Monday 8 October 2012

Juat another manic Monday

UPDATE: I thought I'd try the District Line again today for the way home.  Big mistake.  A 10-minute delay on arrival at Wimbledon (held at a few red signals), causing me to miss not only my connecting train to Hampton Court, but the next train headed to Kingston (a not-ideal but workable alternative).  The train after that heading to Kingston was the 18:43, which was four minutes' delayed arriving at Wimbledon, and five minutes by the time of arrival at Kingston.  Kingston was also, coincidentally, where we got our apology and excuse - recorded and played over the station's PA system.  Signalling problems at Wimbledon, apparently.

I do have to record that the final stage of the improvised journey, the bus ride, was a good experience: the bus turned up a minute early, and arrived at Hampton Court a minute early too.  Nonetheless, I arrived at my final destination 30 minutes late.  Which means £75.  Which means I topped £1,000 in my first two months of blogging: hooray!


Bleugh!  Don't feel good today - I think that, after several weeks of good health, I've caught something from my daughter again.  Last weekend, she had what looked like a nasty cold and a 24-hour eye infection.  Sure enough, I started feeling pretty rotten yesterday, and this morning my eyes were all gummed up.  Seems mostly OK now, apart from being bunged up and having a headache, but then you never can expect much from Mondays.

Now for the journey: we arrived late in Waterloo by seven minutes, again seemingly due to accumulated small delays.  No explanation or apology offered by the train driver, of course.  I wonder if he won an award for last week's National Customer Service Week?

Well, that of course meant I had to take a later connecting tube than the one Journey Planner recommended.  This itself was three minutes' delayed in arrival at Edgware Road, despite the PA boast in Waterloo claiming all underground lines were operating a good service.  All in all, a 12-minute delay over when I should have arrived at my final destination, which works out to another £30.

I'm a little disappointed, to tell the truth: today marks two months since I started Signal Failure, and I had been hoping to rack up a grand in that time.  As you can see, however, I've fallen just a little short of that target at £927.50.  Never mind - there's still 10 months to go!

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