Festival checklist and hungry touts

There really wasn’t much to prepare, the only last minute thing i brought were my spotty wellies that I used for Reading Festival 2006, my bag consisted of a poncho I got from the filmfour somerset house show (mmm scarface), a hoodie in case i got cold, tickets, maps to my hotel, a notebook (containing writing instruments, post it notes and other bits and bobs), and my lovely dslr camera, dont think I bought a book for this trip, in festivals you simply assume that you’ll lose everything you own. plus i loved the idea of packing and ensuring that things were at it’s bare essentials. Once the packing it was time to put on a lovely pair of green converse chucks and hit the road. The train journey was boring as ever, but nothing internet on the phone or music on the ipod won’t kill (i actually find them to be the ultimate time killing combo, you can either read the interweb or write blogs and random entries with the lovely qwerty keypad). I eventually reached Wolverhampton to meet up with kev. He had arrived pretty early and found time to kill by asking touts how much they’d pay him for his additional V Festival VIP ticket, the story was pretty hilarious as the tout originally offered £20 which kev immediately thought “forget it” and left him, but obviously that’s how touts roll, insist that the first offer is their lowest and simply walk away, they know how to bargain (they probably try haggling at McDonalds when they order their happy meals (assuming they eat happy meals, there’s very little happiness in the life of a tout)). Kev had ignored the touts but found them to be slightly aggressive nearer the end when they kept pestering him and asking him for an offer, but obviously kev wasn’t intending on selling it. Once we met up we immediately waited outside at the shuttle bus stop place where the shuttle buses roam. There again the touters were there ready to offer kev money he cannot refuse (but did). From £20 they simply asked him how much did he want, kev asked for £100 and the tout reluctantly started to unload a few twenties from his pocket ready to hand to kev, but kev immediately changed his mind and said “nah”. Man did kev know how to piss the touts off. Kev eventually offered the ticket to a fellow muser once we were at the box office area.

Why wellies were your best friend at v festival

On the shuttle bus we talked a bit about Marley park and other bits and bobs, once we were close to the arena we donned our wellies (kev was ultra proud that he could make use of the wellies once again since he only bought them for the purpose of Marley which really wasn’t used much). Upon walking up to the box office we met a few folks, including dip. Conversation then began and slowly but surely we got our passes, and was in the arena where we met up with Stu. I think this is the point where we finally realised how important it was to wear wellies, it was just as important as our festival tickets (well not really but saying that makes it important). The fields outside the arena weren’t too bad but as soon as we saw the entrance, man how glad were we to have wellies. The v in v festival really stood for mud; rain, fields and loads of festival goers never mix. Of course having wellies on instantly had that sense of feeling as if you touched a gold star in super mario and was invincible to it’s thick and miserable aura the thick brown mud gave out (and if you listened hard enough you probably could hear the invincibility theme tune in your head as you started stamping onto the mud, killing mushrooms and turtles).

Oh did I mention about dip? he was all kinds of awesome and it was fun meeting him, it turns out that everybody including myself love dip, got to love a bit of emo. He’s in quite a few of my photos since he was “hanging out” with the folks and kev gave his VIP pass to him so he was able to chillax with us in there too.

A burger and chips stall called “burger and chips”
Not long we met up with everybody, I think from then on there was a lot of chillaxing involved, we were told that the VIP area had a Nando’s in it which got both me and kev pumped, however our dreams were immediately raped silly when all they served were nando’s burgers. You couldn’t even go “fitter with a chicken on the pitta”, nonetheless, it had to be done, me and Stu bought a nando’s burger (no idea what burger number stu was on hehe) and whipped on the extra extra extra hot sauce and feasted on the hot piece of chicken wrapped around this cold floury bun. I never liked eating food that had two temperatures at the same time, usually buns are heated up to compliment the burger but hey, we’re in a field i suppose, it reminded me of eating salmon nigiri’s where the fish was nice and warm (in the melting kind of way) however the rice was cold, these things require delicacy. Anyway, that was me on the food, I eventually spent the rest of the evening food wise having lovely “gourmet” bbq jumbo sausages, and they were bad at all, definitely had that lovely bbq feel to it and not that mass produced festival food feel. The stalls in the festivals were pretty hilarious, I was constantly pointing out the names of the stalls, going “HEY LOOK, THEY HAVE A PLACE CALLED BURGERS AND CHIPS, AND THEY SOLD BURGER AND CHIPS”, evidently stall owners assume all people are retarded and have to be pretty clear of what a stall is saying before venturing out to buy some beef tacos, noodles or whatever they fancied, though I suppose calling it “Johns Stall” really didn’t help one bit (we later on discover that this wasn’t just inside the festival, there was a kebab place called Doner Kebab in town). That’s the food commentary sorted, lets think of some more things that happened.

The special place

The VIP area was pretty nice, but somewhat lame at the same time, the bar tent had a DJ playing thumping dance music but with nobody dancing to it, it’s probably a DJ’s worse nightmare playing music to nobody, you could definitely feel the energy once you’re in there but the lack of involvement with other people was an immediate turn off, I did manage to dance for a bit when another person started dancing, but that didn’t last too long, the area was simply empty if you exclude the 3 girls who were actually using the dark dance floor as an area to get changed (weirdos). There were lots of lovely tents and seats in the guest area too, the toilets were of a better variety than the ones in the arena (obviously) and I believe kev was able to swot out a hollyoaks cast member (bless). Another good thing about the VIP area was the fact that the grass wasn’t muddy as it was out there, you could actually lie down and chillax the entire day, but that really wasn’t the point of the festival, we had like… 2 bands to see (haha). At one point we were playing buckeroo with some guy who was actually sleeping in the arena, it was pretty fun until someone poured beer on him, bad form and sleep man!

“Nobody plays you because you always win”

After heading off to go see Sugababes we went to the guitar hero tent since inn wanted me and kev to battle it out, the tent was a bit lame since they were playing thumping rock music meaning people couldn’t hear the songs they were playing, it was all about eye coordination and guesswork. We were given cute little guitar hero badges and waited around the booths for people to finish playing, the booth we were waiting for had two kids playing, one of them was obviously whooping the other kid, for his last he picked “Through Fire and Flames” by Dragonforce, if people have played Guitar hero 3 you should all know about this song and how painful it is to play. My heart however started racing because that was the most exciting song to play and I didn’t mind giving that kid a run for his money, the losing opponent left knowing he was most likely going to lose and so I stepped in and challenged him to a battle of guitar hero, dragonforce style. Of course we picked expert mode and then we were off. The needle indicating who was winning stayed on my side and eventually I defeated the kid, he shook my hand and then left whilst kev stepped up to battle it out on guitar hero. We picked the most obvious song on the list (Muse – Knights of Cydonia) and began rocking out (silently mind, still couldn’t hear the song and all). Now kev has actually played guitar hero a lot longer than me so I was pretty scared that he would win, but fortunately the guitar controller was shite, and kev wasn’t a fan of tremolo picking, that’s where I got all my brownie points from and defeated kev hehe. People were obviously cheering kev on more because as inn says i “always win” hence noone really wants to play me, oh cruel video gaming skills how you curse me with the lack of opponents.

After some guitar hero’ing i believe we did more lounging about, meeting up with random people, chillaxing back at the tent, and then meeting people some more, it was quite a tiring day and there really wasn’t much to watch due to the lack of good bands, it really was more about the social part of the festival where we were all together and chatting away though, and good company is usually hard to gather around since they only respond to muse gigs haha. Near the end we went off to check out Stereophonics and then found a decent spot to see Muse. That was pretty much it (the gigs will be explained on part 2 obviously).

Birthday stories and post it notes

We met up with a few musers and then went back to the campsite, halfway through we decided to take a toilet break so he headed back to the VIP area and used the nicer toilets (by this time most people were using the golden wall to relieve themselves, it’s quite a horrific event so I’ll simply skip that chapter altogether). Once settled me and kev paid the camping people a visit to celebrate Gem’s birthday. The last bus supposedly was leaving at 11:30am so we had very little time to hang around, once there we began counting down the time to Gem’s birthday, I had already given Gem my presents to her which consisted of a pink bag (because she likes pink), a fairly big cow model (because she likes cows), and a Joseph CD (because she likes theatre). I also gave everyone post it notes from that post it note project and everyone was happy to read what it said. Gem and Ste remembered to bring their post it notes to me and it was amazing seeing them, I’ll most likely update the post it note section and show you what they wrote. After pulling some party poppers and singing happy birthday to Gem (not to mention attracting some drug dealers at the same time) it was time for me and kev to depart the camping world and return to the world were beds had mattresses and showers were a mere facility and not a luxury hehe (man we did rub it in quite a bit with the hotel dwelling). I wasn’t keen on camping on the last days anyway, the last time that happened I had to sleep through toilet banging, fires, and people screaming, not to mention the ubiquitous drunk man who opens up your tent to pee inside it whilst you’re there (is it ubiquitous or is it just a mere myth that i devilishly inserted to make things interesting? alas, most likely the latter (but i’m very sure it does happen for the unfortunate ones))

Back to civilisation

It was now me and kev heading back to Wolverhampton, as kev said earlier on (Wolverhampton is shit) haha, we were misguided twice by incompetent festival staff for where the shuttle buses were and I was at a point of running to the bus stop in fear that we might miss it, strangely I still had a lot of energy left whilst kev wasn’t having any of it, he said he’d rather get a taxi than run to the bus stop hehe. Nonetheless we arrived at the bus stop and was able to board the freedom shutter bus back to civilisation. It was pretty tiring at this point, we eventually changed back to our normal shoes and sat there talking about the show and the entire day, it was a pretty nice day, nothing hectic and intense as most meetups generally are, just having one commitment (ie seeing muse at the end) was enough to make the entire day nice and relaxing. It was around 1am and we were finally at the Wolverhampton bus stop, we went to a Doner Kebab place called Doner Kebab and ordered a can of coke each, man it’s refreshing to drink some sugary water after an intense day of mud trotting and jumping up and down during Muse, all drinks are amazing when you’re thirsty enough. Once the moment was over we eventually spoke to the cab driver who was suspiciously parked right next to us in his “nonchalant” way (granted we were standing near the taxi rink) and asked him how much it was to drive us back to our separate hotels, it came out to a mere £10 so we entered the vehicle and was transported to our hotels, kevs first (grr). We agreed that if one of us wasn’t able to check in because of the time we’d taxi it to the other’s hotel and stay there. Fortunately both of us were able to check into our hotels and begin the arduous task of cleaning our wellies.

Hotel antics

I was greet by a kind lady and man at the door, they seemed very friendly and helpful, they were well aware of the festival goers so it wasn’t out of the ordinary to have people coming into their hotel all muddy and bloody, it turns out I was the last person to check in (damn toilet break for stalling time) he gave me my card key and directions to my room, I was able to catch the other staff members chillaxing in the living room, it did have that homey feel, and boy did the place smelt of “quality” teehee. Once inside my room I unpacked my bag and threw myself into the soft cuddly mattress, you suddenly realise how aching you are when you meet comfort once again, anyway, lots to do before I head to bed. I only cared about the wellies (and poncho to some extent) and used kev’s method of cleaning them which was to run them in the shower and have some scrubbing fun. The process was pretty quick but I did make a proper mess of the room. Grass and mud were all over the place which I immediately rinsed out to avoid any hotel faux pas. Once that was done I took a shower, wrote in my notebook for a bit, and began taking photos in the room, I had an urge to write a post it note to the cleaners since I was in a post it note mood so I sat at the desk and scribbled a quick message to them. Whilst all of this was happening I was texting kev back and fourth in regards to his status of cleaning his wellies and stuff, that was sorted for him but his task now was to clean up his jeans, he didn’t want to go into town (and subsequently) and Birmingham with mud all over him so he tried washing off with a the shower head. The next task was making it dry, he used the hair dryer to dry up the thing (i had a trouser press but I couldn’t be bothered with cleaning my jeans since I was going home immediately). He texted me back saying the blow dryer broke hehe, so he was stuck in wearing the jeans wet whilst sleeping *shudders*. That was pretty much it, it was a tiring day so eventually I turned off the lights and went to bed.

You can never have enough bacon.

The next morning was the best bit, I tend to wake up dead early when I’m not sleeping in my own bed or sleeping somewhere where I’m most comfortable, today I did just that, enough time to exit the room and head down for Breakfast of the buffet variety. I usually get my money’s worth at breakfast buffets. A lovely full english breakfast was exactly what I needed after an exhausting day of the yester variety. The food was pretty good for a 3 star hotel and the buffet obviously enticed me to order more than I can handle (no caps this time at least, once I was capped for ordering too much bacon ). There were a few customers who were obviously at the festival too, intently listening to the news about the what happened at the festival last night, there was the ubiquitous review of a festival goer who sounded more like a chav being interviewed in the street than a music lover. Once breakfast was over (mmm lovely croissant) it was time to check out and head off to Wolverhampton station. With the post it note ready i left it at the most obviously place, packed my bags and vacated the quality hotel. I asked the receptionist to order me a taxi and spent three lovely british pounds for my transport to the station, the driver didn’t appreciate my constant headphone mode but I didn’t care. Once at the station I was able to say hi to kev for a wee moment and then I was off, back to the city of London. The rest of the day was spent chillaxing and making stuff.

Part two, the gigs

stuff you might also like

• The ultimate Muse Wembley Stadium Weekend (Sunday)
• The ultimate Muse Wembley Stadium Weekend (Saturday)
• Muse Meetup 23rd November 2006
• The ultimate Muse Wembley Stadium Weekend (Friday)
• New Years Eve at Stu’s

Anyway, before and after the event me and Alice had our time off together, Alice wasn’t too happy about leaving her job but had to so she could go travel. Hopefully that all pans out right. We were able to prepare loads of stuff since Alice was leaving very soon. On the duck day me, Alice and Inn met up a wee bit for some random browsing and whatnot. Alice wanted to do a makeover with Mac but that backfired when booking was required, same with Body Shop, shame because it would have been fun watching! Inn also got some food before the duck event. We then chilled out at a starbucks where we met up with Gem and Paul.

After getting a wee bit impatient we decided to just go red chilli and chill out there. We managed to get ourselves a big table that had a lazy susan in the middle. Was a good thing since there was quite a lot of people eating and spinning food around was a good idea. (it’s ALWAYS a good idea). After some bantering kev and her sister finally arrive. We began the ever so painful process of choosing food and eventually we picked a few starters and that duck (whole variety)

The duck was epic, granted Inn wasn’t as chuffed but man it was epic haha. We had a lovely soup too and the others had spring rolls and, some cake and a hot and sour soup (all for kev, though he shared). The main course was a lot nicer than I thought it would be, I ordered the hot pot, kev ordered the sizzling beef, paul ordered some chicken and spring onion dish, alice ordered some chicken dish too and inn had to be alternative by ordering some braised pork trotter (which was some slowly cooked pork so the meat is soft (but salty).

The chicken dishes were highly accepted as well as the sizzling beef. Food was slowly but surely consumed and we even cracked a bottle of champagne (well I did, hardly anyone could drink because they were all driving or didn’t want to drink too much! Rats). I got it from work and had to find a way of using it, not going to just sit on my own and guzzle it haha.

So yeah, we got some nice orange wedges to finish off (everyone ruined their oranges by not eating it the right way (bit like eating sweetcorn too)) and boom, the bill. It was a lot less than we expected which was good and I paid almost half of it since it was meant to be a treat as well as me helping to pay Alice’s portion.

So the moral of the story is, eating is cool. Me and alice took alice’s family to go eat at Red Chilli again so we were able to enjoy a double heaping of duck! They were chuffed about the food too since we ordered some epic dishes (including soft shell crab mm).

stuff you might also like

• Week in Halifax with Alice
• Honey I’m home, 2 weeker in halifax
• Leeds Festival 2007
• The ultimate Muse Wembley Stadium Weekend (Sunday)
• The ultimate Muse Wembley Stadium Weekend (Saturday)

The visit was slightly crippled though, mainly due to the fact that Alice’s job requires her to be at the office about 7-4 odd. Which meant that I would be spending most of that time on my own (that’s a lie, her family will be in the house most of the time). This is where productivity will see a massive boom as I ensure that the time spent when Alice is away isn’t gone to waste. I made sure that I finished blogging everything as well as start finding jobs around the end of the second week. We also had a day where we were going to spend with kev, inn, gem and paul for sushi and bingo (sushi being just with kev and inn). So yeah, quite a lovely one visit hits all plan. How could one refuse to go? (especially when Alice is living up there haha)

The journey up north

The journey this time was quite alright since I once again woke up nice and early for the day. Packing up was once again with the bare essentials (I wanted to bring my wii back down so I needed room and all). Tickets were about £23 this time since it was on a Saturday but it was the best way to maximise our time together (right after job centre haha). Anyway, once I was there we strangely popped by to Yo Sushi! and got some takeaway fish, the place was packed but nonetheless we still got some sushi action and all.

Sunday Roast

I really enjoy sunday roasts at Alice’s place, you get all sorts of yummy meats and just pig out on it. I can’t actually remember what I had this time but nonetheless it was amazing. Out of all the roasts, I believe the duck was the best however hehe, though I did enjoy the pork roast! The scratchings in particular, it was funny listening to everyone crunch through the scratchings while they eat (I did the same too). During one of the meals I started mentioning about what I was doing staying up there for two weeks and how I was going to call this one of my last visits up here before I started finding a job (Alice already had a job as an admin assistant so it was definitely time).

