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

Now what happens next? Do I upload them all? Now if all shots were unique then hell yeah, upload them all, but this is from one gig. A magazine doesn’t show millions of photos for one gig so neither should I. It’s only best to strip out all the similar but not as epic shots and only keep the epic ones. That means comparing them against one and another and SLOWLY killing the photos off. It usually takes hours to do and is a toughie when the photos are all sharp and presentable. I do have a few rules of deciding which photo goes through, usually judging on how interesting the lights are, and how dynamic the musician’s pose is. Once we’ve declared the winners, we start killing loads of photos that are simply “bad duplicates“.

Once all that is done, next thing is mining out rare gems. Sometimes you can take perfect shots and they require very little photoshopping or editing to make it good, but there are cases where you actually need to crop or “black and whitify” the photos in order to make the photo nicer, usually killing distractions or focusing into the musician, and sometimes these cropped or edited photos beat those natural ones. It’s more apparent with gig photography since you need to immediately focus people’s attention on the band so sometimes it’s important to get that kick and draw nailed.

So yeah, an example is this bad boy.

It’s a nice shot, but the background is quite distracting, it’s wide because when shooting, I wanted to shoot him and his foot on the pedal. But when it came on the screen, it wasn’t really that interesting, and when zooming in, I discover that the shot is pretty sharp so I was able to actually crop this and focus on just the top half of Matt, and here’s the end result.

You’ll notice that this photo has a better impact since it focuses on the subject more. The crowd is quite distracting but meh, they’ll stay for now haha. This crop was done a day after uploading the photos, I was slowly swotting down photos that people weren’t keen on looking at to keep the photo count down, but this one seemed like one of those “hmm, if i cropped it, perhaps it will look better”, and it really did. It’s definitely tough work post processing these bad boys, at the end of the day I tend to stick with about 20-30 photos (the amount you can take with the disposable camera usually) I broke the boundries with Muse but hey, it’s Royal Albert Hall :p.

So yeah, when sorting out photos, it’s a pain, but if you put the time and effort you’ll yield excellent results. I hope you all enjoyed the photos, thanks for commenting on them and all.

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).

After work I took the train from Charring Cross to Canterbury West where Stu and Inn were there to pick me up. They had already spent the night there and had Xmas dinner ready, the previously mentioned that they WILL get a xmas turkey cooked to cheer up Karis’ gloomy xmas. They all decided to wait for me to arrive before eating (which was nice of them!) and once the party was all ready, we were ready to party. I was curious as to why the turkey was so tiny when I saw it but wasn’t really in the mood to question it (was more in the mood to eat tbh). Once at the table I made sure everyone was following strict table manners and regulations to ensure we had a formal and respectable dinner. I was quite impressed that they managed to prepare a pretty beefy amount of things to go with the “turkey”, they had the chandberry sauce, sweetcorn, peas, gravy and even pigs in a blanket. We managed to take turns with toasting the new year and Inn made me be the last person to give the toast to really sum everything up, I turned my toast to a business meeting agenda and yeah, lovely toast. I was also able to do my usual bit of asking how was everyone’s days. Stu managed to shock Karis some more by popping out of the living room dressed as Santa, we all god Karis presents and everything (mine was pretty impromptu but I got her something in the end). She seemed pretty chuff, but not because of that too…

It appears that Karis was able to find love in the meetup. Michael (Originalboywonder on the museboard) was at the meetup and before I arrived they managed to “hookup” (OH YEAH! haha) so yeah, this is where it gets interesting, we all took turns to tease the hell out of her. Including an extended long game of “I never” as well as that game where they stick names on your head and you have to guess who they are. It was pretty fun of an evening. New Years eve was celebrated with some lovely paper burning, I can’t remember what I wrote so yeah…

When the clock struck 12 we let loose some party poppers and drank some super cheap champagne (took a LONG time to open). We then played a few “t00ns” on Stu’s laptop and raved for a bit. The night fizzled down with everyone going to bed with me and Inn going online via mobile and ds lite respectively. I slept on the hallway since every room was taken, which was fine since I could sleep anywhere (including the stairs), I could have slept in the living room but Karis and Michael were there… I took the essence of the sofas and made a lovely mattress to sleep with. Later on the evening I kept getting woken up by Ste snoring at a disturbingly high decibel, I tried recording it on my phone but sadly it didn’t pick it up too well

The next day began with me waking up nice and early and having a lovely shower. I played some soothing classical music to wake everyone up which was quite hilarious, inn found it funny this time instead of enraged since the music was fucking awesome haha. I was glad I didn’t sleep in the living room either because the next day it had a very strong stench of crotch smell, and like what Stu said, “it’s only nice when you’re smelling your own crotch”. We thought the best breakfast would be a trip to Nando’s haha. I had already had nando’s with Alice but what the hell, nothing else nice in Canterbury haha. Karis got a bit antisocial at times with Michael and it was pretty hilarious watching them not being able to sit next to each other haha (young love and all that). After eating more chicken we all parted ways, I was dropped off at some train crossing and had to walk to the station in the rain, the train left a few minutes before I arrived so I had to wait an entire hour for the next train and spend another hour and a bit on the train (thank god I was able to phone alice for the entire journey!). All in all a good way to start the new year.

I don’t like making resolutions so I’m simply going with the flow. Life is awesome at the moment so I’ll just stick to what I have.

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.

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 :).

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.

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 :P)). 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!

Getting ready for the ungodly/godly weekend

Some random time in the morning I’m posting on the message board telling people I’m suppose to meet everyone at 1.30pm and how it was 12.30 and I was still in my underwear. I wasn’t really taking packing up seriously! Probably due to the fact that I did live in London so if there was something that was missing I could easily come back home and pick it up, it also means that travelling isn’t as hectic as everyone else (I can get to Victoria station in just 30 minutes mm). Around this time we’ve established that Kiernan has flown from America to Dublin and to London to visit everyone. She was staying at Kazzie’s the entire weekend and was at her place at the time, Inn was heading off to meet Kev and Stephie at their hotels and all, which sort of leaves me and Popey msn’ing about and posting on the board. So yeah, right now our meeting spot was Yo Sushi! at Victoria station at around 1.30-2pm, the rule was, at 2pm, we eat! I better get ready!

I had packed myself the bare essentials, clothes for all days (had to look sharp and all!), a wiimote for 4 player wii, gamecube pads for smash brothers action (I managed to reduce the load by asking inn and popey to bring a pad as well, as well as Max bringing a wiimote so the amount of stuff I brought was minimal). As well as that I brought my DSLR camera, my 55-200mm telelens (its Wembley Stadium so it made sense) and various chargers for batteries and phone batteries etc. With clothes I decided to be a bit retro and dress up with the same clothes as I did last week, I wanted something stripey so the white and blue went well, I made sure I wore my crazy big cuffed shirt and mask to ensure I could ninja my way around and all! The rest were just a simple cardigan and two scarves to vary from hehe.

I had to make a quick detour to fetch my camera before I made my way to Victoria. I think I was slightly delayed from all of this and people were getting quite nervous that I’ll be late once again haha (but fashionably late). I think was about 10 minutes late from it all so it wasn’t too bad.

Yakitori and peeping popey

I finally arrive in Victoria Station, I immediately head up to Yo Sushi and look around for everyone, I immediately catch Inn’s attention, she already had her camera ready snapping away so I retaliated with some fast action snapping. I immediately reach to them and out pops stephie! Was quite a surprise considering… no actually it wasn’t really a surprise, it made sense since Inn did pop around the hotels that kev and Gem were staying. Her voice was disturbingly high pitched! I comment on that immediately and she explains how she gets all high pitched when she’s nervous.

We immediately get ordering, I decided that the bar seating area wasn’t really a cool place for us lot to sit since it was a bit antisocial so I opted for us to all move to the seats with tables and all which everyone did. We all started ordering like made, Popey just told me to pick stuff up that he fancied whilst Inn ordered bits and bobs. I ordered chicken yakisoba and some prawn tempura, I was really addicted to the tempura lately! Oh some time later on Stephie’s voice returns back to it’s normal self when she’s less nervous, I did imitate how Stephie should sound and did a really deep irish voice hehe.

