Up up and away

The Docklands Light Railway is an easy way of getting to London City Airport, according to the airport's website and and Transport for London's website. Easy peasy, no hint of engineering works anywhere. So I get off the tube at Bank (the Circle line having already let me down) to find the relevant bit of the DLR apparently closed, for engineering, and an incomprehensible bit of paper advertising a replacement bus service. Well, we all know what those replacements buses are like, you're better off walking. So I took a cab. Except I didn't; at 8 am on a Saturday the City of London is deserted, those bankers don't get out of bed for less than a million, and not at all on weekends. After 20 minutes of waiting and wandering I get one to stop: "Sorry mate [mate? what happened to guv? was I just demoted?] I can't get you there, all the roads are closed, I've just come from the East and I've seen it." Fuck fuck and double-fuck, I've got a plane to catch and a connexion to make in Schiphol.

How can they close off an airport and not tell anyone? Has some arse, offended by some slight to religion or ancestors, set off a bomb again? So back into the tube and ask someone in a relevant uniform if I really can't get there. "Oh, take the tube to Plaistow, there are buses running from there". Now this is so clearly insane (Plaistow??) that not even I believe it, so I get off 2 stops later, go to a DLR station and see an actual train driver, the first person to say something coherent and true: "I can take you to Canary Wharf, and there are buses from there." It's my only chance at this point, so I go for it. And at Canary Wharf bugger the buses, there is a cab driver who gets me to the airport in time. Whoof.

OK, rant over, only not quite. Look, I understand that engineering has to happen, but why is every piece of information about it either concealed or invented? If I were some wretched Japanese visitor faced with this depravity I'd never want to return. Whose fault is it? Isn't that pointless buffoon BloJo in charge of TfL, so it's him, isn't it? How can I, in my turn, reduce him to weeping frustration? Can I hire a skilled rentboy to spend the weekend bringing him nearly, but not quite, off? No, that would be too much like Eton. Suggestions please.