Honey I’m home

The rest of the weeks were mainly me sitting around at Alice’s place whilst she was at work, it was pretty funny! The first day when she was off I started to clean up her room just so a) she didn’t need to worry about having a messy room and b) I didn’t need to worry about working in a messy room haha. Anyway, cleaning up was fine since her room was pretty much tidy anyway but I wanted to make it so her desk was cleared up completely so I can set up my laptop on her desk and work from there (it’s nice lying down with the laptop but it’s always better when it’s on a desk and all). Once the cleaning was done, I was pretty much doing all sorts of customisations on the PC, namely updating Ubuntu on my laptop. I managed to install all sorts of fancy things such as AWN so I was able to have a dock like thing on the bottom. I also went a bit nuts on customising my foobar settings. It strangely took up the time until Alice arrived. I felt like a proper housewife hehe. So yeah, this was pretty much what I did for the weekdays, I also managed to get my delicious account sorted as well as try out a lot of things, blog like crazy and also pop into town with Alan to give Alice back her ID pass.

Bingo, and how much I wanted duck the entire evening

On saturday we managed to meet up with inn in Leeds since it was where we were going to celebrate her birthday with a super sushi platter at SiSushi. It took a while to decide on what to get platter wise but disturbingly we ended up with two platters! Zero Fish and Sushi Party 2! It was quite an ungodly amount but nonetheless we were going to do it (twas inn’s birthday afterall (well the day coming to her birthday anyway(sorry I like using brackets (kinda reminds me when I code and have to ensure that there were enough closing brackets( that was fun haha))))

The waitress was a bit reluctant to take the order since they were going to be busy and it was quite a lot of sushi to purchase, she told us that it will take around 1.5 hours but we were fine about that, we eventually popped out to do a bit of window shopping as well as buying some firefly drinks for the sushi (they were a perfect combo (since yo sushi sold them and all) (and they tasted nice (very nice (so nice that we almost buy it everytime (since we discovered it anyway (hehe more closing brackets (I get the feeling I might have missed a close bracket) (that’s not a good thing since it would mean those who are computer minded would throw an unexpected error!))))))

During our random wonder around the city (of Leeds) we went into a Currys Digital (RIP Dixons) and found some lovely Canon EOS 400d caps! Now I’m not a cap person but DAMNIT I wanted one! We tried to talk the sales assistant in giving one to us but they said that I needed to buy a camera in order to get one. Eventually someone actually purchased one and gave me the cap so woo! haha. Alice tried on the cap and strangely she looked awesome in it, she would do a good job as a Canon model.

After some more street wondering and some guitar hero at PC World we eventually went back to Sisushi and picked up our food, man there was a lot! Going back was a scary journey since we were scared about dropping £75 worth of sushi! We headed back to kev’s place with sushi and some japanese tea that we bought (thought we’d make it as authentic as possible).

Once there, we pigged out! End of haha. Kev was nice enough to stick a candle on a sushi so we could sing happy birthday to her. I managed to try out all the sushi available and loved the spicy chicken iso in particular. After that meal we played a bit of tetris and eventually headed out to Mecca Bingo to play some bingo! Alice had her bingo vouchers which meant free panininininin and drink!

Bingo was alright, kev’s friend joined us at bingo (as well as Paul and Gem) and he, Paul and Lindsay won at Bingo. One of the highlights of that bingo session was when we bought a ham and cheese toastie! It smelt lovely (nicer than the micorwaved panini) and tasted awesome too! Afterwards we went to the pub where I kept going on and on about how nice Red Chilli was and how amazing the duck was! I tried tempting inn to go red chilli instead of sushi but they werent having any of it At the pub we were very close to popping out and getting a peking duck but since me and Alice had to head off in a bit we said no Alice cheered me up however by telling me that we will go red chilli one evening during the two weeker so woo!

The rest of the stay

After a lovely susushi and bingo fest it was Sunday again, which meant roast! I think we had chicken at some point but my memory is too poor ;( I didn’t really look for a job whilst I was at alice’s place, that plan definitely was a failure since I only got round to signing up on a few sites. Evenings with Alice was lovely, most of them involved playing Harry Potter trumps, watching V for Vendetta and playing lovely games of chess. At one point Alice did straighten my hair hehe, everyone kind of noticed that during dinner haha. It was pretty nice though, my hair was getting a bit too long and messy that a straightening was needed.

Red Chilli!

Thursday was by far the best evening for this visit. It was like our proper fancy date and all, it was to mainly celebrate Alice’s job and all as well as to satisfy my peking duck urges. Before we went to the restaurant Alice advised me to get her mum some flowers and chocolate since she was nice enough to let me stay over for so long. Originally I was going to buy some thorntons chocolates but they were closed by the time we were there and all. We eventually went back into Harvey Nicholls and bought her a nice box of dark belgium chocolate. We were lost with the flowers since most places were closed and all. Anyway, on to the meal

Man that was a good meal! Alice really enjoyed the atmosphere that was red chilli and we had the most amazing meal ever. We ordered a seafood soup, half a duck and a yellow croacker with sweet and sour sauce. It was pretty much alice’s call since she was paying hehe :$ (I said that when I got my job I’ll be paying that for meal so that was fair, plus I was super poor at that time). The soup was once again amazing, it was only £3 a bowl and you got 2 bowls worth of that soup (served from a bigger bowl and all) and to compare that with soups in other resturants that was definitely worth it (in London it was £3 for a basic bowl of chicken and sweetcorn soup, this one had prawns, scallops and other bits of seafood goodness)).

Alice was well pumped about the duck, I kept telling her how the duck was going to be cut by some fat chef in front of you so that was definitely going to the be the moment of the evening hehe. After some waiting our duck came strolling through and boy was it amazing! The cleaver work was amazing! That guy knows how to cut duck haha. Boy do you build an appetite when you watch someone cut up your duck you’re about to eat. There was a lot of pancake action! I think I had about 10 pancakes worth of duck! We were getting pretty full by then and was glad that we didn’t order two dishes for the main course

Everyone around us were proper n00bs at it. They all got the set menu which included a crispy aromatic duck. Boy that’s some shit duck haha, I’d feel sorry for the duck knowing that they were deep fried instead of hanging around some meat hook for an evening after having boiled water, vinegar and honey poured onto it for a 30 minutes and being slowly roasted the day after. Strangely two of the tables around us were gay couples o_O. After some bitching we got our final dish. It was a nice one but we were starting to struggle with it after that duck episode haha. Alice was a true eating soldier as she ate a fair amount of the fish and I finished off the rest of it hehe. So yeah, amazing meal! We thought a bottle of wine was in order so…

Crossgates and how you should check where a train is going before boarding it

After the meal we went to the Marks and Spencers in Leeds station to buy ourselves a bottle of wine, I also managed to find some lilies for Alice’s mum so the evening was definitely going well, well until we got on the wrong train and ended up at Crossgates haha. I think around then I managed to get into Twitter and that’s when I was telling people how lost we were from our date and all. Alice felt really bad in getting us lost but it was fine as long as we were together. We managed to pass time doing random stuff (tetris was involved).

Finally we managed to get a train back to leeds as well as the right train to Halifax where Alan was kind enough to drive us back home. We drank some wine and had the most amazing evening in my life. It was perfect, including the little episode of getting lost in crossgates, everything was perfect

Treasure hunt

I knew Alice was going to be sad that I was leaving the next day. The other times were fine since she knew I would be back but this time it seemed like it was going to be quite a while till I came back up north to see her. So in order to cheer her up when I left I started to go crazy on post it notes. Beforehand we would leave messages on her big pad every morning when Alice went to work (she woke up 6.30 every morning bless her and I just stayed in bed hehe). I managed to construct a long 17 post it note treasure hunt in her room, each one marking something I’ve noticed during our time together. It was quite a fun game, I kept things pretty cryptic and all and worked through the treasure hunt backwards haha. Once alice was back it was pretty much time for us to get ready to pack and go (me going anyway ). I managed to give alice’s mum the chocolates and flowers and apologised for being so quiet all this time i was in the house (I hardly left her room :$ when alice was off to work). We got a a lift from ted and took the bus to town. It was really upsetting to leave but it had to be done… I needed to find a job.

stuff you might also like

• That damn duck weekend!
• Week in Halifax with Alice
• Leeds Festival 2007
• The ultimate Muse Wembley Stadium Weekend (Sunday)
• The ultimate Muse Wembley Stadium Weekend (Saturday)

Visiting Burley Park

As well as spending time with Alice, I had also booked time to go visit my brother since I was only going to Leeds Festival for the day whilst Alice was going for the entire weekend with her friends. So once Alice was all packed up and ready to head to Leeds festival with her friends, I had to bid her farewell for the day and head off to my brothers place to stay. I was to set off from Huddersfield to Burley Park to meet up with my brother (who was currently doing a bit of shopping).

Once meeting up with him I went to his den to check out the state of it (they’ve recently moved houses and now live in a cosy house with a spare guest room which I was going to be staying in). His house was definitely a lot nicer than the previous one. I’ve noticed that he’s got a few new toys to play with, including a Silverburst Les Paul guitar, his POD XT Live and his bloody Mac Book Pro. There wasn’t much to do at his place though, I luckily brought my Wii over to play around with (otherwise it would have been boring) and he got to have a go at it and test out on whether he’d want to buy one afterwards. I also had a go on his Mac Book Pro, it was pretty awesome, however the problem was that all he did on it was browse the internet. Any £300 laptop PC could do that! I thought it was quite a waste to just buy it for the purpose of browsing the internet. I was expecting him to use photoshop or making music via Garageband or Logic, but noo. Just browsing.

Food wasn’t too exciting, lots of oven baked food haha, I wasn’t use to it to be fair, I talked about restaurants he liked going to and he mentioned a place called Red Chilli which was a proper fancy Chinese Restaurant. At some point he was going to show why Red Chilli was an awesome place and all. I told him about Lucky Dragon but he didn’t seem to like the idea about it and thought it was too much of a Takeaway kind of restaurant. Later on my brother had guests and all so I slowly but surely went back to my room to play with my laptop. I did socialise a bit with them but I’m getting the feeling that they’d prefer their own company and all. Anyway, I had Leeds festival to look forward to and all.

Arriving at Leeds Festival

Arriving there was nice, managed to pop by at kev’s place for a bit before heading off to Leeds, originally I was going to have a quick trip to Wokmania and stock up on food but turns out Wokmania wasn’t opened yet so I changed the plan and bought some meal deal lunch at Boots. I knew the importance of food during festivals so I made sure I was nice and full during the day so a decent lunch was required, wasn’t too bothered about dinner since we were all (kev, inn and me) planning on getting a curry after the festival. Inn was going to drive us to the site so once I met up with kev it was a matter of waiting for inn to arrive. After a quick banter at kev’s place we headed off to the festival. Inn was familiar with the route so it wasn’t a painful journey and all.

The trek back to the car

Once there we parked ourselves at the Brown parking overflow place, Inn managed to take down some landmarks to remember where we were and all. The trek to the site was a pretty long one, there was a lot of moaning involved of a trek that seemed like forever, we eventually got there and got our wristbands. I phoned alice and told her to come and meet us. We got into the venue ok (smuggled my DSLR camera as well as a daddio telezoom lens!) and met up with Alice. As I was trying to take photos of the ferris wheel I discover that I had forgot to put my battery in my camera! ARGH! Luckily inn had her DSLR in her car so me and Alice (alice was being ultra nice) had a lovely trek back to the car to retrieve her battery and all. Kev also wanted his Ribena back too and I also wanted to leave my top in the car too. It wasn’t too painful of a trek since I was with Alice and all, finding the car was a pain though. Had to rely on Inn texting us about landmarks and stuff. Eventually we found it and were able to head back to meet up with inn and kev who didn’t really see much since we were gone.

He who must not be named

I wasn’t bothered about who we saw before Nine Inch Nails and Smashing Pumpkins so I pretty much saw whatever everyone in the group saw (think that was the same case with Alice and Inn) so kev pretty much led us around places to see random bands. We saw the Cancer Bats purely because their name had the word “Cancer” in it. We also saw a bit of the Maccabees which was fun, another band which vividly stands out in my experience that day was the band “The Dwarves”. We had no idea what they were like but we had a look anyway. Lets say theres a lot of nakedness. A lot of nakedness. The guitarist, “He who must not be named” was all kinds of naked. Well thats a lie, he did wear a mask haha. It was quite a sight haha, especially when he got up on the amps and started to pleasure himself in front of the crowd (thank god his…thing.. was shy). There was also the bassist who was dressed up as a priest who spent most of the gig with a bass amp fault. It was funny watching them try and fix it and then half way through the singer went “I don’t need bass!” haha. So yeah, pretty random.

Revenge of the Refried Beans

After that we decided to go to the main stage to check out Fall Out Boy and the other bands after them (Kev wanted to see Fall Out Boy). We weren’t really paying attention to Fall Out Boy and spent the time eating our lunch and all. I was surprised that I managed to smuggle my bottle of Innocent Smoothie into the venue and all, it went down well with my all day breakfast sandwich. After fall out boy kev wanted to go and buy a taco (grande) since he was feeling hungry. I advised him that tacos weren’t exactly the best food you’d eat in a festival, he was asking for some proper bowl movements and all, and this is what he got.

After Fall Out Boy came Lostprophets, we began to make our way to the front of the main stage since the rest of the bands we wanted to see were on the Main Stage. We manage to catch a quick glimpse of Kate Nash playing in some random tent as well as the all important trip to the toilet for kev after his taco grande. Lostprophets were fun, they mentioned about how little UK bands were playing tonight as well as getting a proper mosh pit going. I managed to take one decent photo of the lead singer which was good.

Nine inch nails and Smashing Pumpkins

I’ll keep this short (photos will occupy the rest of the post), after Lostprophets we began making our way to the front, the crowd were pretty tame so around the time Nine Inch Nails started we were pretty near the front, and when Smashing Pumpkins started, we were practically in front for it.

Nine Inch Nails were amazing tonight, they did play quite a lot of Year Zero songs as well as do an all synth stage to play a few synth exclusive songs (Me, I’m Not for example) I was really happy that they played Sin tonight as well, they ended with Head Like a Hole and Hurt. The Smashing Pumpkins were just as amazing, though only Billy and Jimmy were left in the band, they still did a pretty good job with their old stuff. Tonight Tonight was probably the best song from their set. I wasn’t too keen on how they went a bit too riff wanky at every song, just picture all their songs extended with big 5 minute instrumentals. Heavy Metal Machine was disturbingly long :/. Anyway, here’s some photos of the gig, I was really happy of the outcome since I was really far away from the stage.

Alice’s birthday and the trip back home

After the festival we exited the festival and went to Alice’s campsite for a bit, we were hoping to celebrate her birthday for a bit as well as have some cookies haha. The time spent there also meant that we wouldn’t have too much of a problem exiting the place since it was pretty packed with people leaving the place and all. After a nice chat and all, me kev and inn left the festival site and headed straight back to kev’s place, we were initially going to find a curry house to eat in but we were too late, everything was closed and all so our only hope was to order a takeaway at kev’s place. Once at kev’s place we decided to download the new episode of The IT crowd and watch it whilst we ate. I ordered a chicken madras, inn ordered a korma whilst kev ordered a lamb balti. Twas a yummy meal, though it was pretty hot stuff the madras (glad I didn’t get vindaloo). After consuming our dinner and watching the IT crowd we pretty much called it a night and went to sleep.

Back to Burley Park and Lucky Dragon action

Kev had already informed us that he had relatives visiting so we had to pretty much leave the place at around 11 odd. We cleared up the living room and stayed at kev’s room for a bit surfing around the muse board and all, once things got boring we decided to head off. I needed to head back to my brother’s place first to unload my stuff and have a nice shower before going back to Leeds for a meal with inn (she wanted Yo Sushi!). After a quick trip to Burley Park and a quick shower we headed to Leeds uni to park the car and head for Yo Sushi! However, along the way I managed to persuade inn that Yo Sushi! wasn’t really a good idea and that Lucky Dragon was the place to be. I finally managed to persuade inn to go and so we headed to Lucky Dragon and had a lovely dim sum meal. I knew what I was going to order since I already had that dim sum lunch with kev and alice. Inn on the other hand was a bit indecisive. The best bit was when we were issued Chinese menu’s and inn couldn’t read it at all. I helped order the with little help of the menu and managed to get a pretty decent dim sum set. The bill came out pretty nice, we only paid about £6 each and was pretty full from it all so it was pretty amazing. Afterwards we went to hunt for a present for Alice, I managed to get her a nice pair of earrings that were the invisibility stars in Mario. The next task was getting a nice box, card and stuff to stuff the box in, we managed to get some cotton balls in Boots for 39p so score! Once all that was done I said my goodbyes to inn as she headed back to kev’s place because she forgot her sleeping bag. The rest of the day was spent at my brother’s place, it was pretty boring, only got interesting the next day.