At one point Stephie orders a mushroom dish in which the waiters had no idea what it was, I later on find out that she wanted a mushroom nigiri, I started banging on the table and telling the waiter about how embarrassed I was with my friends lying to the waiter, I then had a proper lecture about how there was this bond of trust between the waiters and customers and how stephie totally destroyed that bond haha. It was pretty funny, I got both the waiter and Stephie embarrassed

Sooner or later Kiernan and Kazzie arrive on the scene and Inn once again does the Stephie hiding trick! Everyone was happy seeing Kiernan arrive (as well as Kazzie) and we all got down to food ordering etc. Kiernan tried some yakitori to see what the fuss is all about and I think I bought Kazzie a chicken yakisoba to try out (she had firecracker rice last time). I managed to persuade both of them to come by promising Kazzie that I would buy her a chicken yakisoba since she was poor and had very limited amount of spending money and all, Inn was actually impressed of how easy it was for me to persuade Kazzie to goto yo sushi! I literally told Inn to put Kazzie on the phone and after a quick chat I persuaded both Kazzie and Kiernan to come along.

The food was lovely per usual, I’ve only noticed that Yo Sushi! in Victoria has two conveyor belts going at opposite directions (Picadilly’s one only has 1). Inn started ordering some green tea on top of her unlimited water since she loved it so much and it got to a point where the waiters just gave us the entire teapot to help ourselves with (last time was crazy). Stephie tried some miso soup too but kept saying it tasted of wood (the spoon), I personally loved it. Inn ordered some sashimi to try out whilst Kiernan ordered another Chicken Yakitori, the portions were quite small for Kiernan and she said could have eaten about 50 of them haha.

Some random time later on Max and Aino arrives on the scene, they sort of sat behind me and Inn and talked to everyone, they also paid Kazzie her Wembley Tickets money in which she immediately waved about, Stephie took her money out (which she flashed earlier on) and waved the amount of notes she had with her in comparison to Kazzie (Kazzie wasn’t pleased hehe). There was another point where I took a photo of Stephie and Popey where it looked like Popey was looking down her top hehe. Classic!

Near the end I decided to eat some Beef Raymond (I mean Ramen) haha. It was lovely hehe, nice and spicy. I loved the fact that you can just order random bits of food and try it out, the portions were small enough for you to experiment. I think after that (as well as Kazzie ordering some more fruit and wanting to drink some of my green tea) we were ready to pay the bills and depart for Trafalgar Square.

Quick Krispy Kreme break

Before heading straight to Trafalgar Square I also managed to pop by to Krispy Kremes for some doughnuts, originally the girls wanted to go to lush but all the guys overruled this, the key point being that only the guys knew their way to Trafalgar Square so it meant that they had to follow hehe. I ordered a dozen of Krispy Kremes since there was quite a lot of people about and all so we’d save a lot of money, well I did anyway. I charged everyone £1 for them haha! Anyway, onwards to embankment! We have some muse fans to laugh at!

Lion climbing and running away from Sylvie

The trafalgar square encounter was surreal and funny at the same time, as soon as we arrived we immediately saw the muse fans congregating around the stairs at Trafalgar. What do they look like? They were so easy to spot, just look for a Muse T shirt, one of the most original things to wear during Muse meet ups, singalongs and gigs. They were everywhere! As if looking emo wasn’t enough, you had to really join the pack and wear a Muse t shirt to say you’re going to a Muse singalong, you know… in case people didn’t know (haha). Though I suppose you’re supposed to be recognised at the singalong rather than acting all ninja like me and the rest.

I hate posed shots, not to mention the fact that two of them are wearing Muse t shirts…

We decided to climb the lions and just lounge around the square for a bit whilst the Muse fans sat and melted. Btw take note on the terms I use, “muse fans” are the people who turned up at the singalong for a sing and wear muse t shirts whilst “musers” are the sane (sane not same) type who aren’t singing and don’t wear muse t shirts (except kazzie, she’s a bit of both!). I began dishing out the doughnuts (for money of course) and we started getting into photography mode.

I look epic here haha

I was lucky to bring my 55-200mm lens for some proper photo action of the muse fans, couldn’t be complete without a telezoom lens eh? It felt like taking photos of the wildlife. I was using that mainly to check out the people from afar, occasionally taking photos to spy who’s arrived and who hasn’t. I think at this point it had become tiresome and I decided that it would be funny for us to just walk right behind them (since they had no idea who we were) and started posing before dashing back to our spot. Kiernan noted that she was going to visit the group soon since she had to speak to the muse moms. So yeah, the afternoon was spent tempting fate and running right into the lions den (more animal related metaphors) to get photos taken haha.

I was pretty ninja about it since I ran right around the entire square to make sure they had no idea where I was heading back to and all (they probably knew though). Eventually Kazzie got in some of the action too and started posing right behind the musers (see her in the photo above?). It got funny until I had my second go and Sylvie managed to spot me lounging about! She called out my name and instead of responding I legged it! She was about to chase me but gave up hehe, oh yeah! The whole thing was caught on camcorder so it was a pretty darn funny looking back at it hehe. This was around the time where Kiernan was actually over there talking to people too, she was asked many times where she was hanging and who she was hanging out with but Kiernan was cool enough not to crack

Sooner or later it was time for us to move out, our spot was going to be the place where they were going to sing and all so sitting there wasn’t a good idea, we tried moving into some cafe tables which was right next to the steps that they were sitting on but eventually we got broken up, Stephie Inn and I were sitting on the table with some old ladies whilst the others were approached by other muse fans. We immediately cheesed it to find a better spot since we didn’t really want any confrontation with so many muse fans and all. Eventually we found a little corner above the stairs which was perfect for ninja photo taking and spying!

*tap tap*

I turn my head around and find that Gem and Cara had found us! Of all people, they couldn’t find the massive mess of muse fans congregating on the stairs, she found us ninja’ing about in some corner. Chances are Gem spotted my hair again :(. We explained our situation of why we were in hiding and then they join us with the hiding too. Sooner or later we managed to spot kev in the area! He too has been caught with Popey and the rest of the gang (well he probably found them and approached them). We would have joined in but we were sticking to being ninja about it all. Eventually when the muse fans started to head to the square we decided that we needed to get kev’s attention without him luring a bunch of people to see us. Everyone tried calling him and luckily Cara was able to phone him up. It felt like the Matrix when Morpheus was phoning up Neo and giving him directions, we told him to just turn around and walk straight on and he’ll eventually meet us hehe, and that he did. We managed to meet up with kev and all and had a lovely chat.

Everyone started to split up and all and it got a bit confusing as to what happened, I eventually decided “what would be the best place to sit that would prevent me from being caught, and I can enjoy watching the muse fans sing?” what better place than sitting right in front of them all and enjoying the best view on the top bit of Trafalgar square! Thats right, the place everyone will be looking and all! I decided to go Ninja mode so I wore my mask at all times, though it didnt hide much, I did believe it kept me pretty ninja at times (though I did get recognised afterwards haha). When things started to kick off I just sat there with my doughnuts and camera in one hand taking photos of the action. It was pretty surreal since they didn’t really have the right to clear people away, the mics and PA was illegally set up (tut tut) but it was good that they had some PA system since none of them could sing in key haha.

Who’s horny?

Kev, stephie and inn later on joined me and thanked me for picking such a glorious spot to watch people sing, to the muse fans we could have been some random people who happened to pass by and watch them all go at it, but noo. I joked to kev at the whole hierarchy of the seats, and how admins and mods are sitting at the highest part of the square whilst the muse fans were at the bottom singing to him haha. The seats were lovely, you could capture the entire crowd and its perfect for photos too!

I think the others (Popey and co) were standing where me stephie and inn were originally hiding. We tried being cheeky and took photos of each other standing right behind the event, it was pretty surreal haha.

Eventually I met a few people there, including a photographer for NME and Tom Kirk’s brother, we had a pleasant chat about everything and talked a bit about cameras too haha. I kept stealing inn and kazzie’s lens to take some proper wide shots of the crowd and all. At one point the NME photographer got everyone to cheer at her direction so she could take a wide photo of everyone. I eventually ventured in that too and told them I wanted to take a photo so I got myself a money shot too. Just with a wider lens than both photographers hehe (sometimes the kit lens was useful!). Everyone waved and cheered and I took a couple of shots just in case. I think they sort of introduced me as crazybobbles! My cover was sort of blown! haha but just to ensure I’m not going down on my own I sort of told everyone that kev was there too and pointed him out to everyone, oh yeah (to be honest I don’t think they heard the person announcing my name and all) About then everyone was about to rock! There were two people who brought acoustic guitars but you couldn’t hear a thing since they had a PA system set up. Imagine the chaos if they didn’t have one, you’d be getting a lot of out of tune muse folk singing muse songs for an ungodly amount of time! (Microcuts!! GARGH!)

