London's burning

It took me 3 hours to get home yesterday evening after work - a journey that usually takes me all of 24 minutes. Apparently, there was a fire on the line at Bermondsey (this is not exactly close to the main stations) at 10am. Let me say that again - there was a small fire miles away at 10am. I left work at 6pm. What the hell was happening in those 8 hours? Not an awful lot, that I can tell you. Because of this little fire, the decision was made to completely close London Bridge, Charing Cross, Cannon Street and Waterloo East - the four of the main City stations that serve Kent and the South East. So, most people headed to Victoria or Blackfriars in the hope of getting home. Being one of them, I headed to Victoria where I ended up waiting for 2 and a half hours for a train, whilst being barged and pushed around by the police and other passengers. Due to 'crowd control measures', only one exit was open. WTF?? There were thusands of people trying to get off the trains, whose exit was blocked by thousands of people waiting to get on the trains, and all because some little idiot had decided he wasn't going to let people out. The police officers were angrily swearing at people who didn't know that all-bar-one exit was closed, and things got a little physical. Pretty hairy stuff really. Fortunately a nice guy saw me standing in the middle (there was nowhere else for me to go) of what was turning out to be a heated argument with raised fists between two police officers and a group of big builders, and grabbed me out. Thank you, anonymous Samaritan.

After all the pushing and shoving, my train left pretty much empty, and took less than the usual 24 minutes. Nice.