Red Chilli

The next day my brother proposed that we all went to Red Chilli to have a lovely meal. I immediately agreed since I was getting pretty bored in the house. We booked a table and headed off around 8pm odd. Once there I immediately saw why my brother liked Red Chilli, the place was pretty classy! Not only that, the food was more unique and old fashioned compared to your bog standard chinese restaurants. My brother was initially going to order the “True Love” dinner set which was £26 per head. I however persuaded everyone to get some duck instead since duck is always nice as well as the fact that most set menu’s aren’t exactly cheaper than when you order a la carte. We ordered some seafood soup, scallops (I didn’t get any though ) , half a duck and 3 dishes for main course (chicken with some spicy dip, some seafood dish and softshell crab). I was amazed at how cheap the soft shell crab was! The duck was amazing and everything else was lush! I was really impressed with the place and preferred it over Lucky Dragon (for meals anyway, they dont do Dim Sum here). The bill came to about £75 odd which wasn’t bad for a party of 5. Will definitely pay Red Chilli a visit when I’m out about in Leeds (and when I have money haha).

Reunited with Alice

After a lovely meal at Red Chilli the night before I went back to Huddersfield where I met up with Alice, apparently the people around her campsite went a bit crazy so Alice and her friends decided to get a lift from one of their parent’s and sleep in the comfort of a house rather then raving festival go’ers armed with lighters and other flammable objects. I met up with a very tired Alice at Huddersfield where we got a lift back to her place from her mum, Alice was absolutely tired from the festival but nonetheless glad to see me again . Afterwards the remaining days were spent with Alice at her place watching films and recelebrating her birthday with the rest of her family. It was a pretty hectic and fun week. I left on the 30th and had another Yo Sushi! Meal.

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12th July Arriving at Alice’s

Was the first time I’ve set foot into the Day household. I brought Alice a lovely rose (there’s a reason why it’s rose) and some white malteasers (don’t worry, the choice of chocolates get better in future haha!) since she’s never tried them. Other presents I got Alice included a Joseph CD and a little pot of lucky charms. Since I was anticipating that it was going to be a nice long week visit and I would be meeting up with other people (including Gem, Paul, Inn and Kev) I decided to buy some Krispy Kremes in Victoria station. They were pretty last minute and quite a burden to carry but nonetheless I brought it. The train journey was nice and I spent most of my time going online. I brought my laptop in case I’m left on my own or if we want to surf the web without using Alice’s house PC.

Immediately after seeing Alice my world started to light up, we headed straight back to her place and I managed to really make myself feel at home hehe. We initially wanted to go out to the moors to do some shouting and photo taking but the rain sort of got in the way (and I was tired from traveling). The day went pretty quickly and I was also able to meet most of Alice’s family who were really nice.

13th July: I’ll get you John McClain!

Today was a nice and chilled day at Alice’s place, I decided to venture in the Lucky charms I brought for Alice. We shared the pot and enjoyed the lovely sugar filled frosted goodness served with some nice greyish looking milk (got to love food colouring/dye from the marshmallows). Afterwards me, Alice and two of her brothers went off to Bradford to a buffet place called Annam’s. It’s been a while I’ve had a proper curry so it was quite a treat to visit the place. Immediately I notice a slight competition involved (maybe it was me) in how much food we can consume. I ate quite an ungodly amount and ended up going back about 5-6 times (it’s a buffet, that’s what you do haha).

Later on that evening we watched Die Hard 2. Not really a film to watch with the company of a girl but it’s Die Hard! One must appreciate that I didn’t get worked up and called people bitch right after the film haha.

14th July: Little Tokyo and Bingo

I’ve read Alice’s and Inn’s entry about this and boy it’s more detailed than mine, so it’s probably better to check theirs for details :p We were due to meet up with Inn, goto Little Tokyo to celebrate my results, then meet up with Kev, Paul and Gem and get into some good old bingo action!

Before meeting with Inn we went to Millies to buy her some cookies. I promised her that I’d get her some since she did encourage me a lot during my final year in terms of doing my work. Twas a little token of appreciation Of course the damn cookies were bloody tempting so I believe I did eat some myself (either before or after handing them to Inn). We met Inn at the Leeds Station carpark (slightly late) and got ourselves parked and ready to eat at Little Tokyo.

The food was pretty yummy one might say. Though I do feel like I paid far too much for it. I ordered a lovely prawn tempura bento box and enjoyed some lovely (and disturbingly meaty) prawn tempuras. I was quite jealous that the other two had loads of sushi to eat, it was a Japanese restaurant afterall hehe. I did do swopsies with inn on some sushi, she knew she was getting a good deal though since the tempura was just SO SO meaty hehe.

After Little Tokyo we went to meet up with Paul and Gem at Starbucks. We took a quick detour and went to Yummy Beads to see Katie in action haha. I had no idea why but hey, meeting people is fun so why not. Once there Alice instantly recognised her and pointed her out to me and Inn. We then acted a bit nonchalant (in a totally obvious way) and I decided that it was best for us to do some bead shopping. I always wanted to get a bumble bee bracelet made for myself so I thought now was the best time to get that done. I wasn’t too particularly keen on the yellow beads they had but nonetheless I asked Alice to make me one hehe. Once buying it inn approached Katie and told us who we were (before she started to thinking we were some weird stalkers haha). Twas a lovely chat (though I think I only said “hi”) and soon after we headed off to Starbucks.

Starbucks was fun, spent making bracelets and taking photos. I did a few photo challenges with Alice only to be lashed once again by her composition skills. We then met up with Paul and Gem and I shared some of my donuts to them. After a lovely drink and chat we decided to head off and lounge around for a bit before meeting up with kev and going to bingo. We ended up in WHSmiths for a bit and Gem was approached by some guranga people. I’m usually not keen on them, though thats probably because the London ones are a tad vicious when they approach you (they were waving a big chunky book at me and said it was for free, then when I had it they said they needed donations, then when I only donated £2 they said “well since your donation is a small one, how about taking this smaller book!” My mind was set on the big chunky book that I was supposed to get for free, though in all fairness, I wasn’t actually going to read it anyway haha. Gem was a pro at all things guranga, she had loads of guranga mechandise and was always accepted when she started shouting guranaga at the folks hehe. I had no idea what he was saying but all I know was that I had no money (most of which were spent on Little Tokyo or going to be spent on a vicious Bingo session that evening). After a quick lounge and magazine browse inside WHSmiths we went to Mecca bingo to meet up with Kev and Lindsy to do some bingo

Once at bingo we got Alice a new card (since she was new to it all). I decided to get myself a new one too since my other one was addressed to Bob Spektor. The reason why it’s not a good idea to go into a Bingo hall as someone else is due to the fact that IF you do win one of the grand prizes, no doubt you will be given a cheque rather than a wad of cash so best not risk it, not that I had the chance of winning but purely on the fact that I was uneasy all of the time last time knowing that if I did win I would have to give the bingo ticket to someone else to call!

Bingo was probably a bit too intense than usual! Me and Inn did claim our free panini and drinks we got from our vouchers as well as enjoy a £5 discount from our bingo tickets. Inn had some really manky cheese panini (purely because i picked the nice looking one) and it looked like industrial rubber dyed yellow than cheese. Mine was alright, a bit chewy but nonetheless, when compared to Inn’s monster of a panini, it was definitely a blessing of a panini haha. Right now for the bingo; it was going ok until some lady gave us her remaining tickets for us to play. It is extremely painful to play with another set of vouchers, you really need to work on the vouchers as fast as possible as well as ensuring that you do not miss a number. I missed it several times (then passed it on to kev who also missed it so many times) and yeah, was just painful. To makes situations worse inn spilled coke all over Lindsy’s side of teh table rendering her tickets as useless! Gem Paul and Alice tried to salvage the remaining tickets by taking them apart but it was simply a mess haha. Not only did we have a bit too many tickets to play with, but we also had to deal with the antics of people panicing over the spillage. Damn inn and her exceptionally good luck last time, it was a disaster waiting to happen (which Inn did state several times).

I think that was about it after the game, Kev won a fair amount of money for us to split between each other £35 I believe which we then spent on drinks (instead of a nando’s meal haha) Me and alice headed back to the Fax whilst the others said their fairwells

15th July Real Authentic Mongolian Cuisine

This was an awesome day, inn was bored at kev’s place since kev was doing his work so I suggested she come and drive to Halifax and we can find places to eat (yes we love eating food haha). I intially wanted people to go for some peking duck action but finding that in Halifax was proven extremely difficult. All they had were cheap chinese buffets that obviously didn’t sell peking duck (good ones anyway). We were losing hope and motivation in finding a decent place to eat when we decided to phone up Gem and see if she could recommend a good place to eat (as well as inviting her to come). Turns out Gem had just the kind of restaurant we would want to go. It wasn’t a chinese restaurant selling peking duck, it was a Mongolian buffet place called Temujin. It was quite a unique buffet since you’d pick all the ingredients and take it up to a chef who would cook the food up in front of you with their trusty woks.

I was definitely pleased about this place, seeing how Alice was agreeing with Gem on the phone was pretty much the main reason why I decided to go in the first place haha. Inn quickly drove us there and we enjoyed our lovely buffet meal with the addition of Gem and Paul. Inn had previously arranged a curry night with kev this evening so she decided that she would only eat a bit. She got tiger prawns (which were Buy One Get One Free) and we began to feast. Loads of combinations of sauces, oils and garnishes to choose from. I picked the right ones for a nice black bean sauce with noodles and beef hehe. But yeah, food was definitely good, we were very keen on trying the random meats that you wouldn’t normally see in restaurants, today they were serving crocodile. Just tasted like chicken hehe but was nice in filling up your food portfolio in weird things to eat hehe. After a nice meal and some bill complications (mainly inn and her abusing the buffet system haha) we headed back home and enjoyed some lounging about with nice and full tummies. I think I ate about 6 bowls

16th July The Lucky Dragon and the hunt for the Golden Peking Duck

Today was probably the best food day out of the week. We were initially going to go Yo Sushi! to try out the rainbow combo (£10 for a dish of each colour) There was a slight problem however with the trains in Halifax which made me and Alice late, by the time we were in Leeds most of the stores were closed, we were contemplating on going on Nando’s when an idea sprung to mind. The legendary duck hunt! We decided to give that another shot and since it was Leeds it should definitely be a lot easier to find than in Halifax (which is riddled with cheap chinese buffets). After a nice walk we eventually end up in China Town (it’s a pretty lame excuse to be called that though since it’s just a car park with a sign saying China Town haha). We had a look in there and a further look around the area to find nothing but buffets and some restaurant called “The Lucky Dragon”. The menu’s did look pretty nice though, and they DID sell Peking Duck, but it stated that a 24 hour notice was required. In the end we went into the restaurant to see if it was possible to order one without notice. Luckily it was possible! (woo!) We ordered some other bits and bobs including some yum yum dim sum and some chicken feet (for the sake of Alice haha). It was pretty funny watching Alice eat them! Kev and Inn seemed to enjoy it pretty much (kev’s first time) and I myself loved it. The duck was definitely the highlight of the evening though. It was amazing haha! I couldn’t get enough of the thing! It was placed on a plate of Prawn Crackers (which was funny since Kev ordered some too haha) and another dish was made from the remaining meat of the duck. It was an amazing meal and by far the most valued for money (I think we paid about £12 each!).

After a lovely duck meal we headed off to play some dirt cheap Bingo, we were pretty late so we were pretty much there for a laugh. Didn’t win anything though. We then went to Dr Wu’s for some random open mic night action and ended around Leeds station to do some hardcore tetris DS’ing. We’ve finally discovered the powers of 4 player tetris and was finding it more and more addictive of a game.

17th July Yo Sushi! and DIE HARD 4.0

We agreed from yesterday that Inn would stay at kev’s place for another night so we can go eat at Yo Sushi! the following day. Me and Alice arrived at the place slightly earlier than Inn and Kev. We sat down and had some tea before ordering a few dishes. Once inn and kev arrived we went at it with the ordering. It was funny looking at Kev’s menu, he had designed it using WordArt and was hoping it was the perfect combo. Unfortunately for kev most of his selection was compramised and he had to rethink what he was going to eat. He used a Bingo dabber to rewrite the combo on the back of the paper. Kev tried to impress the waitress serving us (Karen Wright: Ace Yo Sushi! Waitress haha) but she didn’t seem too impressed haha.

Food was amazing. I had a Salmon Skin hand roll, yakisoba, crunchy prawn maki roll, beef ramen, prawn gyoza and assorted tempura. Unfortunately the assorted tempura this time didn’t include soft shell crab . We ate and took photos of our food, was quite a fun day, followed by a nice and aggressive amount of Tetris DS’ing. After that it was time to leave and all so kev left us with his other mates whilst inn drove back home. Me and Alice thought going to Halifax now was a bit silly so we decided to head to the cinemas to watch… yes that’s right… DIE HARD 4.0! The film was amazing! Really lived up to the other Die Hards, once again John McClain saves the day haha. Theres apparently a Die Hard 5 planned so lets hope Bruce Willis gets into tip top shape for that one haha. After that we went back to Halifax and lounged about.

18th July Lounging about in Halifax

Was quite a quiet day, made a cake though

19th July More Yo Sushi! and me going back

Today was where I had to say goodbye to Alice. We decided to head into Leeds slightly early and just lounge around for a bit. Once there we decided to actually have another yo sushi! day! We ordered very similar meals and had a lovely meal and several games of tetris. Then we headed to a Nero and sat around there for a bit. Eventually it was time for me to board the train and all. It was pretty sad leaving Alice, she was going to go France the week after which meant we would spend 2 weeks odd apart. We said our goodbyes and I went back to London.

The week was definitely amazing, I really love where Alice lived and will definitely pay more visits to the place .

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More takeshi’s castle and crystal maze

Yup, when everyone wakes up at around the same time as everyone else, you just have to watch takeshi’s castle and the crystal maze . We did the same thing in terms of heckling the TV screen with lines such as “You could of had EVERYTHING!” and “AUTOMATIC LOCK IN”. I explained to Alice about the whole high death counts in both places and how they never really aired that stuff. It’s almost become a mandatory thing you do when you wake up at Kazzie’s house.

It’sa wii, warioo! HA HA HA

We also played some wii, we did the lifeline game where everyone would complete a level and at the end you had to cut strings up and kill off characters, I don’t think I won at this game, ah well. We then started playing wii sports, now THAT was funny! I was a god at wii boxing, I proved that point when I defeated Adam a while back in just one round with him doing very little damage on me, after that I have been playing that more and more and have got to pro status on it. This means bad news for everyone else who was facing me. People were literally taking turns and getting knocked off immediately each time they played me. I usually killed them off on the first round and everything but it gets pretty vicious, Popey and Inn were the main contenders but I managed to destroy them in one round nonetheless hehe, Inn did get very jabby but I kept dodging them and unleashing some godly combo’s straight back at her, ah good times.

Then we started playing games where anyone can win! Wii baseball, me and Popey went head to head on baseball, I’m not too good with the swinging so eventually I lost to Popey. He was well chuffed about it, I think I stopped playing afterwards since I was hogging the console too much and I had to get ready to go and all (not because I lost haha). I think Blee played with her friend Sarah a bit on the wii and afterwards we were once again ready to leave. Quick huh? Internet was mashed up in Kazzie’s place all weekend and she was dying without it, she was on the phone all morning trying to book an engineer to fix the problem. It was funny how mad Kazzie got whenever she was directed to a call centre in Bangalore.

Ste is a bad man, a very baaaaad man

I think Inn and Kiernan sort of drove off in advance while the rest of us were split into two cars, Kazzie took in me and alice whilst Ste took Popey Blee and Sarah. Inn had left Ste the maps to the hotel so it was ste who was leading the way whilst Kazzie tailed behind him. Ste and Popey were slightly cocky about how last night they managed to get to Kazzie’s house based on man instincts rather than maps and stuff, so I think they were doing the same thing a bit this time they drove around.

Occasionally Kazzie would swear at cars who went between Ste and her car. Me and Alice were just sitting there calm as hindu cows. However, during one point, we see Ste take a sharp sharp turn left, which Kazzie couldn’t do since it was far too abrupt and basically ste just drove off! haha. Kazzie was not pleased. Ste was supposed to be leading Kazzie, not driving off without us. Later on, I asked Popey why Ste didn’t stop and wait for us, it really sounded like Ste didn’t do it purely because he was in a “moment”, a rush and all in his head that made him go “YEAAAAARGH I’m driving fast! RARRRGH” or something. Back in our end, Kazzie was absolutely pissed off of what Ste had just done, we tried phoning them up and they gave us rather crude directions of how to get back to the hotel. We would have probably been fine if we had some directions and all but nooo, Ste had that so we were on our own haha.