The singing began, they kicked off with Hyper Music. One of the things that I wasn’t anticipating was the fact that they had a PA system as backup, and this was what probably saved them from being a massive flop. The performance wasn’t too bad! Afterall, the actual music was being played so the actual singing from the crowd wasn’t that audible if you ask me. The stage performance was a bit.. uhm.. I’ll just explain it, you had Jordan, the main organiser wearing white jeans and t shirt with black braces, some other dude wearing the exact opposite colours and someone else. Jordan was carrying a blow up silver guitar and basically air guitaring along to the tracks and occasionally they sang into the mic and all (not the best singing and all, bit of a laddish sort of sing).

They had setlists and all but tried teasing them by not handing them out just yet, they even thought it was funny by handing the setlists to people like us since we were “random” people hehe. We chuckled and read the setlist.. boy it was long, no way were we going to catch the entire show! The setlist was almost longer than Muse’s setlist haha, the songs they picked were quite bad in places. The worst choice of song would have been “Microcuts” a crazy full on falsetto song! Oh how much I would pay to see them sing that without backing! They would sort out the pigeon problem in Trafalgar Square by howling like lunatics and forcing the pigeons to explode (if not by the emoness of the song than by hitting their natural resonance and exploding)

Most of the time I would just stroll around the stage and take photos, there was a time where there were a bunch of chav kids loitering around the area, they had a stick and all I was worried things were going to get messy, luckily the police came and stopped them (and the stick) haha. It would have been a climax though if they had started a fight, chav’s vs emo: live at Trafalgar Square. At one point Roger Kirk said some words about the charities and really did his part in raising awareness and funds for the charities. Kazzie was really enjoying the music and moshed totally on her own on stage in front of everyone, I was hoping she’d stage dive but she didn’t haha, would be a bit painful if you landed on the concrete though haha.

There were times where I’d get the people to wave their ridiculous banners and flags so I could take photos of them, they were really responsive to a person with a DSLR camera which I found pretty cool. After a while we got bored of the entire thing and decided to leave, I tried to keep it cool and gave everyone a \m/ sign before I jumped off the platform thingy and left, the jumping was… well.. hmm… basically I managed to land on my feet, but since it was quite a high jump, my bag sort of weighed me down and bam! I fell on my arse Oh the shame! the shaaaaame! Oh and like any self respecting person, when you fall over, you leg it, so thats exactly what I did. The shaaaaame haha, during my run someone chased me up and gave me something attached to my bag that broke off during the fall. I took it and continued running off to the direction the rest were at. We did a bit of talking and then Stephie caught up to tell everyone about my dramatic falling on my arse incident haha. Grr. I was doing so well and all too

Not feeling satisfied about how I exited I decided to come back on stage one last time and really give them what they wanted, a proper musewiki related speech (filled with other bits and bobs). I asked everyone if I could do it and they were pretty encouraging of it so off I go, back in the wild lands of shame (still using animal metaphors here) where I was going to give a speech to all the musers and effectively revealing who I was.

I entered the platform thingy through the side just so I wouldn’t get shamed again haha. I managed to get someones attention and asked if I could do my speech and all. They agreed and said I could have a quick moment with the crowd after the song (Darkshines). The speech was pretty godly, I was asked how I would like to be addressed as and I said “a representative of musewiki”. I got my introduction and all and came on stage with my mask on to an ungodly amount of musers ready to listen to what I was going to say…

It was pretty nerve racking, but I was pretty used to talking to so many people on a stage (after all I did do a breakdance in Royal Albert Hall before, and that wasn’t even a performance, I just invaded the stage and did it!). So yeah, some of my performing arts A level skills were used here haha. I did a quick bow to everyone and approached the mic… the first words… “hello…” then I dunno, I sort of lost it as to what I was going to say. I introduced people but told them I wasn’t Crazy_bob, I then told them to go to Musewiki because it rocked, then I get a lovely primitive crowd roar response (animals). I then sort of joked around with Musecast and said “and if you’re bored pay Musecast a visit, its an alright site” couldn’t be more condescending haha (but Popey found it funny). It was pretty good, so I decided to go all out and get the crowd going with..

“WHO’S HORNY?”

I have no idea why I said that, I was suppose to say “who’s ready to rock?” but I have no idea why I said who’s horny. The crowd cheered and it seemed like everyone below me was horny haha (that or they had no idea what i was saying and just cheered). So yeah, my next line was “who’s ready to rock?” (the word rock was sort of dragged out in a rock and roll kind of way) and the crowd was estatic at this moment! So I thought I’d end it properly by making them spell muse.

“Give me an M” “M”

“Give me an U” “U”

“Give me an S” “S”

“Give me an E” “E”

and to cheese it off, I asked “And what does that spell?”. Sure they were going to know what that was going to spell haha. And to reallllllllly realllly end it off I quickly went “SMELLS LIKE LUNDUN” I knew somewhere, an Inn and Popey were laughing their arses off at that line! I exited the stage from the right in case I’d fall off my arse again haha. Only after the speech did I realise that I have publicly asked everyone in Trafalgar Square (not just the musers and muse fans, everyone) if they were horny. It was quite a speech, I felt I really ended in style. I knew I did a better job than the other 3 hosts :p I should have been the host really haha.

After that I met up with everyone, more people were about this time including Beast Bob, Lauren, Jon, Ste and other people . I discussed my speech to the musers and sorted out car arrangements to head to Kazzie’s place, it was a bit hectic so I just told everyone to go to their allocated drivers, that seemed to work. Off to kazzie’s we go! I ended up going with Inn, Stephie and Kev. We were to head off to Harrow on the Hill where Inn’s car was parked and also meet up with Kev’s friend Leon. I had no idea who this Leon was but after seeing Inn’s reaction, he sounds like fun! The others took different routes, Ste had his Car parked up in Brent Cross and Jon had it parked somewhere else. We were going to buy food and stuff on the way but meet up at Kazzie’s place in the end. The food shopping wasn’t too planned but nonetheless we continued with the journey.

Yakitori shopping and the unlocked house

Upon arriving at Harrow on the Hill we met up with Kev’s friend Leon. He was fun (as prediected)! He wasn’t shy or anything so immediately he was talking to everyone and all. We walked up to the hotel and paid a quick visit to Kev’s room, it was an ok room and all, Kev was talking about how long it took to press his trousers and all. We also laughed at the retro radio he had, Stephie went back to her hotel where we told her to wear a less revealing top. We left the hotel and saw Stephie heading our way, even from a distance we could see that Stephie’s top wasn’t covering much up! Stephie explained that this was her only top that wasn’t revealing haha. I think kev joked about how long it took Stephie to find a non revealing top haha. Our next thing to do was to head to a local Tesco’s (at Harrow on the Hill) and shop for BBQ stuff. We parked up at Tesco’s and immediately got busy with the food shopping.

Inn rang up the others to see where they were and surprisingly, they were all behind us (not literally), they weren’t at the stores (though they were going to go to another Tescos) yet so we were the first one’s to go shopping. We sort of allocated them the burgers and stuff whilst we bought the weird odd bits of the BBQ including the chicken yakitoris and the chicken wings. Shopping was quite fun with a load of musers, everyone kept disappearing and coming back. Kev took ages trying to pick out some food since he was allergic to wheat, he looked at every kind of kebab only to find that they had wheat in them hehe. At one point he dashed off to find the food for people with special diets (picky people). We bought quite a lot of stuff, including 2 boxes of chicken wings (hot and spicey) , 2 boxes of yakitoris, nando’s marinade and sauce, pringles (watching stephie reach the pringles was gold!), dorito’s, nando’s salsa, normal salsa (boring but Leon insisted we needed one), an onion (Leon brought a red onion so I had to fetch a white one grr), a red pepper, some WKD, some scotch whiskey for Leon? and some cheese. I think that was all, we sort of split the bill in a weird way. I only paid for the Yakitoris and the onion whilst Kev paid for the chicken wings and some other bits, kev got a bit arsey that I only spent £4.18 on the shopping hehe (I paid a lot last time :$). Once the shopping was done we packed it all in the boot and headed off to Kazzie’s place.

Upon arriving at Kazzies we had found out that the others are still behind us all (not that far behind thankfully). We sort of went up to the door and I immediately tried opening it and lo behold, it was unlocked! Judging from inn breaking into Kazzie’s house the night before I would have thought they wouldn’t lock the door once again. It was pretty funny unpacking everything at Kazzie’s house, Inn phoned up Kazzie asking is her mum around and we discover that she was, so we had to be extra quiet in case she thought we were house ninja’s (wouldn’t want Kazzie’s mum shooting Kev with a shotgun would we?). We tried being extra silent about everything but Leon kept making a noise so I kept shushing him up haha. I then told everyone it was best for us to just leave the house with the stuff inside and lounge around outside with our brews and drink until the rest arrive. We could have stayed inside but Kazzie’s mum wasn’t feeling well and was asleep so it wasn’t a good idea to wake her up and all.

