It was to be expected. Why can’t every other European country seem to get it right, but our capital can’t? We returned yesterday from our travels in Provence, and had to go straight to The O2 for an appointment with Madonna, and true to form, getting there took way longer than it should have done.
Transport for London had in their foresight, decided to close the Jubilee Tube Line, on what was probably The O2’s busiest weekend of the year. That meant a taxi ride to the Greenwich Peninsula, and after standing in a 35-minute cab queue at St Pancras, we eventually persuaded a driver to ferry us across the city, even if he was very reluctant to do so.
One of the road tunnels at either Blackwall or Rotherhithe was closed, so traffic had been backing up all day, but by scooting around the southern part of the city and crossing Tower Bridge, we arrived within 30 minutes, much less stressed than we would have done had we have taken a very crowded and many-stops Tube ride.
It still meant that it took us an hour to get from the centre of London to the east, though, when we had sat in five-star, high-speed TGV comfort for only 2.5 hours to get from the southern France Avignon TGV station (above) to Paris, a journey of over 700 miles. The irritable cab queue (due to a lack of a steady flow of carriages), meant that we missed our behind the scenes tour, too. All in all then, very frustrating, but very London.