Eventually Kazzie was lost, lost lost. The kind of lost when I was stuck at Wembley Stadium, only with less people, with cars involved, and we’re not in a stadium (so technically its not really like me lost, but its nice how we use comparisons to determine that it wasn’t really like that haha). Sooner or later I whipped my phone out and used the TomTom software to sort of find maps and routes to help the journey. Kazzie was rather impatient about it all so it made me give her random directions when she said “left or right?” haha. Eventually I got her to stop at some road so I could of used the advanced planning to sort out a route back to the hotel. We had phoned up Popey and managed to establish that we needed to get to Pinner Road in Harrow on the Hill to find them all. Eventually me and Alice tried to use the TomTom as a map to navigate Kazzie to Pinner Road, I wasn’t too good with map reading but Alice did a pretty awesome job. We eventually got to Pinner road but saw no sign of everyone, then we just continued to drive on finding the hotel but eventually got lost AGAIN. We were stuck at Pinner Station (quite a way back from Pinner Road!). We initially thought we’d wait for them to pick us up but they had no idea where Pinner Station was, so back we went to Pinner Road (which was slightly more confusing to find our way back to and all). Everytime I would have a weird sense of dejavu when we went passed the roads and all, it was freaky. We eventually found a place to stop at Pinner Road and just parked there waiting for them to search for us, Pinner Road was a looong road and later we discover that there were two Pinner Roads which was why they couldn’t find us!

I got out of the car to see if I could spot Ste and co who were out hunting for us and eventually I hear Inn screaming my name from a far far distance haha. I quickly get on their car and we immediately drive our way back to the Hotel del Harrow, I told Ste that Kazzie was going to kill him for driving off without us and he was well aware of it and was willing to take the beating (bless him). Once we got back to the hotel Kazzie got out of the car immediately and started to jump on him! He deserved it haha.

Upon approaching everyone Kev and everyone started giving me a big round of applause. Kev even took the liberty to shake my hand as well. Kazzie actually thought the applause was for her haha bless, but nooo, it was for me *glares at kev*. No idea what he said to everyone else, grrr. I think we immediately took off, we said our goodbyes to Blee and Sarah since they were only there for the Saturday night.
We were apparently disturbingly late for Nando’s, Max had already got the seats and all and were waiting for us to arrive, it was mainly due to Ste getting Kazzie lost and all. Here we managed to meet up with kev, Gem, Leon, Stephie, Paul and Kiernan so add them all to the list of people who were ready to travel back to Wembley Park to get our greasy chicken. Inn was somewhere else eating stuff on her own because she wanted some time by herself (chances are she was avoiding big events so she didn’t have to blog about it later on!). I think at some point Ste leaves us too to meet up with Aneta.

Eassy journey to Nando’s

Heading to Nando’s was breezy, we just took the tube and arrived at Wembley Park Station (second time again *shudders*) I was initially going to go Wembley Central but that was slightly longer so we decided to walk to Nando’s once we get to Wembley Park station. Paul seemed to have lost his Oyster card so he had to buy a new one and all (think he just got a paper travel card and all) Alice had to buy herself a travelcard too since she didn’t have an Oyster. Most of the cool kids had Oyster and were all topped up ready to go. Upon arriving at Wembley Park station I sort of led the way to Nando’s, it was pretty funny because I usually found my way to nando’s via Wembley Central but now I was a bit lost, Popey knew the way a bit so we eventually got there without getting lost

Piri piri chicken?

We walked passed another chicken restaurant that was situated right next to Nando’s and sold “piri piri chicken” even the logo looks very similar to Nando’s haha. We walked in and said that we were with Max and all but we discovered that they had to reduce their seating since they were there so long haha. Picture the episode of friends where Pheobe is having her birthday with her friends but people were late so they were forced to sit in a smaller table. Yup, people do that when you start hogging so many seats and not use them for several hours. Though the guys were pretty friendly and all and were keen on ensuring that we would get some seats as soon as possible. I reserved the table under “bob” but the guy misheard me and said “Paul?” so I said yeah why not, we had a paul haha.

We sat outside for a bit and talked for a while, eventually a table was ready and we were ready to queue up and order our food, the table wasn’t next to Max’s table but we were able to shout out stuff if we wanted to. Gem was keen on using her Nando’s reward card to get her free chicken. I managed to get Kiernan to use my reward card to order so we can have multiple goes on the card (kinda didn’t bother at the end hehe). I ordered some extra hot chicken wings this time since I wussed out with hot last time. I didn’t bother with anything else since Alice was buying chips with her chicken pita so I could of shared with her and Gem had a whole chicken which I was actually going to eat most of (I initially was going to share it with Popey and Max but later on Popey was full so only Max had some of it). So yeah, for lunch (its too early for tea) I had 3/4 of an extra hot chicken, 5 wings and some peri peri chips. It was a lovely meal, though it took ages to finish off haha.

I got a phonecall from Inn asking for directions to get to Nando’s, I gave her some rough directions and she was fine with that and vowed to find the place on her own with minimal guidance, and she did just that. Quite a lot of food ordering and consuming during the whole time and a lot of banter was made, shame we weren’t sat next to the other table otherwise it would have been fun. We however saw Leon trying to smuggle Sprite from a glass into a bottle via the use of a straw and some good old fashioned plumbing techniques hehe. Alice ate quickly (well not quickly, I just ate slowly) so she was able to borrow my camera and take photos of me eating as well as other people.

At some random point Inn suddenly arrives at Nando’s and catches up with everyone, she sat on both tables talking to Kiernan and other people, then she gets called by Ste asking how to get to Nando’s so she sort of volunteered to meet them and take them up to Nando’s. I can’t remember most of the conversations to be honest but I do remember still eating at this point (not an easy task eating so much chicken). This is why I ordered chicken wings prior to having full platters and whole chickens whenever I’m at Nando’s, with wings you know which bits to eat and how to eat it quickly. With a whole chicken you have to really mash the chicken up to get some meat out of it. Ste and Aneta arrive on the scene and sit on the newly attached table on the right which we asked some staff to join and all. Ste sort of quickly introduced Aneta to everyone one by one, I managed to do my usual hand shake thingy which was fun, afterwards they sort of sat on the far end and talked to each other.

I think most of the musers were about now, we were only missing one more person… kev. I think this is where Kiernan, Stephie and Inn sort of stand outside waiting for kev, I quickly got Alice to take a photo of them 3 waiting outside for kev, it was almost like groupies or fans waiting outside of the back of a venue for their favourite musician so they could say hello and scream into their ear about how much they love them. Kev took his time bless him but eventually made it to Nando’s, I don’t think he went inside to eat, he had a box of something and a drink in his hand so he seemed fine with the food (Nando’s without kev? Yeah I noticed, he didnt have any the entire weekend whereas Alice had two (and that was the only thing she ate bless her!)). I think after a long banter inside and outside of Nando’s we decided to head off to Wembley Stadium….finally haha.

Back to Wembley Stadium!

Today was special, all the mods and admins were guestlisted for this night which meant we would split up with Kiernan, Inn and Kazzie since we were assuming we’ll be getting seating tickets and all. Kazzie was a little upset since she was promised a guestlist spot from Leon (since Leon felt like standing for Sunday) but eventually found out that Leon wanted to sit down again (because he had a job interview in Wimbledon). Kazzie was also sad that tonight Adam wasn’t going to be at Wembley Stadium with her, actually she was sad throughout the day to be fair and quite a lot of people came to cheer her up from it. So yeah, it got to a point where the standing people went to see what’s left of the gig (My Chemical Romance) whilst we went to the guestlist area and got our guestlist stuff sorted. Kazzie handed me her bag and asked if we could look after it for her (as well as her camera) since she was going to be standing and all. We were worried about the camera so we decided to smuggle it inside Popey’s sleeping bag, as for her camcorder and stuff, we just left it there (bit weird eh?). I handed the bag to kev because I was carrying a bag of my own too (plus it was a ladybag and it suited kev more haha). During our walk kev did a lot of Stephie arse pinching being the charming man that he was (he wore a Blazer for today’s event (that he got from a charity shop) just to be fancy hehe).

Once we were at the guestlist area we had to wait around a bit since Gem needed to wait for Cara since she was her plus 1 guest. Everyone was fine to wait to be honest (well apart from Kev and Stephie who really wanted to see My Chemical Romance hehe ) so instead of heading in we decided to wait around with Gem. Gem was really mad at Cara since the entire weekend Cara has been leaving Gem to see other people. We suggested to Gem that we could leave Cara’s name in the guestlist and have her tell her name to the guestlist people for her pass but Gem insisted that we’d wait for her since last time she did exactly that and Cara wasn’t able to get in (no idea what gig it was). So we decided to sit around and just wait for Cara, we weren’t in a hurry anyway. Kev quickly went to the guestlist people to check if we were on the guestlist and all and it turns out we were (thats the biggest fear of going into gigs with only a name, otherwise it’s pretty awesome going into a gig with just a name, if that makes sense).

Eventually Cara arrived on the scene and apologised for being late, we immediately queued up in the guest area and lo and behold, we see Tom Kirk’s brother and Morgan hanging around here talking to each other. I instantly told Popey that Morgan was about and immediately he was star strucked, never before have I seen Popey’s eye’s stretch so wide, he was Morgan’s biggest fan, and was always mad that he never gets the attention he deserves and wanted to meet him in person and tell him he was his number one fan. I’m not too sure whether Popey was joking about this or not but I played along with it! It was funny, Popey could have just walked up to in and started a conversation to the man he wanted to meet the most but he didn’t, he was too busy with his mouth open just staring at him! Bless. (This is where I constantly mocked Popey afterwards with lines such as “YOU COULD OF HAD IT ALL!”) I managed to approach Tom’s brother once again and have a lovely chat with him and all, we talked about the gig yesterday as well as speculations as to whether or not they’ll be doing anything different for Sunday, he assumed that it will all be the same since not all people are going on both dates and that the first night was a bit too spectacular for them to just do something completely different, I agreed with him and suddenly out of nowhere I saw the entire Kirk family next to me (apart from Tom). They recognised me doing my speech at Trafalgar Square and said hello to me hehe. It was cute since I didn’t recognise them at first.

What the? Standing tickets?

Once that was done we were in ready to unleash our names and get our tickets etc. We were entering the “Club Wembley” entrance where everyone was dressed up nice and fancy. Even the bag searches were slightly more fancy than the normal entrances (since we were asked to sit our bags on the table whilst they did their search). It was pretty fun how they didn’t find two DSLR camera’s in both me and Popey. Tut tut. They didn’t really search for Popey’s sleeping bag so technically he could of smuggled a gun in that! Having said that he did have quite a lot of bags with him (since he was going to leave straight after the gig). Once in the reception area we had to give our names again so the receptionist would find and hand us our tickets. Immediately you could feel the wristband so we already knew that it had a special pass of somesort. However the surprise is that we discovered our tickets were…standing. It was strange because we were the only ones to have special Hospitality Suite passes but with standing tickets. We were slightly confused, we didn’t know what to do so we asked someone and was later escorted to the hospitality suite where they served free soft drinks. The problem now was to be able to get passed the security guards who were checking for tickets to make sure people had the right tickets and not just a VIP pass.

Kev approached them and explained the situation and they told them that we could simply stay in the suite but had to go back to standing since we didn’t have seating tickets and seats were reserved. We were a bit annoyed at this since it meant we couldn’t really enjoy the VIP area haha, so we tried the other exit to try our luck and hope they just let us in. Whilst kev was explaining the situation again to the guard I was able to just walk passed the guard and actually get to the seating area. Though being only me I decided to step back again haha (I just find it funny when one person distracts the guard, the entrance is practically an open invitation for anyone to just walk in haha). I even spoke to the other security guard about whether or not there were spare seats last night which she replied yes. We were then directed to some lady who explained the situation to us that we could not have seats purely because we had standing tickets, she said she’d gladly escort us to get standing passes (since we got through the area where you exchange your tickets for passes) and direct us to the standing area blocks, but we could stay around the VIP area for a bit if we wanted to. We decided to quickly stock up on a glass of soft drinks before we went back to standing. There wasn’t really much for us to do to be honest.

During the walk, Leon kept talking to lady, it felt like he was going to get her phone number just like he did for every female muser this weekend! (it was funny watching his list of female numbers build up). We were slightly disappointed that we didn’t get seating since we were all tired and all but we were also glad in a way since we were able to meet up with everyone who were standing. I managed to quickly use the toilet in the VIP area, apparently when I was in there kev managed to catch Tom and tell him that our tickets were standing, he quickly responded with “Standing is better!”. I think I heard that one at Shepherds Bush Empire hehe, but he was right, it was better… if we had golden circle passes *grovels*. We tried to ask the lady escorting us if we could get golden circle passes but that didn’t work too great either, ah well.

Meeting up with Kazzie and co again!

Once back in the Stadium we were able to meet up with Kazzie and everyone, I managed to give Kazzie back her camera (which was inside Popey’s sleeping bag still) and soon after, Alice needed to use the toilet (she should of used the VIP area hehe) so I went with her on the quest to find a toilet (it was going to be hard since My Chemical Romance JUST finished so all the guys and girls were rushing to the toilets and all). The normal toilets weren’t really an option for Alice since the queue was loong. We decided to get back to the VIP area and use the toilets there since there would hardly be anyone in need for the toilets there. So we went on a crazy trip finding our way back to the VIP area, we had to get a security guard to take us to the outside area and all, he only took us halfway but we managed to find some vacant toilets and all on the 2nd floor. After that we had to jog back down the stairs and get back to where everyone was standing and all since Muse were about to start very soon, we dashed the stairs a bit too much since we hit the basement level and had to dash back to the ground floor again. Finding our way back was pretty easy and we managed to find everyone again! Phew (not like my bathroom break tragedy the night before one must say).

We were all lounging around the middle area again, this time, being prepared to find Muse bobbing out of the grey box again so we can take photos of it, since everyone had compact cameras and all they were either taking a few shots or a clip of them ascending from the box, I went slightly oldskool and used the telelens to do a burst shot of them coming up so I could use it as a gif! I was told by Kazzie that we were cool to use our DSLR cameras because it seems like they weren’t too fussed about it! This was why I took the big daddy DSLR camera out as well as the telezoom lens! (Wish i knew that the previous night though ). This meant photos were going to be a lot more nicer and all!

Suddenly the music stops, Muse were about to appear from the box again, it was funny how there weren’t many people hanging around in the centre area after knowing that Muse will be coming out from the box, and like last night they came up posing. The funny thing is how they couldn’t keep a straight face this time, probably because everyone knew they’d be coming out from there, everyone mentioned how Chris couldn’t hold a straight face when he was rising up. I was at it with my camera taking burst shots until they full ascended from the box, the confetti was a bit annoying now since the focusing kept focusing in on the confetti so now the band was blurred, though having said that there was so much confetti this time that you couldn’t really see the band anyway. Here’s the gif of them in action!

Muse and the 55-200mm lens

Once they started heading for the stage we knew that was it, Kiernan told us to head down to the side of the venue so we just started following her. It was cool because suddenly the crowds became less packed around the sides, probably because you couldn’t see the entire stage from the side so you’ll be missing all the clips and stuff. It was fine for us since we already saw it last night so we were now benefiting from seeing the band at a much closer distance. It was still pretty far but I was able to take some pretty decent shots of Matt with my 55-200mm lens. I only noticed that Kiernan, Kazzie and Alice were about, the rest apparently managed to find seats to sit on to enjoy the gig and all. I was happy where I was standing because I was tall enough to catch all the action as well as take photos of them! One of the funniest sights however was seeing Kazzie go nuts the entire gig, at one point she had her arms up and was smiling as if she was gathering the powers of all her ancestors who were previously crazy giggers so she could go nuts at tonights gig. It was a funny photo hehe, I was then going nuts on the photography with the lens, occasionally Kazzie would ask to borrow my lens so she could have a shot at it but the problem was she wasn’t tall enough to get the money shots hehe. It was heaven for me :p

I think eventually Kiernan and Kazzie left the side which left me and Alice to watch the gig by ourselves. The best shots I took were when Matt stood on the side paths that had an amp for him to rock out on, he did that several times and from those times I was able to take some pretty sharp shots of him (see the photos in a bit). Alice was really patient with me and my photography, I was being a bit antisocial when I was taking photos of the band and all, however she was understanding of it all and allowed me to go nuts at the shooting, occasionally I would stop simply because I wanted to enjoy the songs with Alice. I gave up on taking photos of Matt when he played invincible and I didn’t want to take photos of him when he did unintended. It was a song for some good old fashion swaying and all, not photography hehe. It was the best night ever, being able to listen to Muse, take photos of them and be in company with Alice who was amazing throughout the show.

Some bullet points of the gig (heres the setlist found at Musewiki), though less since it was so similar to the previous night:

• Dan the trumpet man only played for Knights of Cydonia since city of delusion wasn’t played
• Blackout had the same girls, this time both me and Alice were able to take photos of them with the zoom lens!
• Alice was too short to take photos, bless! (though she did take some photos of the flying acrobat ladies)
• I kept shouting out the song names before they were played, you can instantly figure out a Muse song by a few seconds of song, usually you can hear echos of the guitar and just odd sounds that instantly prompt you on what song is going to be played next, I was annoying by telling everyone the next song haha, I did that both nights :p
• No more crazy hair lady jumping up and down next to us spilling wine all over the place
• We were slowly able to linger into the front of the stalls, go us! haha

I think that was it, the show was very similar to previous night but with a better photo opportunity for me as well as a few songs changed here and there. Near Take a Bow we decided to head off whilst it was playing, reason being I wanted to be able to exit the stadium as soon as possible by being closer to the exit as well as being able to take some wide shots of the stage, particularly when the flamethrowers were on during take a bow. Once that was done we were able to leave the place quickly. I was still buzzing from the gig, it was an awesome set like yesterday and was fun listening to them play live.