We need two bags of charcoal! (No we dont)

Before I get started on this chapter, I think it’s best to establish who’s actually attending this bbq, since theres so many people involved, I can kinda miss out characters during the entry so yeah.. here’s the people who turned up at the BBQ:

Kazzie, Inn, Popey, Kev, Stephie, Leon, Ste, Jon, Beast Bob, Lauren, Kiernan, Gem and me! Hopefully that helps for those who werent actually at the BBQ, just so you’re not surprised when people just suddenly appear haha.

After some bantering outside, the sky turned pretty dark. Kazzie and the others arrive at the scene. Was funny how we were outside drinking tea / brew and everything. Kazzie entered the building and we got right into the BBQ. The food the other people brought was immense, they tried doing the same thing with the Nando’s sauce but apparently some bottles were smashed and was replaced with a milder sauce, luckily we actually had some spare! Ste also managed to buy two crates of beer (I originally had a typo here and wrote bear, imagine two crates of bear, terrifying) for the men to drink, it was funny because the entire night i probably drank about 2-3 cans haha, there were a lot of times where I was passed a can and i just left it there unopened (ninja), I didn’t want to wake up with a massive hangover plus I was meeting up with Alice the next day at 1.30pm, had to be on my best behaviour haha.

We later on find that the propane BBQ (which I renamed Hank (King of the Hill)) couldn’t be used because Kazzie’s mum didn’t get propane that she promised Kazzie. She was also sleeping upstairs which meant we had to keep quiet. Kazzie wasn’t too pleased with the situation, but me and Inn managed to work something out, we pretty much said that we’ll buy some new coal and stuff and just use little nigel (i didnt come up with Nigel’s name, Popey did, it sucks!) for the BBQ. People (well the guys) tried sorting out the Gazebo, I actually wanted to stay and do the Gazebo too but was roped into coming with Kazzie and Inn to buy charcoal and stuff for the BBQ. Kazzie’s temper was bad here, she sort of gave up and all but we made sure that this wasn’t a flop by getting the charcoal bbq sorted. The other problem was the noise since her mum was asleep, my suggestion was to just do it at a park and bring everything. I ordered (yes ordered haha, I was on a power trip :$) people to clear up the gazebo and get prepared to move out once me Kazzie and Inn got the charcoal and all. Gem cleared up the Gazebo since all the guys were too lazy to do it.

As well as buying the charcoal I bought some additional instant bbq’s just to ensure that we have more grilling area. It was all a bit excessive in retrospect but then inn kept going on about how it’s better safe than sorry, she actually wanted to buy another bag of charcoal (thank god we didn’t) the charcoal we had (well it was more wood to be honest) was ungodly and did a pretty good job!

48 gazebo poles, 5 confused men and one inverted gazebo flap

After arriving back to Kazzie’s house, we sort of calmed kazzie down, I think Gem or Kiernan went upstairs talking to Kazzie’s mum and she was fine about everything now. We have sorted the tension in the house and was ready to get the BBQ going. Kazzie decided that we can just eat outside the garden rather then going to the park, which was a good idea since I wasn’t keen on moving things about and theres a very high chance that we’d forget something. So back to setting up the gazebo and BBQ in Kazzie’s house. I was pretty much being team leader here since noone had a clue what they were doing, I managed to order Kev, Beast Bob, Leon, Jon and Ste to start rebuilding the Gazebo again, it was pretty funny since they haven’t seen the instruction so they were just stabbing in the dark (quite literally). At one point we quickly did some Star Wars light sabre battles, where at one point it was Kev (Yoda), Me (Darth Vadar) and Popey (Luke) battling it out, though kev didn’t really have a clue what he was doing so it didn’t look like a light sabre battle so I keep telling him to hit me, “go on! hit me! hit me!”…

.. and so he did..

ouch! I get whacked in the tummy by a gazebo pole by Kev (of all peoplpe) haha. Bastard! Though I was being pretty evil with the gazebo leading. I just kept popping over at the construction site and telling them how bad of a job they’re doing and how me and Popey managed to finish it within minutes. It was really demotivating but fun at the same time haha, they finally manage to get the Gazebo sorted and were putting the flap over the Gazebo when I told Kev (it was kev’s doing) that the flap was the wrong way round haha, I told him off real good that he went to the corner bless hehe. I had to flip the gazebo flap the right way round for him before he came back from the corner bless.

What about the BBQ?

Whilst all this Gazebo drama was happening the BBQ was doing really well! The wood we bought was pretty cool and we were able to get the BBQ going very quickly, with the help of Popey’s frisby. We did a lot of fanning on the gazebo and I managed to take some nice long exposure shots of the sparks and all.

I think the first things we put were the burgers, we also had the other instant BBQ going and were cooking Yakitoris. I think Aino was cooking something else too, it was wrapped in foil so it was probably her brownies or something I dont know. Strangely it wasn’t really about the food that night though, it was strangely more about the chips and dips (and drinks). There was a lot of sitting around and crisps eating. I tried the Nando’s salsa sauce with some salted doritos and absolutely loved them hehe. Leon preferred his generic salsa shit as well as Lauren. Lauren was a bit tipsy looking throughout the night since she kept falling all over the place haha. Leon then started to have a food fight with Lauren and cover her face with Salsa and hummus, not a pleasant sight. I kept giving evils at Leon for creating such a mess at the party (which I later on had to clean up) and for smothering all the girls with salsa sauce (he even got Kiernan a ginger beard).

The BBQ was kind of left abandoned after the first batch of burgers was cooked, Popey gave up his BBQ role and people were cooking steaks and stuff (I managed to nibble a bit of steak hehe). I think around now I stopped taking photos and had to charge my camera battery using Kazzie’s charger. Inn was still snapping away! (God so many things happening at the same time).

The death of the BBQ and yakitori

The BBQ died out for a bit and then we started to make another one but this time cook the sausages and yakitoris (this is where a part of me cries inside). Since Popey had left his role, the food were just whacked on and were left to cook. Now during the Leeds weekend we learnt that shoving sausages into a BBQ was a bad idea, they’d spit like crazy and char the entire thing up! Since noone was maintaining the bbq most of the food were left burnt. I think during this time Inn was driving Kev and Stephie back home. Kev was feeling tired around midnight and wanted to go home and rest up for Saturday and all. Inn was being proper sportsmanlike and drove them back to their hotel rooms, she knew that she would also need to make another trip to drive Gem and Leon back but was cool about it.

A quick sidetrack from it all (though I’m only doing this because I was sidetracked from writing this bit, I was watching an interview with Bruce Willis about Die Hard 4.0 haha) was how kev and stephie received giant hugs from everyone. We’re talking a proper group hug, more chaotic than tellytubbies hugging. Was quite fun with kev, with stephie, since she was vertically challenged it was like we were hugging nothing haha. Inn instructed us to leave her some food from all this travelling, but since the food was all burnt we could only provide her with burnt sausages and some steak. I think the BBQ was quite a flop since people were more interesting in socialising then taking care of the BBQ, it would have been nice if the food was cooked though, I was actually starving the entire evening :(. Ho hum.

People did try eating the burnt yakitoris but it just tasted like ashes haha. The bottom piece of chicken on the stick was alright, it was the least burnt down bit of the stick haha, I couldn’t even pick up some of the sticks too! It was that bad! Leon tried clearing out some of the yakitoris by feeding it to people, again… food fight, bad form! Food is not fun! It should be eaten, not toyed around and thrown about! Before Popey talks about how if starving children want it they could come and get it, I was hungry Though to be honest it was getting pretty late/dark for anyone to bother with the food. I think that was the problem. Ho hum.

Muse singalong part 2

During the evening Kazzie got the guitars out for a singalong. I was in charge of the guitaring since kev wasn’t about and we basically sang and played the songs Kazzie could play along to, which was Time is running out and Supermassive Black Hole. We did a pretty good job I must say. I was surprised that people were actually singing during the singalong but it was pretty fun. Though take note that I couldn’t hear any bass going on, evening when it was amplified. Though it was open air i suppose, ho hum. Lauren managed to film the entire singalong on her camera and it was a great laugh, Ste tried to get me to play some Manics songs but it was pretty limited because I needed the chords with me to remember what was going on haha. The singalong was definitely better than the Trafalgar Square purely because it wasn’t just someone playing the CD really loud with some background grunts and moans, you could actually hear people singing (because it was a more smaller but live rendition). Eventually we stopped when neighbours and Kazzie’s mum were telling us to pack it in haha, it was pretty late!

