The blog has been a bit quiet recently as I have spent the last 6 days in Sweden; 4 of those days were in a small house close to Nyköping in the countryside with no internet connection. But today I’m back in London, and it’s back to the real world with a bang.
I took the early morning SAS flight from Arlanda to London City – a tiny Avro AJ70 aircraft, and a tiny airport that can accept planes no larger than 100 seats or so. Seem to be plenty of flights to Switzerland for the bankers from the city. However even a Boeing 737 is too large at City Airport. Landing there completes the set of London airports for me – I’ve now flown to and from City, Stansted, Heathrow, Gatwick and Luton. Not sure that’s a very enviable statistic.
Yet as soon as you touch down you know you are back in Britain. We were not allowed to leave the aircraft for quite some time, as the steps had not been organised. Then upon leaving the airport all the passengers were greeted with the news that the new Docklands Light Railway link to the airport was suffering a computer malfunction and hence there were no trains. So a bunch of – predominantly Dutch – businesspeople had to pile into the local bus and head off to Canning Town station. Clearly the bus was a bit of a stress for the business people, and they proved even more loathe to move down the aisle to give everyone space than normal London commuters are!
I’m writing in the train to Sunningdale, having taken a service half an hour later than planned due to the bus mess. Welcome back to the UK!
Erm, I can’t actually imagine that… Unless they move the European Parliament to Strasbourg or something! 🙂
Imagine: you could be living in France… Given the choice, I’d rather use London’s public transports than Paris’…
Manu can you explain your comment a bit more? I always thought French public transport was streets ahead of London (although the latter has certainly improved a lot in recent years).
Jon, do not make easy jokes, if you don´t want to have 200 posts talking about the link you have right down on your blog.
When it comes to Paris metro… yes, I never had problems there, but in London, when I first saw the boards telling which of the metro lines work and wich ones not I realised that has to be quite a normal situation that 2 or 3 lines just stopped working