No flames

Flamesss

And then there were 8…

Once outside the venue, we immediately found the others outside waiting for us! We then found out that they were sitting down for the gig so were able to exit it easily. We were learning from our mistakes this time in terms of getting out of Wembley and getting to Wembley Stadium. Everyone talked about how mental Kazzie was and how much they ripped the piss out of invincible by using their bodies to illustrate the lyrics, I kinda wished I was there to see it as it seemed like they had a proper buzz from it all hehe. We said our goodbyes with people who were heading back home and all which included Popey, Ste, Gem and Cara (Ste was driving back up and was dropping off Gem and Cara back to Leeds). The only people left were Kazzie, Stephie, Kev, Inn, Alice, Leon, Kiernan and me.

There was a crowd still like the previous night but people were moving a lot faster than before, we were able to get to Wembley Park Station ok (I told people to make sure Kazzie was in front of us!) and somehow we were split into two groups, group A (me, Alice, Kazzie and Leon) and group B (Kev, Kiernan, Stephie and Inn). I had no idea why we were split into teams, I think it was just to make the journey back exciting as well as ensure that we’d move faster and not have to look out for everyone, just our team mates. Since me and kev were in opposite teams there was already a sense of mandatory competition and all. Don’t think we competed in anyway anyhow haha.

Kebabland or Curryland?

Once we arrived at Harrow on the Hill, we were stuck with the ultimate question, Kebabland or Curryland? We were standing on a subway path that forked into two directions, the left hand side led to kebabland and their friendly staff with funny accents, the other side there was a street filled with curry houses that kev wished to go! I think we kind of split paths in search for food, kev went to curryland whilst we went to kebab land. Though a few minutes later we see kev coming back and telling us the other path doesnt seem to be the path to curryland (haha) so we were walking back together as a group of 8. It was a Sunday so most of the restaurants were closed. Finding food at this time of the night was really hard! We walked passed kebabland but decided that we wanted to go to curryland.

We managed to find ourselves a burger king, though we weren’t going to eat there since the food sucks and we were all determined in going to curryland. However, Kazzie wanted to have a burger there since she was not fond of curry haha. She ordered her food whilst I ordered a bottle of fresh squeezed orange juice since I was parched. The juice was godly! So godly that I ordered another one! Kev found a burger king crown and wore that for a bit whilst Stephie saw a Stuart Little car ride and immediately got on it, from then on… things happened. I think they were trying to put money into the car but.. uhm.. well see for yourselves…

There was a really huge bee buzzing around the place which we tried taking photos of, but to no avail .

After the quick stop at Burger King we went back to our adventure in finding a curry house. I think the first two we went into were closed but eventually we found one that was still open and was taking orders. We were also able to eat in but we wanted to make use of the 20% discount and all so we ordered a Takeaway. The one thing we were missing however were knives and forks (I think Kazzie picked up a fork and handed it to me so I quickly shoved it in my bag haha). We quickly ordered our food as well as some popadoms to share (kev bought them for us). Everyone bought curry whilst I thought i’d be different and ordered seafood fried noodles on the Oriental Menu haha. After some bantering we got our food and all, they had given us our 20% discount as well as charged us less for the popadoms, I told kev to give him a hug but he didn’t so I gave the waiter a hi5 (kinda felt guilty for taking his fork haha). We went back to the hotel to eat our food, stopping by at a Kebab place to get some additional cutlery as well as a bottle of water for Alice to drink. The walk was long but we finally made it!

We went inside Leon’s room (since Kev’s room was small and it smells) and immediately jumped into the his bed! Mmm comfty beds! We were then munching on the food we had! Alice was once again not hungry so I didn’t force her to eat anything. My noodles was amazing, it was nice and hot still too! It had mussels, prawns and all sorts of seafood bits, I let inn have a taste and she really liked it. I tried a bit of her stuff but it was far too mild hehe. I wasn’t too sure about everyone else and whether or not they liked their food but they didn’t seem too pleased. The popadoms were nice too, I think Kazzie had some too since she had no idea what it was originally. Kev noticed that me and Alice were wearing matching socks, I explained to him that it was purely coincidental that we were wearing matching socks and he went awwh! During our feast Stephie knocked over kev’s food on the floor which was funny, and to top that off she got milk (not hers) all down her top and on the wall, it looked really wrong haha!

After that I think Kazzie was ready to head off, Inn followed us to the car park as well as she bided us a farewell and drove off back home (home home). So now we’re left with me, Alice, Kiernan and kazzie. We drove back to Kazzie’s place for the last time (with Kiernan giving directions) and eventually got back to her place in peace (Kazzie was getting more familiar with the route back now). I managed to smuggle the bed inn was sleeping and shove it in the living room to sleep in. Kiernan was sleeping in the guest room again and Kazzie slept in her room again. Not much talking was involved (really tired) and we all soon fell asleep, well most of us anyway… (me and Alice actually kept hearing these strange noises, it sounded like the cat or someone laughing, but the morning after we discovered that it was 2 air fresheners spraying their stuff at timed periods, grr). Oh and we turned douglas around because he was a creepy, pervy man sitting there watching you!

And that’s it, the morning after Kazzie drove us to Watford Junction and we took the train back to Euston where I left Kiernan to escort Alice back to Kings Cross where we had a nice long hug and said our goodbyes. I was a bit sappy and actually did a bit of platform running haha, haven’t done that in a long time. It was a nice and fun weekend, I dont think anyone disliked it, we all met each other and had a wonderful time together and when watching Muse play. Even two weeks after (and blogging this weekend) I still miss the weekend and wish we could relive it or have another one again. Ah well.

stuff you might also like

• The ultimate Muse Wembley Stadium Weekend (Saturday)
• The ultimate Muse Wembley Stadium Weekend (Friday)
• Muse Meetup 23rd November 2006
• The v stands for mud: V festival 08 1/2
• That damn duck weekend!

The godly sounds of the word…”godly”

The sky is now a lovely shade of light blue, birds are still singing and people in the living room are starting to show signs of life. I randomly met some of Kazzie’s mums friends, it was funny saying hello to them. I felt a bit out of place since Kazzie was still in sleep. Eventually everyone woke up and complained about the lack of sleep they had, I kept talking about how godly of a bath I had, I think I repeated the word “godly” several times (no wait, i dont think, i know, you’ll see soon). Sooner or later Kiernan and Inn emerge in the living room too, I think at around 9am since they did plan on waking up at 10am. Inn complained that I was constantly using the word “godly” that my voice sort of went through the ceiling and straight into her ears hehe bless. I apologised and made people tea.

“You could of had everything!”

Whilst settling down, we watched some tv, namely challenge TV. I think we managed to catch some Crystal Maze and Takeshi’s castle, with Takeshi’s castle we pondered at the thought of the amount of casualties made from the show. Some of them are ever so close in falling down and crashing their skulls into the hard concrete bits of the course. I said that they simply didn’t air all the casualties and that under the rivers and ponds are a nice layer of dead bodies and decomposed corpses of ex contestants who missed the platform or fell off the bridge the bad sort of way. Though left with a sinister and morbid thought we were soon cheered up with the contestants falling over comically theres one of the courses where you had to catch a ball that was falling down a maze type thing, you had to sort of predict where the ball would come out and sort of jump for and catch it with a bucket. There was one contestant who saw the ball fall down into the muddy pond but felt obliged to just jump face first into the muddy pond any, weird Japanese. I explained about an endurance gameshow (japanese naturally) I saw on Tarrent on TV in which contestants were to take laxatives and have a lovely camel ride, the aim was to see who was the last person to you know… relax themselves, there was a toilet in the middle of the arena and the camels just rode around in circles.

After Takeshi’s castle we watched some Crystal Maze, this was immense, Popey explained how him and his friends used to shout out “AUTOMATIC LOCK IN” whenever there was an automatic lock in clause in some of the rooms. Unfortunately the contestant managed to pass the courses that had the clause. We werent pleased, it was funny how we didn’t want them to win. A winning team is a boring team! Everytime a contestant would give up in a room we would all shout “YOU COULD OF HAD IT ALL!” or “YOU COULD OF HAD EVERYTHING!” in the most dramatic voice ever. The team didn’t win this time which was a plus! Haha, not like the prizes are amazing anyway.

Back to the Harrow on the Hill

After some Crystal Maze action everyone was pumped up and ready to head off for the meetup and stuff, I had to meet up with Alice at Kings Cross so I had a bit of a diversion to take, not to mention selling my tickets to someone on Musebay. Kazzie’s mum asked for two strong men to carry some fridge into the house, initially I was assigned that role but I passed it onto Jon and Ste since i’m just skin and bones, inn went off to take photos of them doing the handy job haha.

I unloaded most of my stuff into a plastic bag and left it at Kazzie’s place, I was once again assigned in Inn’s car whilst Kazzie followed behind Inn to Harrow on the Hill. I can’t remember the car arrangements but thats a bit trivial. I think Kiernan was in the car with me too, Kazzie was slightly mad that we had all left her behind at the end and that noone was going to sit with her. I wasn’t too fussed at who’s car I was sitting in. Inn quickly told me to go and sit in Kazzie’s car, but once I started walking to Kazzie’s car it seemed that Max and Aino were to sit in Kazzie’s car. Having that sorted, we were ready to head off to Harrow on the Hill. I think…

Once we were at the Harrow on the Hill we met up with Gem and Cara in their hotel room, Kazzie was worried about parking and stuff so we ensured that Stephie was going to ask the Hotel people that Kazzie’s car was hers so it wouldn’t get clamped and all. Upon entering Gem and Cara’s room I quickly went to the toilet for a wee, only to find a floater in the toilet.. *shudders* after doing my business I quickly flushed the toilet and went outside to tell people theres a floater, Leon suddenly appeared and then I just glared at him haha. After some bantering we went to Stephie’s place for a bit, she was surfing on the net in her room with the TV, fancy. I think inn then went off to find Ril, so me and Kazzie (and Kiernan i think) were left lounging around with Stephie whilst she did her make up. After some bantering and squabbling everyone all met up and were ready to go to baker street where most of the people were (the actual Musers Meetup, held in Regents park).

I think by now the following people were about; Inn, Kazzie, Stephie, Kiernan, Gem, Leon and Ril, Aino and Max sort of headed off to Harrow on Hill by themselves whilst the others were on other cars meeting us all at Regents Park. During the tube journey we went passed Wembley Stadium and sighed that we will be seeing them soon, I think someone mentioned how they saw people already camping outside the venue waiting to get some golden circle action! Sad sad sad! We quickly sang happy birthday to Ril since yesterday was his birthday and all, we were originally going to do the “Hip hip, HORAY!” thing but he was too old to we only did 3 and counted them as decades haha!

Once we were at Baker Street I managed to meet up with my Musebay ticket buyer (David Ticketman, thats right, his surname is Ticketman), we quickly did our transaction in the dodgiest way possible, Inn and the gang walked passed us and laughed at our dodgey dealings but I shoo’d them away. An additional £80 spending money for the weekend was nice! The guy was actually buying 7 tickets for his friends and all, sounds a bit crazy if you ask me (especially when you find out that touts were selling 3 Muse wembley tickets for a tenner!). After selling my tickets I left Inn and the others to find eat or do whatever they were supposed to do whilst I went to pick up Alice at Kings Cross Station.

Meeting up with Alice

Alice had just finished her major exams on Friday (which was why she wasn’t about on Friday) and wanted to join in with us all since her friends she was going were travelling at a different time and all. The morning was pretty hectic for Alice since there was a flood in Halifax which meant she had to drive all the way to Bradford Station in high speed megaoverdrive. Gem explained earlier on how Halifax never floods and that it was funny how it was flooding today. Alice however managed to catch the train from Leeds to London. Her luggage was a bit too minimal since she didnt bring her mp3 player which meant she was just left sitting around in the train for 2 hours.

Back in London, I was queuing up in Kings Cross station for paper one day travel cards for Alice since she didn’t have an Oyster. The queue was pretty long so I thought I’d save some time by queueing up (rather then lounging about in the station for 30 minutes and doing that again). After purchasing the ticket I tried looking for a poncho or something waterproof since it was raining quite a bit now. I had a look at boots but to no avail . Eventually Alice’s train arrives on Platform 1, I grace Alice with a nice long hug and we begin heading off to Baker Street where everyone was waiting for us (I told them that we were quite close anyway so we could have easily met them and all), not before a quick toilet break, apparently the toilets in the carriage was broken so she couldn’t use it so she just went to the one in the station. It was pretty funny waiting for her and hearing women coming out of it whilst rolling their eyes and complaining about how long the queue was (got to love male toilets, you just go in and out within seconds haha). We quickly headed off to Baker Street to meet up with the rest of the gang.

Alice, Mission 1: Guide the lost french man

As soon as we arrive in Baker Street we were given to directions to the cafe that inn and the rest were sitting around in. Initially when I walked passed Weatherspoons I told Alice that this was the most likely going to be the meeting place for musers! (more from this later) Upon meeting up with inn and co at the cafe, Alice was immediately given a mission to help some poor french man with directions and all. Ril was actually trying to help the guy first since he knew a bit of French but it didn’t work too well. It was pretty funny see her go at it helping the french guy, I constantly joked around with everyone by doing Joey’s take of speaking French (“Bler de la bler! De blue bla blei” (see, italics make me sound french, i bet you thought that too )). After some french banter, we discover that the guy wants to go to Marble Arch and all from Baker Street using his magical map. It was pretty confusing because Alice was good at her french but had no idea what the guy wanted to go or do exactly. It got really confusing and eventually Alice gave up hehe. Bless. I blamed the french guy for being confusing, if he wanted to get to Marble Arch than he could of took the tube to Marble arch, thats what the tube is for :p.

The nando’s sniffing nose

Still raining, we decided that the park wasn’t a good idea to be so where to go? Max had mentioned that he was going to take away a Nando’s so immediately we knew that there was a Nando’s, the trouble is where? This was where my super sensitive nando’s nose was put to use. I managed to quickly point at the place we should be walking to get to Nando’s. Now I haven’t been to this nando’s before, neither have I looked at any maps prior to this meetup. Lo and behold, after walking down the road a bit (every was slightly sceptical that I could find it) we find a nice Nando’s restaurant gracing us with their godly flamed grilled chicken aroma. I was smug about it, once again I was about to sniff out another Nando’s. We all went inside and got ourselves a seat. I think this is where I constantly kept calling people “kind stranger” (though I was doing it quite a lot on Friday too). Everytime I was served at a restaurant, shop or the venue I would say “thank you kind stranger” at the end. Usually I’m greeted with nice responses and all which was good, most of the time the staff were confused.

We had some lovely seats downstairs with big cushioned up chairs. We all ordered our food (I think just me, Alice and Leon ordered since Gem, Ril and Inn finished eating their breakfast not long ago) Alice had extra hot pita per usual but I chose hot for my wings. Alice wasn’t too pleased that I picked hot haha. I preferred extra hot on whole chickens and hot on chicken wings! Ho hum. Leon had
a veggie pita since he was a veggie.

“HEAD TO KFC!”

During the nando’s fest Stephie and Kiernan phone inn up wondering where we were, we told them that we were at Nando’s in Baker Street. They initially had no idea where to go and all so it was up to inn to guide them to the restaurant. It was really funny listening to inn give directions and all, I was constantly going “head to KFC” since Nando’s was located in the same road as KFC and it was nice and red, but inn was persistent in not telling them to look for a KFC, she constantly used other places such as Starbucks and Pizza Express, Stephie and Kiernan were very confused. Kiernan later on explains to me how the stores inn suggested were on the corner so they had no idea which road inn was talking about. In the end KFC saved the day as a noticeable landmark and Kiernan and Stephie were able to find us, KFC 1 – Inn 0 haha.

We were now joined with Stephie and Kiernan who were very hungry (like us) and were ready to feast on the beasts (except Stephie, she feasts on bits of vegetables). I remember how relieved I was when I ate my food because I was really hungry after having just a burger and some burnt yakitori’s for dinner last night, and since I was sleeping outside and all I felt a bit weak and all so the food really helped! The spices helped out on my nose too as it was getting a bit sniffly haha. Kiernan was a bit scared on the heat of the peri peri sauce so she ordered just a medium for her chicken pita (you cant get any fitter with a chicken in a pita). She wasn’t impressed by the heat (medium are for losers thats why!) So yeah, we have a lovely meal and all. I think Stephie ordered some frozen yoghurt in which Inn happily helped herself in some (she did ask dont worry hehe). We then started to play a game on how tall we can get the frozen yoghurt, well it wasn’t a game since it was more of a task for me to see how tall I could get it. I was warned that the machine was located upstairs and all so not only did i need to ooze the frozen yoghurt out of the machine in a way that it stands up tall, i need to quickly run back downstairs to show everyone before the whole thing falls apar, the final masterpiece was pretty tall, though a bit of it fell off (which I quickly attached back on)

Right after taking photos of the frozen yoghurt, Inn suggested I’d eat the thing without using my hands, it wasn’t hard at all but you were guaranteed an instant brain freeze! I do so and as predictable as ever I got brain freeze. Inn somehow managed to dare Ril to do the same thing too which was funny because he got frozen yoghurt all over his mouth when doing it hehe. After all chicken was consumed as well as the mountain of frozen yoghurt we decided to meet up the rest of the gang before we headed off to Wembley Stadium, we phoned them up to ask where they were… and guess where? “Weatherspoons!”