Nobody won, honest

Ooh I forgot to mention Aino and Max, I think some time during the BBQ they called it a night and went off sleeping in the living room, occasionally I would wonder into the living and just give them a confused look as to why they were being antisocial in the living room (they weren’t really sleeping, just lounging around in the living room). It was pretty funny how later on they tried sleeping in the living but was interrupted to much that they just had to go upstairs and sleep in Kazzie’s room (apparently a few musers walked into Kazzie’s room to find them inside their sleeping bag, with the bag sort of ruffling about, chances are they were having sexy beast *shudders* (though Kazzie is more mortified since they were doing it in her room!)).

After a crazy night of bbq’ing we took the fun into the living room, for some wii and smash brothers action. Though the energy was getting weaker and weaker as the evening went on. We had a few games of smash brothers and wii, Inn managed to come back for some wii action and tried completing the single mode in order to get multiplayer mode going. But yeah, I think everyone was lacking the energy to play really. It all came to a halt where people just went to sleep. Oh and in case Popey thinks i’m going to hide it, we did have another smash brothers 1 on 1 battle, I didn’t take the battle too seriously but he once again gambled cupcakes for my 400d camera. The beginning was once again quite a sight, I keep whooping him and all, but near the end, I got a bit too cocky and decided to fall off the stage and lose all 4 of my lives, I was initially going to lose 3 of my lives, then mash Popey up a bit until he was definitely going to lose, but he managed to tempt me to fight him one on one with all our lives ready and all. Bad mistake. Lets say some proximity mines were thrown in my direction and I was unfortunate to die at the last life Ah well. Its still mine :p I managed to have another game where I was playing against 3 players, Popey, Jon and Kazzie I think. The beauty of this match is that I wasn’t time wasting anymore so I just got down to it and whooped all 3 of them haha. Take note it’s hard beating 3 people, you have 5 lives and you have to defeat 15 lives off your opponent, but sometimes… I just do it :p Oh some random sideplot includes Lauren breaking her camera, the lens sort of gets stuck and she’s doomed haha, thats what warranties are for

Uhm.. yeah, the wii appeal died soon after and Inn had to drive Leon and Gem back again. Kiernan accompanied Inn on the trip Inn would be going back to Kazzie’s house on her own so some company was needed (plus Kiernan wasn’t tired). It was sleep time.

I’m not sleeping outside, peanuts got a mouse

When things died down I immediately stole the duvets available since I was the one sleeping outside (initially I took inn’s one, was snatching it off Lauren and Bob but then inn said they were actually hers so I had to give it back :(). It wasn’t a pleasant place to sleep in. Last time we were playing games and partying till 4am which meant the sky was a nice light blue so it was actually easier to sleep (and I was so tired that sleep was definitely required) this time it wasn’t so late so sleeping was actually a problem. Not only that, pollution was another factor of crippling my sleep! Both the air (from the bbq) and the noise! (coming from inside! damn people chatting away). Popey was initially going to join me and sleep on the trampoline but later on he moved back inside because it was wet. So I was pretty much on my own trying to get some good nights rest on the deck chair type thing (which I only knew how to make it go down near the end). It was actually disturbingly warm and cosy! I was hot from the duvet and chair cushion, but I couldn’t sleep. I was a proper insomniac at this time, everyone else were just wannabes since they all went to sleep pretty easily haha. The mumblings and laughter soon began to die out inside and it became silent. Occasionally you would hear someone crack a joke but most of the time it was dead silent.

About an hour has passed by and I’m still wide awake outside. I couldn’t really get a comfortable position on the deck chair and it wasn’t as nice as a mattress. Suddenly I hear a loud thumping noise, it was peanut, and eek! it had a mouse in it’s mouth, beforehand I already caught it fighting with a mouse but now it’s pretty dark and I’m trying to sleep, so there’s actually a slight chance I could wake up with a dead mouse on my lap, or I could wake up at the sight of peanut holding a dead mouse in its mouth. That was a risk I wasn’t going to take, I decided that the best thing to do is to just go back inside, surrender at the godly thought of being able to sleep outside under the gazebo, it was a really good idea last time, but with the smoke and all, it really wasn’t a good idea this time.

The snoring competition

Now ninja’ing my way back into bed was fine, Popey was actually awake still so that was good (someone to talk to), I managed to find myself a little spot on the foot of the mattress that Kazzie, Beast Bob and Lauren were sleeping (ain’t Beast bob a stud haha). I think I should draw a diagram to explain the sleeping arrangements.

Popey got right cheeky and stole the essence of my deck chair (watch Friends Season 3 if you dont know what I meant about essence of a chair), which meant he technically had a mattress now so I’m sort of sleeping on the floor with no pillow listening to everyone snore. Eventually Popey did go to sleep and boy did he snore! As well as having Ste snoring right next to me, I also had Kazzie and Beast bob kicking the crap out of me (occasionally on the face) when I’m trying to sleep. So picture it, a snore fest with Ste and Popey, followed by some lovely kicking. Sleeping heaven! :/

Sooner or later I was sort of saved by Kiernan and Inn who had just came back from driving Leon and Gem back to their hotel (Leon was sleeping on the floor mwahaha). They were pretty giddy and all, Kiernan randomy just went up to Popey and started riding him, calling him seabiscuit and everything, it was hilarious. The funny thing is how we were whispering everything so it sort of added to the fun! Kiernan did it everytime she went down, just riding Popey. Not sure how to explain the whole riding thing, but basically Popey was sleeping on his back (I think) and Kiernan sort of squatted over and and assumed the horse riding position, occasionally doing some whips as well :p. Definitely made my evening haha. Once they had left it was back to the snoring again.

At one point I went upstairs to use the toilet, after leaving the toilet I noticed Kiernan and Inn were still awake so they invited me in their room for a bit to chat, I think they were having a girly talk and all and was still a bit restless so I continued talking to them for a bit, eventually I left them to go sleep, Inn said I cant wake her up before 10am haha. I knew that wasn’t going to work! But yeah I went back downstairs to suffer the snoring wars.

…it was unbearable, you really couldn’t sleep with all this snoring, it was like a battlefield, people really need to clear their sinuses before they sleep or something, it was oblivious, occasionally Ste would let out some ungodly snores that made Popey and I burst out laughing but once Popey was sleeping on his back, he started doing the same. It just went on and on. I actually got bored at one point and started to record the ungodly snoring that is Popey. Afterwards I just had enough of the snoring and went back outside to the garden.

Back outside again

Outside, it was still chilly and stuffy, the air was still polluted with smoke from the BBQ, I quickly played back Popey snoring and laughed in the comfort that noone could hear me laughing outside. The snores were funny, at first I thought each snore was followed by a high pitched whistling sound, like his sinuses were so blocked that it emitted high pitched noises whenever he breathed out, turns out it was some birds outside (dang).

Running out of places to sleep I decided to take a shot at the trampoline, although Popey said it was wet, i was sleeping under the duvet (well i was wrapped around the duvet so there was duvet sandwiching me). The trampoline was actually alright, I didn’t find it wet as Popey had claimed (I think he was just scared of sleeping outside). So I decided to actually sleep outside in the end. It was pretty funny, for once it was actually comfortable sleeping there, I did get a bit of a draft coming from below (since it’s a trampoline and not a mattress) but other than that it was fine. Draft sooner or later became more of a problem as it was coming at all directions, this required more duvet positioning to ensure that I was fully wrapped in duvet and that I was draft free, this lasted for about 30 minutes until water started to drip from the sides of the trampoline and into the centre, damnit, so this is what Popey was on about. But it was too late to complain, I really needed my sleep, so the there was more duvet positioning to ensure that I could get some sleeping. Later on it got to a point where I was actually thinking about how your body falls asleep; is it in one go or does your limbs slowly fall asleep sequentially? It was one of those moments where you start thinking all kinds of crap to occupy your brain, somehow it actually worked. I finally got some sleep.

… about 2 hours worth anyway.

The morning after (or the 2 hours after)

Yup birds are chirping away, I have had the worst amount of sleep ever (you’ll see the nasty effects in the Saturday and Sunday blog I think!). Nonetheless I don’t think I could sleep anyway, the time was 6am and I felt like getting the day started. I picked up my duvets and shoved it back into the living room. I then began picking up the mess everyone had made, nobody cleaned up last night during the BBQ because they were all too tired and wanted to leave it for the next day. Rather then waiting for them all to wake up and clean the mess I decided to just clean the place up straight away so theres more time and all. It was a painful job, in particular picking up dorito’s on the floor that Leon had spilt. This was why I was a bit grumpy with Leon! The mess he made, so many stuff I found on the floor could have been traced back to Leon; the burnt Yakitori’s, the soft soggy dorito’s found on the place that was meant to store kindling, the salsa sauce still unopened with insects crawling in it and random bits of sausage. Food fights are not cool! (they’re cool if someone else does the cleaning I suppose). There were other bits of cleaning too including picking up beer cans and draining them out, draining random unidentified liquids (hopefully not body fluids) in glasses, throwing away ungodly amounts of food, and picking up all the beer cans that weren’t actually opened (my ones!).

