her only experience of Arriva has been the X46! When she went to the hospital in Durham, she waited for the Go North East X46 back home (RIP). So now whenever she's getting the train from Durham, she'll just park at mine and get the X21.