I immediately told Alice about how predictable musers were in terms of places. They could not escape the curse that is weatherspoons, its all about the cheap alcohol I suppose.

A very brief meet and greet

I think this was one of the shortest meetups I’ve been to (short for me anyway, only because we were at nando’s eating). Upon arriving we were greeted with millions of musers (millions is a lie but it did feel like a lot!) It was confusion all the way, most of the unknown musers I have never met were lingering at the back of the pub whilst the ones I’ve met were all walking around meeting each other. As Stu explained, it felt like speeding dating only without the dates and more weirdo’s haha. Alice hadn’t a clue of most of the musers around, she knew the obvious ones but lacked to recognise the less obvious ones. She said how she thought Max was a lot taller and all (but he’s not bless). I managed to simply point and tell alice who most of them were, I did a pretty good job as well (until I reached to the random people at the back where I had no idea who they were either), I really should of did a proper meet and greet. Naming the people present at Weatherspoons is going to be a painful and pointless task so its probably best for you to just look at the photos and find out who’s who! Some key new characters that I met and had a slightly longer chat with were Gemsy, Blee and Haze I think, Haze was fun to speak to again in particular since we only met last year in November for Muse at Wembley Arena.

After a quick banter Inn decided to take some mega ultra group shots of everyone, so in order to do that she required everyone’s attention. Who else can generate enough attention on a crowd so big? Me haha. Initially I was going to slam the table at an ungodly rate, Phoenix Wright Style but my arms were still weak from lack of energy and sleep from last night so I sort of managed to stand on the coffee table type table and do an Aino impression. I dont think aino and max aren’t aware of this impression still but basically during the February Mona meetup when we were doing all sorts of challenges; Aino did a Salmiaki challenge and to get everyone’s attention she shouted “everybody listen to me” in her funny accent. So now whenever I called everyone’s attention I used Aino’s line and accent to draw everyone’s attention, the sheer sillyness of it managed to get everyone’s attention and all! Wish I had done the slam to be honest, people love the slams :p. I told everyone to get ready for some big group shots as Inn whipped out her DSLR camera equipped with a nice wide 18-55mm lens (wish I had mine). Seeing as I wasn’t really keen on being in group photos I whipped my DSLR camera out too and started taking separate broken down shots of the group whilst Inn was focusing on a wide group shot. It was fun because I just made them stand around for 5 minutes and a bit. Funny thing about my shots were that they were totally random ones, I really wasn’t concentrating so most of them turned out blurry due to a slow shutter speed. Below are some shots, some people are looking quite natural judging from their expressions but some (like Ril) were plainly posing hehe.

Hand up = Go, Hand down = Stop

After taking some group shots we were ready to head to Wembley Stadium, since I had already got everyones attention I was yet again leading everyone to get to Wembley Stadium, Inn and Leon had to quickly drive back to the hotel since Leon had left his ticket in the hotel (silly him!), not to mention a few people wanted to unload some stuff back in the hotel rather than bringing them along to the gig and all. I was cool, I had my camera nice and smuggled in my bag with bits and bobs in my laptop bag for the gig (some of which were to distract the guards and all!). They left slightly earlier than everyone else.
Back to leading, I quickly did another Aino impression and we were all ready to head off, at one point Alice had to use the bathroom and told me to promise her not to leave her once she’s in the toilet hehe bless. I had to do the same thing too (was a long trip and I had a bit too much bottomless action! (bottomless drink that is, not man love with a guy with a flat arse!)).

The journey was filled with random stops to check up on people and perform headcounts but I managed to establish a simple rule that is; if my hands is up, you go, if it’s down you stop and wait. A lot of waiting was required for people to top up their stuff and buy tickets. Once the long wait was over we went straight to our station, to our amazement Inn and Leon were there in the carriage. We quickly ran down the stairs to get into the same carriage as them. It was quite a rush since the last people barely got in. Next time when you’re in a big group just split them into smaller teams, its a lot more manageable and all

It seems that the train was just waiting around for quite some time before it headed off which was why Inn and Leon were still there. Once the train was moving we started talking in our own little groups, at one point we all started singing happy birthday to Ril again, it was far more majestic and grand than this morning’s singing since we now had more people involved. Once we arrived at the station things become harder to manage since people knew exactly where they were going. Me, Alice and Gem knew we had to wait a bit before heading in anyway since Gem had to wait for Cara and Alice had to wait for her friends to give them their tickets. We walked pretty close to the stadium and decided it was best for us to stop and wait, eventually we saw Haze come back saying how he was hungry and needed to use the bathroom since he had a bladder of a 9 year old girl. Since the food in Wembley Station was extortionate, we decided to head to McDonalds for Haze to unload his bladder and fill up his stomach. We still had plenty of time to spare since they were only support bands playing (I’ve become more and more prone to missing support bands and only seeing the main act!).

The long long wait for 4 drunken people

As well as a visit to McDonalds people also went to the cash machine to get some money and all, alot of road crossing was required but I kept ensuring that people used the zebra crossing purely because it was there to pay tribute to the dead spirits of a zebra who was once run over while crossing the road. McDonalds was pretty packed with other fans wanting to have a quick bite before they goto the gig, the toilets there were funny as you saw a nice long queue of people waiting to goto the toilet, I later on realise that they were all women so the men’s toilets were in fact free and ready to go! In the toilet, some guy was actually trying to sell tickets to me! I said no and then he started to approach other people in the toilet, asking whether or not they wanted tickets haha….some weirdo (but at least he tried I guess).

Afterwards we managed to meet up with Kev, Inn and Leon. We however still needed to wait for Alice’s friends before we could go, there were apparently drunk and stuck in Stockwell station. We had a quick visit to the local newsagent as well as Wimpy’s where kev bought some chips. Other than that we were sat around the meet area near Wembley Park waiting for Alice’s friends to turn up. Now and then we would hear announcements telling people not to congregate in the station as well as not stop to take photos of Wembley Stadium (people did so anyway! dumbasses). The wait wasn’t too bad since we had loads to talk about and all, one really vile topic involved why the golden circle was called… the golden circle, and how Muse were going to do a GWAR and literally fire canon’s of Matt’s urine all over the crowd…. this is what you get when you mixed Leon and Kev together. I was starting to understand why Kev invited him to see Muse and all. Hmmm, when I said the wait wasn’t too bad, that was a lie… it was actually pretty bad! The time sitting there was ungodly, Alice would now and then apologise for her friends and Leon would tell her to give him her phone so he could have a proper yell at them. People became slightly impatient about it all and my neck was getting sore from turning around to check if the new batch of people were Alice’s friends. Though I dont know why I did that because I had no idea what they looked like.

It did take a while but eventually Alice’s friends arrived to pick up their tickets, we were trying to persuade Alice to just throw the tickets at them and throw a fit at them since they made us miss a few bands and all, but Alice just handed the tickets over to them where they quickly gathered around the envelope to look at the tickets. It was cool, we didn’t need to go with them since they were already quite pissed as well as the fact that we were pissed too (pissed off at them haha), Alice was really sorry that we had to wait for them to arrive and that they were so late and all. Bless

The ticket process was pretty straight forward, you hand in your ticket and they would wristband you up with a standing or seating wristband, we initially thought Haze had a golden circle pass but found out that he just had a normal one like everyone else bless hehe. I managed to have a friendly chat with the ticket man about how his day was, twas fun. Up to the bag checkers, they did a really slack job! They just had a quick gander at my bag and left it like that, little did they know that I was smuggling a DSLR camera and telezoom lens! Finding the entrance to the standing area was quite tedious too, eventually kev asked someone and we found the block number we were supposed to enter in.

Wow, everything was so… white… and big!

I must say upon entering the stadium I wasn’t too surprised about the size of the Stadium, it felt a bit like Wembley Arena to be honest. The catastrophic size didn’t really hit me at all throughout the gig. We eventually found Kiernan and the rest of the gang who were standing around the centre of the stadium. Alice needed to use the toilet so she nipped off for a bit (again I promised her I wouldn’t leave her). I was still adjusting myself to the size of the venue, nothing really clicked to be honest, Alice kept asking me on whether not I was excited and I kept saying how I wasn’t really excited, and I’ll probably be excited only when Muse start playing. Back to describing the venue, I suppose the size of the venue is mainly due to the amount of seats there were, after all its for football matches so it’s all about the seating.

The standing area was split up in a weird shape, there were two “golden circles” in which the first comers were located, and then there was the standing area for normal people. I found the idea silly since there was a lot of space at the back of the golden circle, its weird how Wembley would cripple the view of so many people by separating the early people with the people who turn up at a decent and less ungodly time. The reason why there were two golden circles was because theres a lovely split in the middle that leads straight up to the stage. I initially thought that there was an inner and outer circle and felt that to be even more ridiculous and arsey about where people would stand. The only benefit I felt the golden circle achieved was to stop people who just randomly arrived to the venue to just barge all the way to the front, but to me, this is one of the beauties of gigs haha. Ah well, enjoy some wide shots of the venue to have a clearer idea of what the venue looks like.. I didn’t take them because I knew I had to upload them and I was more about taking money shots this weekend haha.

A weak bladder will get you lost in Wembley Stadium

There was an announcement in the stadium, telling us that the Streets will be performing in 5 minutes, Alice had came back from her bathroom break, but now it was time for me to need it! (Worst time ever). I told her to hold on to my bag and not to leave me hehe. I quickly ran back to the stadium for a quick toilet break, the queue wasn’t too bad but walking there was a pain (it was Wembley Stadium). Upon coming back to the Stadium, I was lost, The Streets have started playing and there was more people about! I couldn’t see Alice and everyone else. I knew the only landmark that everyone was standing next to which was the grey thing, I started to follow it but somehow I ended further down the left hand side of the stage and still lost like silly. I was dangerously lost! Since when is it hard finding someone in the crowd with ginger hair (I was spotting kev’s hair since there’s not many ginger people in the area) Since the crowd was more packed then beforehand I thought it was almost impossible to find them, I knew Stephie was standing on the rails so that was my hint that I had to get nearer the stalls! I did, but people weren’t happy, usually I’m quite nimble at squishing through people without them complaining (since I’m quite thin and all) but this time people weren’t too happy of people going passed them, one wanker thought it was funny to push me deliberately right after I got passed him, was pathetic if you ask me, its not like I’m going to fall, I’m wedged into a crowd and the push really didn’t seem like a push, just a minor inconvenience. Not to mention I was actually moving back from the stage rather then forward, why would it matter that I’m moving around the stage? Still lost silly I tried texting Alice that I was lost, apparently she started dispatching other people to come and find me.

Now I was quite further down the stage, this is where it sprung to me that perhaps they weren’t that close to the stage, perhaps it was my natural instinct to try and get closer to the stage rather than finding everyone else. I decided to retreat properly and work my way from the front of the stalls, I eventually saw Alice and everyone, their area was more relaxed than further down the standing area which was good haha. I was relieved that I got back, it would have been pretty silly if I saw the gig myself, wedged in with a lot of stupid Streets fans haha. I told them about the pushing and all, it was definitely a bad place to be during the Muse gig if it was already squishy now! I mean come on! Its the Streets playing! I find out about the whole search team out to look for me and I felt a bit guilty about it, but nonetheless I was back! Phew

All we hear is? Come on! Jump!

Man the streets were really bad at controlling a crowd. There was no energy in them, I don’t think Stadium gigs really suited them to be honest. Most of the time you could only hear the music, its the rapping and singing that were a bit, meh? Most of the time he wasn’t exactly singing, just talking throughout the gig. The crowd in my area really detested Mike Skinner, there was one bit where he did a Time Is Running Out cover, that didn’t go down too well with the crowd as well. It was really awkward, it was like cousins having sex. I do enjoy listening to the Streets at the comfort of my own home because you can hear everything nicely and mixed nicely, but it was just really really bad here.

Now to really add to the awkwardness of the gig, Mike Skinner constantly sang the chorus line in Queen’s “Radio ga ga” (All we hear is, Radio ga ga…), but he was hoping to get the crowd to participate in it, he sang “All we hear is…” and tried getting the crowd to go “radio ga ga”. Perhaps the people in the golden circle were saying it, but at our end all we hear are people telling him to shut up of f**k off haha. It was pretty painful seeing him doing it. The thing is, he did this not just once, not twice, but 7 or 8 times throughout the gig! Everytime at our end the crowd were just agitated from it all. Mike Skinner explains how he saw Queen do it on their Live at Wembley Stadium DVD (bless, he was researching!) and really wanted to get the same reaction. The problem lies here, Freddie Mercury didn’t do it 7 or 8 times and more importantly, Queen were the headline, everyone bought tickets to see Queen (unless My Chemical Romance were supporting haha) so obviously the entire Stadium loved Queen, so it was easy being able to pull that off if you were actually Queen performing, not when you’re the streets. As well as doing this “All we here is..” crap, he tried getting the crowd to jump too. Apparently he tried that in Leeds Festival too and noone was listening to him hehe, that felt just as awkward as well, I think they should of just stuck to playing and singing, they were too cocky as a support band for Muse I’d say, he even kept jinxing the damn weather by constantly saying “Please don’t rain”. A lot of head shakes one must say…Alice kept closing her eyes and just sleeping it off since they were that bad hehe.

Look its Muuuse ascending from the centre of the Stadium!

After the Streets were had a nice break for soundchecking and instrument moving etc. We discussed about how bad the Streets were and took some photos of each other. The sky was beginning to turn dark and all which was perfect (since the lighting rocked most when it’s nice and dark!) and suddenly the DJ music stopped. The crowd went at it and screamed like loons and suddenly… the big grey box next to us starts spewing confetti! What a weird place to fire confetti onto the crowd, then suddenly the music started kicking in and you could see heads slowly ascending from the grey box. It was Muse (duh haha)! Quite an unexpected entrance one must say, purely for the fact that they were sitting inside that grey box for quite some time before the show starts. It makes you wonder what they were doing inside, perhaps they had an xbox 360 set up inside and were just playing against each other, perhaps they had a lovely view for the support acts? or perhaps they had their DS Lites out playing Brain Training against each other.

It was funny watching Muse just stand there posing whilst everyone cheered at them, they then started to walk down the crowd to the stage with some random people in yellow suits following them. We couldn’t see but from the photos they sound like fun ha!. They kicked off the gig with Knights of Cydonia which everyone later on complains to be a good opener but would have preferred it if it was the finisher instead of Take a Bow. I’m not going to review the gig itself too much since you can read reviews and stuff for that, however I will bullet point some noticeable things during the show, for full details you could check Musewiki for the setlist and notes, anyway, some bullet points:

• Dan the trumpet man was here to play Knights of Cydonia and City of Delusion, was happy they played that, he got a nice mention and all, I think Stephie and a few others were talking about how “fit” he was haha
• Morgan received no attention this time! Popey was heartbroken, I don’t think you could even see him at the gig. I think Muse are keen on making Muse a 3 member band now
• Some of the clips on the screens were fun to watch, some were a bit obscure and Windows Media Player visualiser esque, I loved the feeling good one with the cherry blossom petals, plug in baby’s one was awesome too.
• Most of the songs were extended and finished off with a riff fest, was lovely for moshing
• I didn’t really use my smuggled camera since we were standing in a place that was difficult to take photos in, not to mention the amount of security guards standing in front of us all. Would have had it instantly confiscated!
• There was this crazy haired lady who was a bit too enthusiastic about the gig (hence why she’s crazy), she spilled wine over some guy and almost got wine on us, she went nuts on all of the songs! Alice was a bit scared from her especially when she kept jumping on her feet! They should have a pit for crazy women and see whether or not they could cope with not being “the annoying crazy one”. I kinda had the feeling that she was the same crazy lady that was dancing along during Bliss when Muse played at Wembley Arena.
• Dom’s green trousers, Dom’s green trousers, Dom’s green trousers! I think Muse are trying to use Dom to target the gay scene
• Soldiers Poem was the mobile phone waving song, it was fun and sappy, I tried recording a footage of it on my phone with deliberate phone swaying.
• Unintended was ultra chees, nonetheless a song to sway with the person you’re next to hehe, I’m quite glad that they’ve kept Unintended ultra simple with Matt on the acoustic and Chris on the bass.
• Microcuts was played this evening (not the other I’m afraid), that was fun to listen to!
• During blackout, aerial acrobat ladies ascended from the stadium via balloons and danced around throughout the song, this was one of best moments of the gig, was spectacular and really complimented with the song, I managed to take out my DSLR camera for that occasion, though most of the shots werent too good haha.

That’s about it, I also managed to set my life ambition for the gig, which was to give one of the security guards a hi5! At first it was impossible getting his attention and all, and when I did we tried it twice and missed! GARGH! He gave up and went back to his job while I screamed “nooooooooo!”. It would have been something I would have regretted to do for the rest of my life! Luckily near the end I saw him again and managed to get that hi5 in the end haha! Then the rest of the musers gave him a hi5 too. Stephie was lucky enough to get the guards to get her the setlist they possessed which was lucky, we pondered at what she had to do or show to get that setlist haha.