Soon everyone was nice and clean, I forgot to mention that during the night I randomly woke up and went “THE YAKITORI’s”, frantically heading out to the garden to save the other box of yakitori by shoving it in the freezer haha (I didnt care about the rest). I was all dirty and messy from all the cleaning so I decided I needed a bath. I quickly walked up to Kazzie (still half asleep) and assassinated her. Haha, no wait, I didnt, I just gave her prod and asked her to use the bath, I said “could I use the bathroom to take a bath?” “an ungodly bath”, she just nodded away and said “yes”, to be honest, she would have said yes to anything. I think that was probably the time where I should of asked if I could have her L series lens, I could even record it on my phone as evidence (ooh thats a new plan!). I had my bath and wrote on the mirror “Oh yeah! I just had an ungodly bath” onto the condensation. I think a few people saw it.

Afterwards it was a case of lounging about, drinking tea and waiting for the others to slowly wake up. It was funny to watch people sort of wake up and go back to sleep again. Kazzie’s mum got up quite early and saw me downstairs and said do i even sleep at all? It was pretty hectic of me to just wake up at such an ungodly hour, so I told her I did get my sleep but she didn’t believe me that I had much (which was true). Banter was minimal so I just lounged around in the garden some more. Slowly but surely people began to wake up, it was a new day for all, and a new adventure awaits…

Saturday will be filled with random french people, abandoning people for nando’s, meeting an ungodly amount of people at weatherspoons, seeing the streets trying to get the crowd to say radio ga ga about 7 times, watch muse perform, and finding/losing kazzie about 7-8 times after a stamped of muse fans head back home.

Friday 5pm The photography, tin man and pirate

Before the BBQ event (which was on Saturday), me Inn and Kazzie were going to meet up and all and just do something relaxing before the big BBQ, Inn was taking the train down to London and so I thought I’d meet her at 7pm when her train arrives, Kazzie had to do some cleaning up for the event to ensure that everything was nice and tidy.

Living in London, I didn’t have much trouble preparing or anything, I just treated it as a normal day and had my usual lunch at 3pm odd, but instead of heading home I decided to just lounge around central London until Inn arrived, I picked Covent Garden as my lounging destination since I haven’t been there in ages and I wanted to check out Cyber Candy which sold import candy and cereal stuff.

Upon arriving I took photos of random street performers as well as a weird selection of people sitting on a bench which consisted of a photographer, a tin man, and a pirate (well he wasnt a pirate but I insist on calling him one anyway for blog entry marketing purposes). There was also a guy called “Reno” (not really but I like giving people names to make it easier to remember) who did some random ball act. I’ve seen it quite alot of times before so I wasn’t too amazed but I took photos of him anyway.

Afterwards I was off to find Cyber Candy. I was disturbingly lost! It was pretty annoying, however I did manage to find a Tin Tin Shop! Was pretty chuffed about it and all, Alice was a big fan of Tintin so I thought she’d love the photo of the shop and all. I got quite a lot of dirty looks but thats what you get when you become a photographer haha.

I kinda gave up on finding cyber candy, judging by the time I had left it would have been closed if I had found it anyway so I just headed to Forbidden Planet to look at figurines, it wasn’t particularly interesting, I wanted to get some studio ghibli figurines but turns out they didnt have any :(. Ho hum. The day was getting quite shabby due to the lack of things I was getting haha!

I found out today was Malaysia Week, there were a lot of stalls open which demonstrated a lot of Malaysian culture. One in particular was a stage showing Malaysian fashion. It was a cat walk in which they talked about the interesting clothes worn in Malaysia, I just jumped at the opportunity and took photos of the event. Since it was a public event I was able to stand right in front to take the photos, it was quite fun I must say. I had free models and everything hehe.

It was funny texting people and telling them that I was at a fashion show, think I confused a lot of people during that hour. Inn had texted me saying her train was cancelled and that she had to take the train after that which meant I had to meet her at 7.30pm instead. So I was just taking photos of the event until it was time to leave, once the fashion show was over they were preparing a Malaysian wedding, they had the chairs all set up but I wasn’t able to watch the ceremony due to time restrictions.

Friday 7.30pm Train Pirates

Upon arriving at Kings Cross station, I got a bit bored and got myself some water to drink, it was a bit humid today and the trains were ungodly to travel in. I arrived slightly early than planned so it was a matter of finding things to do, wasn’t too long though till Inn rang me up telling me she had arrived. I picked her up and we went to Euston Station to take the train directly to Watford Junction. I initially thought it was ok for us to use the Oyster card to get to Watford Junction but it turns out later on that I was wrong haha (crippled me a bit with a £5 fine and all!)

Anyway, the train journey was cool, there wasn’t any seats left so me and Inn just sat on the floor, occasionally we would get trains coming from the opposite direction at rediculous speeds which would scare us or wreck our ears haha, it’s funny how everyone was used to it and didn’t flinch at all when the trains went passed. There were a lot of delays, I told inn that perhaps the train ahead of us was being hijacked by train pirates which caused the delay, I even did the ubiquitous ARGH voices to ensure realism of the scenario haha.

Friday 8.20pm “We have a KFC?”

Upon meeting up with Kazzie at Watford Junction, we immediately got in the car and drove around Watford in search for food. The list Kazzie suggested wasn’t too pleasing, we had to choose between Chiquitas, KFC or MacDonalds. Personally I wouldn’t mind having a bit of dirty dirty KFC but Inn wanted some decent food which left us pretty stuck on what to get. Eventually we drove up to a TGI Friday restaurant for food, however there was a 30 minute wait so we drove off in search for food once again. We then saw a Harvester and suggested we went there since it was better than the rest, I kept singing “ooooh when will there be a harvest, for the wooooorld” when we were close to the place, and later on we also find out that there was a Frankies and Bennys close by! We were shocked that Kazzie didnt mention them! We decided to head to Frankies and Bennys since it was close to the bowling alley which we were going to go to afterwards.

Upon arriving at Frankies and Bennys I immediately knew what I was going to eat, I remember when Michelle kept mentioning how she’d have Spaghetti whenever she went there and she liked it, so I decided to try it out, I was initially going to get the Meatball Spaghetti but they ran out of them, I even did the accent when I was ordering but I think they didn’t appreciate it haha. Kazzie got ribs and a quarter of a chicken served with chips, Inn initially was going to get a BBQ chicken lasagne but then decided that Mushroom lasagne was a better choice.

The restaurant was funny, they served things in disturbingly large trays and all, the drinks were a bit funny too, Inn described them as a liquid version of chewits, they tasted a bit mank to be honest haha. We did the typical thing of taking photos of each other and the food when it arrived.

I wasn’t too happy with my food, it tasted like something you’d eat in a school canteen, nothing like my Lloyd Grossman spaghetti which I enjoy making and consuming. Everyone else seemed chuffed with there food. I ate my food swiftly and was still hungry, Kazzie couldn’t eat any more and gave me some of her ribs whilst Inn also treated me to some of her Potato Skins (which was alright). The problem with the food was that it became pretty boring when you ate it, with places like GBK and Nando’s your tastebuds were always filled with something new which made the food nice. With this place it was rather bland and monotonous. The bill wasn’t too good as well, I had spent £9 for a rather sub par meal, the entire bill was about £40, with that kind of money we could have bought 4 family feasts (I remember a time where I constantly converted money into the amount of family feasts you could purchase with it).

It seems like no restaurant visit was complete without my banging on the table. I remember randomly doing and everyone was dead silent looking at me afterwards, it was quite embarrassing but funny at the same time haha. The waiters were also a bit too flirty for my likings too, he mentioned something about carrying Kazzie and Inn in his massive tray (tray not being an innuendo for penis before you think about it)

Friday 9pm Teh Kazzie, Jesus and God

We left the place and stole a balloon since the food was rubbish, some chav kids went “oi that’s illegal when we did so” inn hesitated for a bit but we still managed to leave with it, until some random kid said that the balloon belonged to his grand childs birthday (yes he has a grand child). Inn just surrendered the balloon since it wasn’t really worth squabbling over, though I felt she could of outwitted him with the obvious “what’s his name, how old is he, what year was he born, WHAT IS HIS FUCKING LOGICAL INTERVENTION”. But yeah, by surrendering the balloon the kid went all smug for lying about something pathetic in order to get a balloon. Ho hum

Bowling was shambolic, for me and Inn anyway, we weren’t too good at it, I myself have my good and bad times at bowling, Inn wanted to have bumpers in the lanes but I insisted that it remained a mans game haha. We picked our name on the interface, I called myself “Jesus” for comedy purposes, Inn called herself “God” whilst kazzie just called herself “Teh Kazzie”

We had quite a fun night, though most of our bowls were gutters it was still nonetheless fun, Kazzie did alright since she played it quite a lot beforehand and all. I just made a lot of over dramatic moves to compensate on the shit bowling haha. Inn didn’t do too well to begin with when she kept bowling gutter balls and eventually building up to hitting one pin hehe.

