The Royal Albert Hall. Not the best place to get to, but worth the effort if you have a fun night out.

Coming home from there on Friday evening should have been easy: Piccadilly Line to Holborn and then Central to Liverpool Street and on to the over-ground. Except it wasn’t. The Central Line was closed from Marble Arch to Leytonstone because of a ‘passenger under a Central Line train at Liverpool Street’. Code for ‘suicide’.

So we stayed on the Piccadilly Line until Kings Cross, changed there onto the Ham & City Line and continued our journey.

Now there’s no real reason why closure of the Central Line should affect those cut and cover lines. They’re at a much higher level than the Central Line and there is no platform-level intersection. Except they still closed Liverpool Street on all the other lines, too, which would have been fine if they’d given us plenty of notice.

Had we known, we could have got off at Moorgate and walked. It’s about five minutes, tops, and we know the way well. Except they didn’t announce it until after we’d already passed through, leaving us no choice but to sit pretty until Aldgate and then work out how we got back, along with a dozen other lost commuters.

Now I can’t blame the tube for the problems on the Central Line, and if there are good operational reasons I could overlook the problems on the Ham & City, too, but giving us no notice until it was already too late to get off was the hopeless.

In the end, we didn’t get home until half past midnight. Our ‘do’ had finished at ten past ten.