Muse finished with Take a Bow which was a bit of a weird climax, the flames near the end was the best though! For a moment there they were rammstein haha. Jus that one moment :p. Now here’s the hard bit… How the hell do you get 77,000 odd people out of Wembley Stadium and back to whence they came?

The ungodly exit and the forever vanishing Kazzie

Getting out of the venue and back to Harrow on the Hill was a pain! So many people were oozing out of the venue, and unless you have a light sabre like Celtic Rose and Firebaptist (who weren’t with us) its actually really hard to find each other in the dark, lost in a sea of sweaty and horny musers (i’m assuming the ones at Trafalgar Square were still horny after the Muse gig).

We made the big G sign (exit G) outside our meeting point, we phoned up people who were missing in the group and managed to gather everyone to the sign and all. Finally out of nowhere emerged Kazzie and Adam, they were nowhere to be seen during the entire purely because they both went off somewhere else to see Muse and all. Adam looked as gay as ever so I mocked him on that one and Kazzie just looked silly with her big yellow shiny thing and silly clothes (apparently loads of people spotted her during the gig!). I managed to meet Adams mum and all and strangely gave her a hi5 (probably some excess hi5 mojo coming from the security guard I hi5′d earlier on). Eventually we had everyone and was ready to head off. We tried being sly about it all and held each other’s hands to make sure noone is lost. Kazzie was the main culprit of disappearing, she wanted to speak to Adam some more but wasn’t aware that the trains were going to stop after a certain time so it was crucial that we got to the station as soon as possible. Kev thought the announcement said that the met line closes at 11:15pm odd which I felt very strange since trains usually stop running after midnight. I kept asking kev if he was sure and he kept assuring me that was the case (in the end is wasn’t haha).

The entire road back to Wembley Park station was flooded! I would have been easy for one person to worm their way out of the crowd but we had a big group with us, and having Kazzie disappearing so many times meant that we were in trouble in terms of catching the last tube home. Once Kazzie and Adam said their goodbyes, Kazzie was instantly texting adam and everything. Now remember this, Kazzie is letting loads of us stay at her place, not to mention she had to drive people around, so we really couldn’t lose her and all. This was were people started to get annoyed with Kazzie and told her to stop being distracted and make sure she’s still with the team. At one point we were disturbingly lost and we needed Inn to get on Leons shoulders and wave an umbrella to get Kazzie’s attention because she was left at the back again! During this time I kept spanking Inn’s butt and telling kev to join in (in which he started to pinch it haha). It was fun until Inn started attacking kev for it, he was a serial butt pincher the entire day, Stephie’s bottom was most likely in prune state from all of kev’s cheeky bottom pinching. We were getting very worried about Kazzie but we eventually managed to find her again, we were in a position where we seriously couldn’t lose anyone since there was a crowd of people heading to Wembley Park station and we weren’t in a position to wait (especially with the train deadline and all).

Eventually we all manage to get into Wembley Park station, some of us wanted to go to Baker Street whilst some needed to get to Harrow on the Hill, so this was where we had to part with some of the musers (can’t remember who to be honest! haha). We headed to your platform and managed to squeeze in with the other musers into the carriage. It was VERY packed! This was where I was able to do the sardines joke! It was funny when Stephie was squashed by so many tall people hehe, you couldnt see anything but a hole where Stephie was sort of crouching and hiding from all the tall people (ie everyone), Bless.

The legend of Kebabland

It was packed but we still managed to have fun talking to everyone in the carriage, eventually we were freed from the carriage and go out of Harrow on the Hill station. People were hungry (kev mainly) and so Kev decided to take everyone to Kebabland (land of Kebabs) to get something to eat. Upon arriving at Kebabland we immediately got ordering, the seating area was closed off which meant we were only able to takeaway the food or just lounge around the place and eat standing up or squatting. The staff working there had the funniest accents and none of them were really able to say the phrase “next please?”, the word next was alright, its when they say please it sounds more like “pliz” or “plis” or even “bliss”. When I was ordering I kept commenting on their funny accents hehe. I ordered myself a shish kebab and some water (for Alice since she was thirsty). Alice didn’t want anything because she wasn’t really hungry, I think nando’s was all good for her.

I then started explaining why I preferred shish over doner kebabs, purely because you’re getting proper chunks of meat being grilled on the spot rather then some random bit of processed meat getting heated up on a stick. Doner kebabs are nice, but it has to be in classy greek kebab restaurants and all. Kebabland, although having seats, didn’t seem to make quality doner kebabs, so yeah, shish it was. I tried asking the waiters how kebabs were made but was interrupted by a guy with a bloody nose. Ah well. Once we ordered everything we decided to head back to the hotel, I wasn’t keen on eating in Kebabland so I was saving it till when we get to the hotel so I can eat in peace please/plis/plees.

We stayed at Gem and Cara’s hotel room for a bit, finishing off our food and all, had a lovely chat about the gig and everything. Kazzie was absolutely mashed from the gig and was lying in the bed. Once all the food was consumed we began planning our ungodly trip back to the hotel. I think Ste and Popey were heading to Kazzie’s place from Baker Street so we had to head off soon and all in case they had to just wait around in the car for us or something, i dunno. Once Kazzie got some energy back we were off again. I can’t remember the seating arrangements too well but I think Alice, Blee and her friend were in Kazzie’s car whilst me and kiernan were in Inn’s car. I think inn led the way again whilst Kazzie followed, soon after we reached Kazzieland kazzie pretty much knew where she was going and it was sort of a free for all. The car journey wasn’t that bad.. bad seating arrangements if you ask me haha *grovels* :p I can’t remember which car journey it was I was required to give directions to but yeah, one of the car journey’s I was giving directions to inn to drive back to Kazzie’s and all. At one point I had my head on one side as if I was dead and I think Kazzie phoned up to ask if was alright or not haha, the sniffles had caught up with me again, definitely no trampoline time tonight haha!

We eventually got home and pretty much got ready to sleep! We initially wanted a second BBQ but since it was far too late and everyone was tired, we decided it was definitely not a good idea and all. I quickly nabbed my duvet I needed, Alice had her own sleeping bag and all. No mattress was found so we were a bit stuck, there was an air bed but that was just ridiculous to get set up. It was electrically powered to blow up and all but the noises made were ungodly. Everytime I turned on the on switch for it to inflate I would get an ungodly whriling noise, each time would turn it off and apologise to everyone. I tried messing with the settings but it was still really loud. I think I tried turning on the switch about 6 or 7 times before giving up completely and sleeping in the floor . Blee and Popey were sleeping in the other room and I warned Blee about the snoring Popey emitted during the night, not to mention Ste’s. It was actually funny listening to Popey snore; me, alice and ste were still awake and all when Popey was sleeping and they all managed to catch me recording Popey snore AGAIN haha! We had quite a chuckle but eventually we all fell to sleep, well most of us anyway…

Next up, the finale of the trilogy; some more nando’s action, VIP pass cockups, some godly photos of Muse and finally, Curryland!

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• The ultimate Muse Wembley Stadium Weekend (Friday)
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• That damn duck weekend!

9am The girlish screams of a bewildered boy

Again, for the morning I did more micro sleeping, I kept waking up at random times and going back to sleep due to the lack of activity going on since people were asleep. I got a text from Alice saying she was going to be back in Leeds at 12:30 odd and that Gem was awake and all. I think I knocked at Gem’s room to say hello and everything and eventually people were awake to get ready for the last day before everyone scatters back from whence they came.

Alice sooner or later arrived at the door (Gem’s door) and we all had a pleasant chat about what happened and all, I showed alice some photos I took of the day so she had a gist of what went on and all. Eventually everyone went downstairs to make more cupcakes or breakfast (can’t remember). I remember walking downstairs to the living room and finding all of Gem’s housemates just sitting there. It was like I entered the wrong house or went through the wrong portal. I tried explaining myself (i think was trying to anyway) or maybe introducing myself… actually I dont know, the thing was… I just muttered a bit and just gave up explaining or saying anything and just ran away screaming girlish noises, was quite a sight for them and myself I must say. Inn said all she could hear was girlish screams and so did Paul, Alice and Gem who were in the kitchen (you had to go through the living room to actually get to the kitchen). I explained inn what happened and then we eventually went downstairs for our breakfast.

Gem prepared the last bowls of lucky charms for me, inn and Paul to eat, I was intending for her to have the rest but she was generous to let us three have the rest (though i really shouldn’t have made so much cereal yesterday, it could have lasted a lot longer and all). We commented on the fact that the lucky charms turned the milk grey from all the colouring and stuff that was nicely added on to make the marshmallows pretty.

We drank some more tropicana juice to ensure that we were nice and awake. Our plan today was to conquer West Yorkshire and enslave the northerners, forcing them to work down at the pits again to create a new Mordor. No wait, thats another plan, our plan for today to only work out what we were doing. We decided that a BBQ was definitely a nice way to end the weekend and all. Gem had already asked her housemate last night about whether a BBQ was feasible or not and they replied saying that it was best we did it today rather than last night (our original plan). So yeah, our plan was to head down to the local Sainsburys and buy ourselves some BBQ goodness. At one point during the conversation I got bored and balanced my dslr camera on top of my head and tried taking photos with them (they were appalling so I didn’t upload them haha).

1pm odd: Food shopping (aka shopping for food) and the pregnant juice

Initially we thought we’d be able to buy all our stuff at Sainsburys but it turned out that it was lacking in meat and burgers etc. We decided to head into a bigger supermarket and buy our food there instead. So off to the car we go as we drive down to the nearest supermarket which happened to be a Morrisons (god I miss safeways, Morrison’s colour scheme reminds me of some ultra bargain supermarket chain like Netto *shudders*). We bought all sorts of stuff, including olives stuffed with feta cheese (me inn and alice were obsessed with the idea of getting olives for the BBQ, we also got some orangey olives but they’re not worth mentioning to be honest (and by mentioning it now it sort of negates that fact that we are ingoring it)), proper quater pounder burgers, sausages and bacon (there was an offer where if you bought the bacon you get the sausages free) , some onions and some cheese.

We also bought cloudy lemonade and some other juices for the BBQ, one of them (pomegranate juice with raspberry) made me go “Pregnent juice?”, quite a funny way to misread things but I’m sure you can see why I got that looking at the word “pomegranate”. We also got some ice for the juices to make sure we were doing things right. We also bought some sauces and stuff for the BBQ, I insisted that we got nando’s peri peri BBQ sauce as well as some extra hot peri peri sauce for the BBQ to really give things a kick! I also got some catsup for inn (which was highly unpopular at the BBQ).

The bill was about £30 odd which was nice since there were five of us. We tried looking at disposable BBQ’s at Morrisons but I told everyone that they were a bit shitty so decided to pick up one from Sainsburys instead. So we drove there and everyone voted for me to go get the BBQ. Upon entering the store I thought we were missing something, I went to the meat section and got some additional meat for the BBQ, I think skewers are awesome at BBQs and though that the Pork kebabs were a great addition to it and all (especially when you marinade them in extra hot peri peri sauce!). Afterwards we were almost ready for the BBQ, we headed out back to Gem’s place to prepare everything.

Upon arriving at Gem’s house we (well inn) began chopping up the onions and peppers so we could BBQ them (bless her she was tearing up from the strong onion smell) as well as packing up the cupcakes that were made this morning (Alice went at it with the cupcakes to ensure that we could fit them all in hehe bless). I sort of lounged about, I was playing whistle a day when shopping for stuff so I thought I’d give them a break on the whistle haha, I didn’t bring much to be honest. Twas funny looking through the cupboards for extra stuff (we used peppers for the bbq that Gem had already bought and all), Gem earlier on had a look in the cupboards for onions and managed to find one that had began sprouting at the top. Was quite funny one might say.

We eventually headed off to the park de la park for BBQ action.

3.30pm Super flaming BBQs, Photo wars and piggyback ride

We managed to find a lovely spot in Hyde Park to have our BBQ, it had a nice bench where we could unload all our food and all. I think we just went at it with the BBQ. We used some matches Paul got from his car and lit the instant disposable BBQ up, whilst that was going we had a lovely toast on my end of uni, alice’s end of college, gem’s end of second year, and inn’s job haha. Twas a lovely toast (for me especially since I had only finished uni a few days ago). Me alice and inn then toasted with the cameras too haha.

Afterwards we began taking photos of stuff (though to be fair we ALWAYS take photos of stuff so there isn’t technically a begining), this included crazy duel at both ends of the table as well as some crazy 360 degrees continuous burst shooting.

Here’s a battle scene between me and alice.:

Alice gives me the duel face and we DRAW

Me drawing and the third person view shot haha

I also did an animated gif of Alice by doing a continuous shot of Alice whilst moving 360 around her (it messed up near the end since I was closer to her so it wasn’t really a loop) but it turned out quite well as an animated gif.

As soon as the BBQ was ready we went at it with the burgers and the sausages, I told Paul and Inn to put all the sausages in to maximise the space and all but later on the sausages started spitting and the BBQ was in flames (nice flames to be honest), during the incident Inn and Paul tried saving the food but during the process dropped a few sausages onto the table (tut tut).

Not long after some of the food was ready, the burgers were godly! We picked the right type of burgers (as oppose to birds eye frozen burgers) and they tasted like the burgers you’d eat if you were in heaven or at Gourmet Burger Kitchen (they do bare many similarities however). To really top it all off I used the nando’s BBQ sauce and it just made everything taste godly.

The sausages were a bit charred and burnt, Alice still liked them regardless and we managed to eat them all still. Eventually Gem’s friend came to visit us and join in on the BBQ. We had a lovely chat about cameras which was fun. We were explaining use of aperture and how that affected depth of field and all, I even did a test using my lovely model alice (she was pretty much a model for the entire day).

Afterwards we went camera crazy again and started taking photos of each other (like we planned our) it was a blissful moment where everything was childish and giddy.

Near the end inn suggested a piggy back race so I teamed up with alice for the race, though we lacked in other contestants so we just thought we’d have a piggy back ride around the trees for fun anyway. It was pretty fun, Alice thought she was too heavy and I wouldn’t be able to carry her for too long but I did a pretty awesome job, her shoes came out at one point which was funny too hehe.

I decided to get an animated shot of me running around the tree with alice so inn got the camera ready and we started running around the trees in piggy back mode, I think something went wrong with the first take so we did it again haha! I also teased alice a little by tilting myself left and right hoping alice would get scared of falling, luckily she wasn’t, we were able to run around the place in piggyback mode for quite a long time, inn was amazed at the time I was carrying alice (most piggy back rides last a few seconds until the guy just gives up haha), twas all about a nice grip from alice and some good legwork from me haha (do note I’m trying to burn off ungodly amounts of food and the best way to do so is to just do piggyback rides (yes the BEST way to do so, I went there))

Inn then borrowed alice for some portrait photography, I took a quick photo of inn taking the photos as well as a quick photo of Alice when she was doing her hair as well as posing for the camera. One of the shots I took was amazing hehe, theres this natural sense of glacialness and naturalness going on (yes you need a natural sense of naturalness to be natural, if that even makes sense), I was proud of the shot hehe, not to mention my godly 50mm f1.8 lens.

Inn taking photos of Alice

My shot of Alice

Near the end where most of the food was left over I just asked everyone if they wanted to eat anymore and they all shook their heads, so being the proper food eating manguy person type thing I was, I decided to finish it all off. Was quite alot but it also meant I didnt need to eat in the evening hehe.

The flames began dying down and we eventually called it a day and headed back to Gem’s place, we had noticed that the BBQ had burnt through the wood a bit, we took photos of the spot and wrote our names on it.

6:30pm odd: The end of the weekend

At Gem’s house we noticed that her housemates had cleaned up the living room and had set up a dinner table for them to have some sort of special leavers dinner. There were crackers on the table which made me laugh (haha, see I’m laughing, its not xmas!) and they all gave me this look that sort of dictated “you crazy girl screaming, door locking boy”. I just ignored them like the others and went into the kitchen to unpack and clean stuff up.

We then began packing our bags and stuff to call it all a day. I didn’t have much to pack so it was all good, I quickly gave everyone a notebook for them to write something random on the page and all, most of which liked the idea of drawing things I feared most ranging from naked men in parks and megabuses. I get the feeling I did this in the morning but yeah, probably sounds more dramatic to put it here than at the beginning since we’re about to leave and all rather than start a bbq haha (though explaining this probably negates the effect).

Once all packed up we were ready to go, Paul and Inn were driving and Gem was staying in the house. We waved goodbye to inn and then me and Alice headed off to Leeds Station. We got a bit lost on our way to the station and we even went to Belle Vue Road (where my brother lived). Felt a bit funny to have just walked past my brother’s house and not say hello or anything.

We eventually made our way to the station, we bought our tickets and waited at the platform. The wait wasn’t too long as Alice’s train arrived a few minutes after. I gave Alice a nice long hug and a kiss on the head and waved goodbye to her. It felt like those sappy movies where people saw each other off on the station and all hehe. I was tempted to chase the train until it left but my train was about to leave too! So I immediately trotted back to my platform and got myself a nice seat (well not really, it was shite haha, dunno why I said it was nice) inside the GNER train. The journey was ok, I had quite a lot of micro sleeps during the journey and was listening to music constantly. I eventually got home and collapsed into my bed after neglecting it for so many days (and nights).