At the end the results were in, Kazzie won the game with me coming in second and inn last. We got our shoes back (was funny how they only took one shoe instead of both) and decided to really jazz things up with some DDR action. Twas only a quick go but I kept it simple and focused more on doing flash dancing (ie making it look fun). Most of the time I was able to spin around the dance mat and do steps without actually looking at it haha.

There was a Stacker machine there too which I was very tempted in playing but gave it a pass since they didnt have DS Lites as the prize (just ipods).

Friday 10pm Inn the pyromaniac

We went back to Kazzie’s place to have a nice lounge about, we literally did nothing but talk outside in the garden. Was a very chilled out moment that you’d hardly see in Muse meetups. Kazzie had a chimnea in her garden which we could burn stuff in, inn got well addicted to getting stuff burning, I just sat around and watched them do the burning. We didn’t even have fancy drinks, just drank tap water and talked all night. Not much to say to be honest… I could go on about the chimnea but that’s just boring haha. We eventually headed off to bed and awaited a crazy day sushi eating and BBQ’ing

Saturday 10am “I just had 11 microsleeps”

I’m really bad in the mornings, I’m used to sleeping in the dark so when the sunlight comes, I don’t notice a thing, this was mainly due to my bed being a bunk bed for quite some time (noone sleeps at the top) but ever since I’ve had the top bunk removed, I got an ungodly amount of sunlight which meant I actually wake up from the sun! I never knew how responsive I am to the sun, it’s good I guess because I can wake up naturally via the sunlight, but the problem is I don’t want to wake up. This is where microsleeping comes into play. I’m simply wake up, know that everyone is asleep still and just fall back into bed again haha. I woke up at around 6am I think, noticed it was an ungodly time and went back to sleep, and it almost became a 30 minute thing where I’d wake up again from the sunlight and fall back to sleep, nearer the end Inn was actually awake from all the waking up I was doing, so I tell her I had x amount of microsleeps. It got ridiculous when my count ended up to 11 microsleeps! I was literally waking up and sleeping for 10 minutes before waking up again! Inn kept complaining that I snore, but it wasn’t the oblivious type of snoring you get so I dont care, my golden line is still “i sleep like a goddess when in foetal position” and most of the time I’m forced to sleep on my back.

We woke up properly at 10am when Kazzie popped by and brought peanut the cat over (I’m only relying on timestamps on photos to guess the time haha). After much peanut playing (kazzie was using a goldfish tied to a stick) we decided to get ready and drive to central London for some food. During the journey we get close to a megabus, twas pretty disturbing for me Kazzie intentionally drove up close to it to really take the piss *shakes head* We eventually arrive at Brent Cross where we remember where we parked (Level 2 block C) and headed to Brent Cross tube station, we popped by a Krispy Kreme and Apple Centre in the shopping centre too, inn had never tried Krispy Kremes so we showed her the godlyness of it and all, she enjoyed it, Popey loved Krispy Kremes too so we managed to rub it in his face that we had some, the next best bit was when we went to Yo Sushi in Victoria Station to have our lunch.

2pm The green tea thieves

This was inn and kazzie’s first time at Yo Sushi, I had a disturbingly lovely meal at Yo Sushi with Jason so I was nice and prepared on what I should be getting to eat this time. We didn’t really get into the conveyor belt action this time since the food there wasn’t too good (or fresh) we ordered our food multiple times which was fun. I got myself some prawn yakisoba action as well as some prawn tempura to eat whilst inn ordered some sweet potato tempura. Kazzie was scared about almost everything, she wasn’t a fan of fish so sushi was definitely a no no for her, I eventually persuaded her to have some chicken dishes including firecracker chicken rice and chicken yakitori (Jason kept going on about it so I thought it would be fun to see it in action). Quite a lot of conveyor belt photos were taken, not to mention our food haha.

Everyone was loving their food, we tried each others food which was cool so we had an idea of what other stuff tasted like, I loved chicken yakitori so much I actually ordered another one haha, the waiters gave us a chicken yakisoba instead of yakitori by mistake for Kazzie, however inn was going to order that anyway so she decided to have it, then it was sushi time, felt a bit wrong if we just ate the hot stuff and not venture into some sushi, I got myself a salmon nigiri and inn got herself an assorted mix of nigiri and maki rolls. The sushi today was particularly fresh! The salmon was so soft that it melted into your mouth haha, Inn was very pleased at the quality of sushi.

Kazzie was enjoying the entire visit, she was trying out a lot of new stuff, including chopsticks, yakitori and most importantly…sushi! We managed to persuade her to have some cucumber maki roll, it wasn’t really fish so she should be ok. Here’s her attempting it…

Bless her, twas simply too much! I think its more in the mind than the fact that it was not edible, I mean she was eating rice prior to this and she was cool, I guess its the nori that freaked her out, or maybe the fact that I added wasabi in it haha (who knows :P). What I don’t get is that why people think nori is bad, you can hardly taste it, its just there to wrap things up and all, it doesnt really add to the taste or anything. I eventually made her eat everything.

Near the end I made faces with my food hehe. Was fun, the table really helped the photos unlike the one at Picadilly.

Kazzie did some pretty silly stuff at Yo Sushi, she even went into the men’s toilet by accident silly her haha! Inn kept drinking my damn green tea, she initially said how she didn’t like it, but eventually had a sip of mine, she definiteily liked it, whenever I looked the opposite direction from my tea she’s quickly get a sip of my damn tea! She did this quite a lot times, then Kazzie wanted to see what all the fuss was about so she started drinking my green tea too! Then it got to a point where it was either kazzie or inn stealing my green tea, I didn’t get my peace I had to constantly get refills from the waitress for them to drink it all up, Kazzie drinks quite a lot in one go too which meant I had to pester the people so many times. Even when i went to the toilet they actually got the waitress to refill my cup so they could drink from it!!! Grrr. We paid our bill after countless amounts of green tea consumage, I help paid for some of inn’s bill since I owe her money for lying about the price for Gem’s present (I swear I didn’t even get the money for it!). We were going to meet up with Popey at around 5 odd so we headed off to Camden Town for some shopping (well Inn and Kazzie wanted to shop anyway). We took a little detour and bought some additional krispy kremes too!

Saturday 4.30pm The Jamaican hat and booby apron

Shopping at Camden was a weird and also stupid experience, it was alright but you need to remember how much I loathe Camden Town for its worn out “alternative” feel. It was the home of little shits (emo, goth and the sub human categories) where they are able to buy identity kits. Speaking of which, Kazzie wanted to buy a spikey belt, wristband and some T shirts with whimsical sayings haha. And yes I did lecture her about it.

During one of the stall visits we found some aprons we could buy! Inn was supposed to buy one for the event but didn’t really have the time to buy one so today was a good opportunity to buy one for Popey to wear, we happened to stumble across one that has boobs attached to it and decided that we HAD to get it, it was only £6 so it was definitely a well spent investment and all.

At some random point I decided to put on a rastafarian hat and pretend I was Jamaican haha. Inn immediately took photos haha, there were also points where I tried on top hats but inn was far too slow to take photos before the guy said no photography allowed (well she was oblivious to the fact that the guy said it and only stopped when Kazzie told her not to).

We eventually met up with Popey, hiding the apron from his sight and then telling him that we bought him a Krispy Kreme but eventually I ate it which is why I only have a paper bag without the doughnuts, truth is Inn had it in her bag and all just to trick him, was quite fun. Popey made sure that he was getting the most out of the doughnut by sniffing it for a bit haha (I did that too but after eating it, it smelt so nice!).

We did some more browsing, me and Popey bought some freshly squeezed orange juice and went to Cyberdog to look around at crazy stuff. Everything was far too expensive for our likings though so we didn’t really buy much, we event went to that goth shop where inn wanted to buy some clothes. Actually it got to the point where inn kept stopping at shops which made us have to hang around and wait for her haha (Dont worry, I get my own back at the Apple Centre). After some hard shopping we went back to Brent Cross to get this BBQ thing started!

