I think you're confusing total rendering time, as being discussed here, with server response time. I'm getting 86ms response time from the mentioned blog (from London), and 900ms total rendering time.
I did mention latency, which you can't do much about. For me it's around 100ms from response received to rendering, most of which seems to be google analytics. I don't know where the server is, but I'm in Australia so it's probably crossing the pacific. See my reply to the other person for why I'm blaming analytics.