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Another absolute failure, and with my brother this time as well.
BUT we did do a Circle Line Bottle after giving up and beat my personal best.

Care to furnish us with more details?

Where did it all go wrong?

Take heart Jonny; it's taken me 23 years and 1 day to do the entire network and I'm still about twenty stations short.

Well I plan my route as if i would not make that connection onto the Watford train at Moor Park, thus planning on waiting 10 minutes. I usually, obviously, end up 10 minutes ahead of schedule at Watford then. But we missed this train due to our train into Moor Park being delayed (i think it must have been routed into the bay at chalfont when coming down from chesham as there was a 2-3 minute wait approaching it.
Anyway, so we were now 'on' schedule -- not too bad really. Except the planned Watford service was delayed by about 8 minutes, we then missed the connection at Watford and were about 15 minutes behind arriving at North Harrow. We made a good connection at West Harrow saving us a few minutes -- with my brother making me more determined to run faster and make it.

We went swiftly up the northern line until Stockwell. We then waited 10 minutes in the tunnel to Oval, then 10 minutes again in the tunnel to Kennington.

Severe Delays on the Piccadilly lost us time with Uxbridge and Heathrow. Further time was lost at Heathrow when we were making a fantastic connection onto HEx with the train there to run into, but the guard, strangely standing at the entrance turning people away rather than seeing off the train told us that the doors had shut and we couldn't get on. I tried to persuade him but it was clear with the BTP standing 5 metres away we weren't going to be able to get that train. We ran back to the underground and doubled up on both Terminals 1,2,3 and Terminal 4.

Delays on the Jubilee caused a bit of a worry with the indicator blank at Southwark but we weren't put too far behind then.

We waited at Edgware Road for 20 minutes for a Westbound H&C train.

It doesn't look a lot but this plus other minor things put us 1h30 behind (ouch) and we would have missed the Shoreditch bus anyway had we bothered carrying on - it didn't look like we could make up time quickly enough for that.

We gave up and did the Bottle challenge.

Sorry to hear about that catalogue of woe, Jonny (and sorry for earlier being flippant!). Ten minutes' wait in a tunnel is something that I've never experienced, you know. But frustration does mount up quite often on these crazy challenges, like waiting at Bayswater for few hours for a Circle!

I'm shocked to hear about that guard. If the train's only sixteen feet away from you then it's seriously galling not to be allowed on to it. Were the doors still open?

To get my own back on those guards, I tend to stand in the doors at major stations and hold them open for a few seconds after the whistle's gone for that last-minute straggler, because it's always sad to see somebody miss a train by mere seconds!

Well what annoyed me more was that the doors were still open (i wonder if he could get done for 'lying', if i complained). The guard wasn't dispatching the train, merely standing at the platform entrance telling people that the train was ready to depart and the doors were closed.

I don't suppose you thought about circumnavigating the guard at speed?

I did but the BTP called me back.

Good grief. I hope that that never happens again to anyone...