I hate commuting and had the end to the day today to make me want to be somewhere like Bali. I normally work a five minute drive away in Hertford or at most fifteen minutes down the road in a town called Hoddesdon, but today had to go into London, to Greenwich, just south of the river.

I left home about 6am and got down there just after seven. Leaving work at 4 o’clock it should have been about an hour home. By 5.30pm I’d gone about a mile and was stuck in a monumental jam leading up to the Blackwall Tunnel, one of the main crossing points of the River Thames.
This tunnel has two lanes going each way under the river and a truck had broken down in one of the north bound lanes according to the radio, but the traffic was absolutely crawling, about a half mile before the tunnel three roads kind of come together.

When traffic finally reached the tunnel it was closed by the police and we were sent on a big loop around and back on the way we’d just spent ages coming from. I now had to try and get across the river somewhere else, either go west into central London and the rushhour commuters leaving plus the new congestion zone, or east out to the Dartford Tunnel, which is what I did.

It finally took three and a half hours to get back here and what really annoyed me was the total lack of traffic police around the Greenwich area. In the time I was there I saw two cops in a car blocking the entrance to the tunnel, but nobody stopping traffic joining this jam from all the ajoining roads. Three or four cops on bikes could have saved thousands of people a couple of hours of frustration, but most of the time I get the impression the police in London couldn’t order a Chinese, nevermind sort out the traffic.