#5

THE ABSOLUTE SHITFIGHT THAT WAS GETTING HOME FROM METALLICA - 28 MARCH 2009

A special post, ladies and gentlemen. Special in that you get two posts in 3 days, and that this post is essentially one of complaining and hate. All justified, I think.

I wont bore you with the details of the actual concert, which absolutely made my night, by the way - But will inform you of the ridiculous transport options to get home that evening.

For those of you who are uninformed, I live in West London. The o2 Arena (admittedly, an impressively gargantuan arena) is in North Greenwich, a place in East London. The London Underground has many, many lines. These are all mostly useful and often highly punctual. North Greenwich has one tube line going through it The Jubilee Line - a rare occurrence. Of course, the weekend a Metallica concert is on - they close it for maintenance.

Historically, maintenance on these lines has been rare, irregular and somewhat unpopular. Due to the impending Olympics in 2012, I think a collective, figurative "bollocks" was exclaimed amongst those who are in charge of the London Underground.

They have to compensate with a 'Rail Replacement Bus Service' - basically buses trying to compensate for the frequent, efficient, Noah's ark-like capacity of the Tube.

Fail.

What ensued was thousands of drunk, pissed off Metallica fans, trying to bloody get home. What's one of the most annoying parts of the story was that even if we used the Rail Replacement Service, we would have got to the Tube station well after the last Tube had left.

Thus, we were forced to catch a bus to the city, and hopefully catch a Nightbus to where we live. Sounds fine in theory, right?

Wrong.

The bus from North Greenwich to Waterloo and Victoria, stopped and terminated at Elephant and Castle. Also known as Shitville.

Our next option was to persist to Victoria and catch the Nightbus. We got a minicab (cheaper than the poncey looking ones) with a Dutch speaking African man, who used his Dutch-speaking GPS.

We eventually got to Victoria Station and then waited in about minus a billion temperatures at the correct stop for the Nightbus. This bus was meant to come at 17 and 47 minutes past the hour. We were there by 30 minutes past. We were waiting till 10 minutes past the next hour. All the while, we'd lost an hour due to the lovely plight of Daylight Savings.

At this point, we were roughly 3.5 hours after the concert had finished, and nowhere near home. Luckily, a nightclub was nearby and we got a cab from the joker outside. That ended up costing 28 quid.

IN THE END, we got home 4.5 hours after the concert finished, spending 40 quid on transport when it should have taken about 1 hour, and cost us about 1/10th of that amount.

How's that for a poostorm of shit luck.