It was an epic weekend, one that would be hard to top off, the BBQ was probably the nicest part of the weekend since it was so relaxed and playful. We later on discovered that Gem’s housemates did not like us one bit (oh yeah!) and that bacon was one of the most underrated things to put on a BBQ. And there we go, another BBQ to follow next weekend!

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• Honey I’m home, 2 weeker in halifax
• Week in Halifax with Alice
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• The ultimate Muse Wembley Stadium Weekend (Saturday)

8am: They’re after my lucky charms!

Sleep was a precious thing, some people treasure the amount of time they have for sleeping, in particular with those who go to work on a 9 to 5 basis and are suffering from fatigue. I myself having finished uni and am in the middle of being in a jobless and studyless state don’t need to cherish these moments. This is why I woke up at some ungodly time and just lounged about for a bit. I think I woke up about 8 odd and got changed and ready for the next day, unfortunately inn wasn’t actually ready so it meant I had to just… sleep some more. That’s right, another micro sleep. I keep doing this every morning due to the fact that the sun really gets into me.

So yeah, fastforward this a bit more and we get to the point that I eventually wake up because inn woke up. She kept moaning about how I snore in my sleep which kept her up when in fact.. my snores were minimal, just a bit of heavy breathing I’d say. Man breathing.

Gem eventually knocks on our door quietly to see if we’re all up and all, she jokingly knocks the door really hard like what happened the night before, twas funny until one of her housemates go “HAR HAR VERY FUNNY!”, but even then it was still pretty funny haha.

After much preparation and getting readyness we all head down to the get ready for breakfast, I eventually walk downstairs and have a friendly chat with everyone. Eventually it was time for some lucky charms and orange juice action.

Alice and Inn have no tried lucky charms so it was a new experience for them (of how to get really fat haha). We went in the kitchen to get the bowls and picked 3 nice big blue bowls and a dish like bowl for inn (a bit like a bowl where you’d put milk in for kittens to drink). I poured an ungodly amount of lucky charms into the bowls and served everyone, we only had about 1/4 worth of lucky charms left haha.

Everyone was loving the lucky charms, Gem used to love lucky charms when she was a kid so this was a nice blast from the past whilst the other two just enjoyed the marshmellows and frosted oats. Of course the breakfast won’t be complete without some shots of the lucky charms.

We eventually headed off to Leeds for some shop browsing and lounging about

12am Lioning climbing and jazz scat music

Inn wanted to go to sound control to check out acoustic guitars so we started walking to the place, we eventually stumble upon some lion statues which inn wanted to climb on, it was literally a photo break for our journey where we just go photo trigger happy haha.

Sound control was quite close to the train station and all, Alice was the only one who actually knew where it was so we all relied on her in finding the way, she didnt seem to convinced at where it was suppose to be and people started to doubt her on it hehe bless, I strangely had confidence that she would get it right so I stood by her side that she was going to find it. We eventually found the place and headed in for some musical jamming.

The sound control was quite fun and friendly, we instantly scattered to instruments and played with them (well just me and inn anyway haha), inn went straight to the acoustic section since she wanted to get an acoustic guitar whilst I went straight at the keyboards. There was some random guy playing lots of Muse songs throughout the visit and it was rather annoying since he was only doing the guitar riffs and it was pretty boring haha. I played my typical tracks to Alice including the odd take a bow, some super mario tunes and pokemon.

Soon I went to the acoustic section to play some King of the Hill and Mansun. I tried the bass a bit too but it was a bit boring on its own, soon after that I went to the keyboards and tried out new sounds, one in particular was “Jazz Scat”. It was awesome! Every note was a sampled scat note, I played a few muse tracks including Hysteria which sounded awfully like the acapella rendition of it and eventually I did Leekspin too! I also switched to church organs and played Phantom of the Opera at full blast. Good times!

We eventually left the store and Inn bought some plectrums which made us look less like we were here JUST to jam (I know I was haha).

1:30pm: Nero and goodbyes

We headed to a nearby Caffe Nero and bought some drinks to chill out, we picked the one pretty close to the train station since Alice had to go at 2 odd for her prom (lots of preparing involved). Soon after we ordered our drinks we went trigger happy again (we’re terrible arent we). Twas a nice chilled out sit and chat, though sadly it was time for Alice to head back to Halifax, I walked her to the station and gave her a quick hug goodbye before heading back to Nero.

Now thats one person down, we were expecting Paul (ril from the board) to arrive and keep the numbers above 3 people hehe. He came by and got himself a coke, we continued to talk for a bit until we decided it was time for lunch and all.

…meanwhile somewhere else… Alice’s train broked down so she was a bit delayed and all, she had a hair cut and go ready to goto the prom in a retro car ready to rock mid level venues hehe.

15:00pm odd: The return of the singing sushi man

Inn and I wanted to get some sushi action for lunch, Gem was fine since she had quite a large bowl of Lucky charms and she didnt really have breakfast in the morning so that was pretty much lunch sorted, I think ril had eaten already *shrugs*. We went back to sisushi (well not we, I did, the rest haven’t seen it). The waiter who sorted out the bills last time was there whilst there was a different female waitress serving us (the other waitress was probably traumatised from Kev’s advances). This time I decided to order out since it was a lot cheaper than eating in. I ordered myself a gourmet set which includes:

• 4 Salmon Nigiri
• 1 Seabass Nigiri
• 1 Prawn Nigiri
• 1 Octopus Nigiri
• 1 Tamago Nigiri (egg)
• 1 Ikura Salmon Roe (salmon eggs!)
• 3 Grilled Ell & Avocado Maki rolls (unagi!)
• 3 prawn and avocado make rolls

This was about £8 odd, I was silly enough to not ask for water of any sorts whilst inn got herself the same gourmet set and some miso soup.

We continued harassing the male waitress with the whole all singing all dancing sushi men! He told me that he did ask the sushi chefs but they gave him a dirty look! Inn was convinced in getting some boyband singing sushi men so she tried her luck on the male waiter to see if he would give him a rendition so he said name a song and he’ll do it. Unfortunately he didnt know the songs we wanted him to do (“I want it that way” by Backstreet boys was the grand choice) so Inn said he has to learn some next time she visits, Inn was definitely going to pay them a visit again!

We took our food and headed outside to eat on the grass. It was a lovely lunch I must say, I haven’t tried quite a lot of the stuff in the set. The salmon roe was the scariest one since liquid comes out when you bite into each egg. I sort of used the line in Jonathan Ross (in regards to eat maggots) and told inn that she had to bite into each egg in case fishes started to spawn out of her tummy hehe. I used the tripod I asked inn to bring and took some photos of us eating it from afar.

During our meal some random kids came by and jumped around like monkeys, it was pretty surreal, they were doing backflips, front flips and all sorts of monkey related activities. We just ignored them haha (I took some photos since I had the tripod and remote set up).

Afterwards we started to plan out what we were doing this evening, we were going to go play some bingo! It starts around 7 odd so we had quite alot of time to kill. We decided to do some shopping and relax at another coffee shop

4pm Corn Exchange and the stories of random people

We decided to head over to the corn exchange and browse around, it was quite a nice play I must say, first time I’ve ever been in there. It was like the miniature version of Camden without the in your face goth’s arse sticking into your face. There were a few clothes shops selling alternative clothes, Paul bought a tie in one of the shops for someone. We also went to some comic book store type place and looked at figurines and comic books haha. We had a look at quite a few shops and during one of them I bought myself a man of mystery type mask. I was hoping to gate crash Alice’s prom dressed in a cape and mask (and other clothes, not naked haha) and kill someone (Inn keeps thinking it’ll be Zorro). But yeah, least I took the first step in finding the mask. It was only £2 so it was all good. I was tempted to get a cat one too haha but passed since noone was going to wear it.

During our random wonderings we also went passed a games workshop, the same one me Alice and Kev stumbled on when finding little tokyo. The funniest thing was the fact that one of the pasty kids was looking into the manual for the game, they were getting the rule book out, we laughed so hard at them and I even asked inn to take photos of them (since she had her camera out and mine was in my bag) I dont think she managed to get the shot in the end though I would have literally walked in and took a photo of it if I wasn’t lazy ahha.

We later on went into a Starbucks and camped there until it was Bingo time. I ordered myself a Strawberry Frappacino as well as some yummy blueberry cheesecake. We sat around and had a lovely chat, talking about all sorts of things including kev, laptops, manchester, manics etc. I later on suggested to play a game where we sort of make a life out of the people walking past us underneath (the photo should explain where we were sitting and were people were more). There were odd couples kissing down this path and we sort of made cheating affairs with them and stuff. Was a fun game for a bit, then it died out haha.

We sat down until it was time for some hardcore Bingo action. Me and Inn were well excited about it all.

6.30pm Bob Spektor and the 3 bingo’s

It was a weird experience one might say, me and Inn were really curious as to why the likes of kev and Gem are having so much fun at an OAP game. So we ventured into the whole bingo thing to see what all the fuss was about. Upon entering we were prompted to register ourselves with Mecca. Knowing me, I used a fake name to sign up (Bob Spektor), Gem was impressed at how I was able to make up a signature and write it again at another time with the signature looking exactly the same hehe. I was so tempted to use “Dr” instead of “Mr” but that might give it away haha.

The entire experience reminded me of the scene in mighty boosh where vince and howard went into a Bingo hall to find Nanneratu. We looked extremely out of place upon entering, everyone was old and pasty whilst we looked like a couple of fresh meat ready to rock these old people’s worlds (or rocking chairs).

Gem explained the rules of Bingo to us and we bought our tickets for £14 (quite a lot of rounds though). We also bought dabbers to jot on the numbers, I picked myself a green dabber and got some water along the way.

Bingo was definitely out of this world, it was an intense game that required full concentration, I was amazed at how focused you need to be when listening to the people call out the numbers whilst you mark them on your bingo sheet. At first I missed out a few numbers but later on I really got the hang of it and went dab crazy. We discovered that you can say or do anything to alert people that you have won, kev apparently used “bingo” when he won but the others seemed to just go “yup” or “yeah” when they win. I was hoping to use “GWAAAAAAAAAARGH” whenever I won and do a double metal sign just to really get things going. Of course I would be shouting it too!

Each round was intense, but sadly some random person wins it and not us haha. At one point the person behind me and inn shouted “YUP” and scared me and inn hehe. It was a classic scene, the guy eventually apologised to us and bought himself a beer haha.

Eventually Inn starts to really get lucky (probably from my lucky charms) and wins at Bingo, she quickly confirms that she was won on her ticket and goes “yep!” Really quietly, I was disappointed that she just went yep like the other people, but then again you’re concentrating on it all too much that you don’t really think about it when you’ve called. Inn won £100 for her first go. We all hi5′d each other and everyone at the bingo hall gave us a smile, the kind that goes “i wish i was young” i’d say haha.

There were all sorts of sub games going on tonight too, including an american version of bingo, a national bingo and some other one. The national one was pretty scary since all Mecca bingo halls across the nation were playing and the prize money was scary! One of the problems with me winning it was the fact that the money was going to be paid via cheque so you can imagine how much of a bummer it would be if I wont and had to tell them that my name wasn’t Bob Spektor. I had to settle with the giving my ticket to either Gem Inn or Paul if I won and they’d split the money 4 ways afterwards, it stressed me out that if I won i wasn’t able to celebrate! Once those games were over I was able to relax and enjoy the game like normal since the payout was in cash (some random person handing out money to your table).

The games continue and near the end, inn wins AGAIN! This time £20. Nonetheless she claims her money and is super chuffed about it. There were many times when I was one number close in winning too but some other person starts calling before you. I usually cursed them for winning haha, just added to the drama! The final game was won by, yup, you guessed it..INN AGAIN! She managed to pull off a hattrick of wins. This time she did it in style and went “YEAAAAAAAAARGH!” really loudly. This time I got the feeling the other players were adding inn into their hitlist for winning so many times that night. The prize was £50 this time so inn won a grand total for £170.

It was a proper buzzed evening, purely because inn had done us proud and won £170 which was later split 4 ways (there was a sharing rule in place where we’d share all the winnings). The celebration of it wasn’t too good however… we just went to a local fish and chips store and ate chips and stuff on some steps at Corn Exchange haha.

11pm: “Stacker, my nemesis in life”

Right after some food (I ate some ungodly amount of fish and chips AND a sausage haha) we went to Dr Wu’s apparently it was a nice place to hang out, unfortunately for that day it happened to get all dancey and filled with twats. Kev explained later about how other nights it’s a great bar and all but tonight was just that one night where it’s utterly crap and filled with konbs. After a quick drink and all there we decided to head to another pub. Gem took us to some pub that used to be a library. Upon walking to the pub we met a lot of students dressed up as romans which was quite fun.

We managed to get nice seats upon entering the pub and all, we then ordered some drinks and went back to the table for some random bantering (i got myself a pint of guiness haha) Gem managed to put in £2 to play some manics tracks on the jukebox. Paul pointed out a game to me in the pub that was called “Stacker“. Heres a quick explanation of the game taken from Wikipedia (wish i read this beforehand)

Stacker is an “Amusement with prizes” style game manufactured by LAI Games. The aim is to align rows of moving blocks on top of each other by pressing a button. When a player gets to the top row, they win a major prize

Now we werent initialy going to play this, I wasn’t keen on winning prizes neither was playing games a social way of spending the evening. Only until we heard some girls winning the game and getting a Nintendo DS Lite. I was pretty amazed by it I must say. I dont know what happened but soon after that I decided to venture in on this game. Upon trying it, I was able to immediately reach to the last level of the game. This is where it gets annoying. EVERYTIME i push it at the right spot, it would show that I just missed it. I wasn’t too chuffed about it so I decided to play the game again, like before I woosh past the minor prize band but totally screw up at the last level. Suddenly a crowd begins to build around me as they notice me do a really good job at getting near the end but screwing up. Most normal players would take their time and mess up at certain areas, I did it at a disturbing rate and more instinctively. I’m quite good with my hand eye co ordination so it wasn’t hard for me to get to the top. But the problem was that everytime I do get to the last bit, it messes up. I got quite addicted to the game and more addicted in trying to win the damn ds lite (even though I have one myself). The crowd became bigger and wilder, it got to a point where they asked Gem my name and began chanting it throughout my ventures. I even got people paying me money to win minors prizes since I could “win the minor prize in my sleep”. It was quite a buzz having loads of people surrounding me watching me try to beat the machine and all. I even asked inn to break £10 worth of notes into coins so I could play the game, but it simply got to a point where it wasn’t my fault I wasn’t winning the prize, it was simply a rigged machine. If someone had just won a DS lite over that game, clearly it would be impossible for me to actually win it again based on the probability and all. The machine was rigged up to only let the player win if a certain amount of profit was made.

It was ever so tedious, inn told me how all I wanted to do was beat the machine and that I was far too stubborn and determined to do so haha, she was right. I think in total I actually spent £20 on the machine (maybe more from the other people paynig me money to play for it too haha). So yeah, heres the lesson for today, don’t try and beat a machine that’s rigged. Nonetheless I had a lot of fun on the damn machine what with the crowd and all.

After that I decided to have a game of pool with inn (since Gem and Paul didnt really play pool and all). We racked up the table and began a vicious game of pool, the problem was the fact that the table was missing quite a lot of things. First it was the triangle and than it was the cue ball, Inn tried asking the manager of the pub to sort out the problem but it got to a point where he had to fish out loads of pool balls and evenetually just gave inn a red ball and told her not to pot it haha. We did get the triangle though. The game was quite fun, inn was in the lead most of the time but it got to the point where I managed to catch up on the last ball, and pot a flukey ball in and win the game It was quite fun since inn would have won if she got the black ball near the end hehe. That cheered me up quite a bit. After a while we decided to call it quits and head back to Gem’s place. It was pretty dark and all outside too (being 1am in the morning and all)

1am Doobeedoobedooo

Now, not sure if anyone knows this fact about Hyde Park in Leeds. It has been reported to have a high percentage of gay rapes there. So walking around at night at 1am in the morning wasn’t a clever idea. The park didn’t have street lamps either so it meant the entire place was pitch black and very dangerous for late night wonderings. Gem thankfully had a torch light on her phone that we used to find our way back.

I constantly went on about the fact that the park could be filled with naked men running around ready to attack you, I made a sort of sound that naked men would make if they were to move about which went “doobeedoobedoo” in a slightly funny but sinister way. The entire journey was filled with possibilities that naked men could be hiding behind trees, above trees and even inside bins. We did some shadow puppets along the way with the light too which was fun. But eventually we did return hope safe and sound.

It was quite late but nonetheless some late night bantering in Gem’s room was necessary. Me and Inn got our DS lite’s out and began battling it out with brain training as well as 42 games in one. I played Gem in several of these games including a game of pairs where we took turns to find out pairs from a stack of cards. It was fun and intense since we were both good with our memory. We mutually decided to call it draw since it was quite an intense game and we had already endured enough games for today haha. After that we decided to call it an evening and all went back to our rooms to go sleep. Inn and I were still traumatised about the whole banging last night but went to sleep anyway. We didnt have spare dovets this time so chances are it won’t happen again ahah (and it didn’t)

Thats about it, our final day in Leeds includes the return of alice and a godly impromptu bbq in Hyde Park.

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