Saturday 6pm: Jamming at the mac store and 20 yakitoris

Once we were around Brent Cross I decided to stop at the Apple Centre JUST so we could play the fat man song. I was instantly recognised from my previous visit and they made me get on the keyboard to jam around haha! I suddenly was crowded around with loads of Apple Centre staff people listening to me play stuff, I did quite a lot of tracks including tetris (which people thought was “some russian song”), phantom of the opera (which was thought to be “some scary organ track”) and mario which someone actually knew what it was (though they thought the underground tune was the boss tune so they didn’t do their home work!) . The reason why people made such silly guesses? Well the songs they requested were…”some R’n’b tunes” and “Beethovens 5th”. The latter I can explain a bit more, I asked them “how does that go” and they said “I dont know” with a blank shrug. Bloody retarded chavy staff! I was hoping the more sophisticated types working at Apple Centre, not some retards who had no idea what quality songs I was playing! Popey Kazzie and Inn sort of stopped crowding around me and went on the Muse board whilst I was generating the crowd so sooner or later I decided it was time to leave (well to be honest I only left because someone turned down the volume when I was playing some pretty intense synth leads haha).

Our next trip was to Tesco’s to buy the BBQ stuff, me and Inn immediately knew what we wanted; quality quarter pounder burgers, chicken wings, onions and peppers, sausages and bacon, bread, breakfast stuff, tropicana, cloudy lemonade and cheese. Some additions included beer for the men (haha), steak for inn and Popey (they wanted to go all out with their steak and all), waffles for breakfast, some nando’s marinade and extra hot sauce since we had to buy raw chicken wings instead of ready to eat ones. Our most important purchase was the 20 sweet chill chicken kebabs, which we immediately called “Yakitoris” haha. This food was for the evening and the morning. Instead of working out bill splittings etc I just purchased the food with my card and asked everyone to pay later on (too much dilly dallying if they had done the splitting there) there were a few individual purchases so they were paid separately, including Popey and Inn’s steak and Popey’s 42p cupcakes which he was going to wager for my Canon 400d camera!

Popey refused to sort the food into the back so Inn shoved everything on Popey’s side (looks pretty silly) and we were off! We had gazebo’s to build and BBQ’s to make! During the car journey we took some nice photos including some car mirror shots, a shot of some random lonely tree and the “The NORTH” sign.

Saturday 8pm: Gazebo building, BBQ making and Smash Brother battles

Once we arrived back at Kazzies we instantly unloaded our food and took a photo of how much food we bought for the day, we then started having a go on the trampoline and began building the gazebo, me and Popey were in charge of doing it whilst inn just watched and took photos (don’t worry she gets a shitty job of cleaning the BBQ grills later on). It wasn’t too hard to follow. Most of the time when we were connecting the poles together we started battling out on them as if they were light sabres, we joked at how the instructions told you to test the durability of the poles by engaging in a light sabre battle with a friend and strictly telling you that you needed to make the sounds and everything in order for it to be a proper light sabre battle. Sooner or later our gazebo was built, it was a pretty big gazebo and we were really proud that our whimsical dream has actually became reality. Was surreal but satisfying at the same time.

I took some random helicopter shots which turned out pretty well, I basically made Kazzie look like a helicopter every time she jumped on the trampoline and made her do it at all angles, what we got was a spinning Kazzie that looked like she was flying from her helicopter spins haha.

Kazzie couldn’t find the charcoal I purchased last time we visited her house so it meant Popey and her had to quickly nip down and get it, me and Inn stayed to finish off cleaning the BBQ grills and to marinade the chicken wings. I wanted to use a meat cleaver to do this since I was literally cutting through bones and all but Kazzie didnt have it so it was a case of slowly cutting the bones with a normal knife. I used quite a lot of nando’s hot marinade as well as some extra hot peri peri sauce that I kept from the last bbq and some BBQ sauce just to add a bit more texture to the mix. The problem with marinading stuff is that you should really leave things over night since the stuff needs to get into the meat in order to taste anything inside the wings, but time wasn’t our friend so we had to make do with a quick marinade.

Popey and Kazzie arrived with the charcoal, we were ready to rock! We had loads of fire lighters this time so we were well prepared in ensuring that the BBQ would work this time. We eventually showed the apron to Popey and he was well chuffed at it, one of the funniest lines he said was “why does she have stumpy legs?”, not realising they were suspenders haha. The BBQ looked pretty good at this moment so we thought we’d just leave it and have our battle on Smash Brothers where my £500 Canon 400d camera and stu’s 42p cupcakes were on the line as wagers. The rules were simple, 5 lives, medium occurrence items, and Hyrule Temple. We picked our favorite characters (Me ness, Popey pikachu) and we battled…

The results were horrific, I thought Popey would have actually improved but I the moves were similar to the previous time we played, i was able to baseball bat him all over the place and dodge his lightening attacks, things were so much easier when you’re playing against one person so no doubt it was an easy victory for me. I was taunting him throughout the game by constantly falling off the screen and losing a life, the results were 5 ko’s (me KO’ing Popey) and 4 suicide deaths (me falling for the sake of taunting). So yeah, it was a pretty non intense game in which I defeated Popey :p haha, however to be fair he did make me worry that I wasn’t going to be able to defeat him this time and I had to actually hand him my camera so fair play on that!

Saturday 9:30pm The second BBQ

After the lovely victory we started our bbq and whacked on some cheap “ultimate” burgers from the frozen section of Tescos. It was always wise to shove in the shit food first and all haha. We also whacked on some yakitoris since they didn’t take too long too cook, the result was some crazy flames spewing out of the BBQ, I personally liked a bit of flame anyway, adds the texture and all. We eventually toasted with our nicely cooked burgers and continued to make some more burgers as well as eating yakitoris along the way. The yakitoris were godly! They actually tasted better than the ones at yo sushi (I confirm this at a later date), the funniest thing was that everytime we had a yakitori we should shout “yakitori” and someone would shout back “yakitori”. Twas quite funny, and similiar to earlier on when we hi5’d everytime we mentioned “yo sushi!” haha (just to piss Popey off since he loved it but didn’t get any).

We later on shoved the angus burgers into the BBQ as well as the rest of the yakitoris, the problem however was that the flames were beginning to die off. So once the food was cooked we decided that we needed more coal and heat. What does this mean? we had a SECOND BBQ (we did haha), not a separate one, just a new one with new coal and everything. This time we cooked the chicken wings, ribs, steaks and sausages.

The chicken wings were godly! I had once again done an awesome job in making some awesome hot and spicey chicken wings for me and Popey to eat, Inn couldn’t eat it due to her loss of spicey tolerance and kazzie had some chicken wings that didn’t have marinade on them. They were just godly!

Inn and Popey then shoved their steaks onto the BBQ and battled it out on who can have the rarest steak. Inn won by a long shot haha, I managed to have a little piece of steak that came off Popey’s piece haha, it tasted pretty awesome, though I didn’t really want to eat an entire steak myself since I was saving up for yakitoris as well as my chicken wings. The food and company was all good. We started putting streaky bacon into the BBQ too, I immediately thought of the idea of wrapping them with the sausages! It was a grand idea, bacon worked so well in BBQs I must say! We managed to do some guitar jamming during the evening too and sang along to some muse songs, I did do a few other songs but people had no idea of the lyrics, it was like they only knew Muse haha.

The rest of the evening was spent chilling, relaxing and talking. We continued our talks back to the living room and played some more smash brothers as well as wii. We went back to the whole me vs everyone battles on Smash Brothers since I was able to occasionally beat them at it, and it was only fair for me to play handicapped, it meant that instead of killing 5 pikachus, I had to kill 5 pikachus, 5 kirbys and 5 pichus. It was tedious! They’re whoop me at times but when I won I had my victory dance of defeating 3 people ganging up on me hehe.

Afterwards we played some wii tennis and bowling. Tennis was fun since people were just lying there and playing it rather than standing up and assuming the tennis position. Inn kept getting in the losing team which was funny haha, though she said her batteries were dying and all. Wii bowling was fun but Kazzie won again (damn her and her bowling haha). You got to love wii sports since its not about gaming skills anymore. It was around 4am that we were playing wii, Kazzie’s mum was a bit ill and was in bed all the time, she wasn’t too happy with the noises we were making during our battles, she’d text kazzie telling us to turn down the volume and all. Near the end when we got into bed Popey made a joke about farting in Kazzie’s face and everyone started to burst out laughing, inn in particular it was quite contiguous, Kazzie’s mum sent another text to Kazzie saying that was enough and that we should go sleep!

Later on that evening it got a bit hot so someone suggested in going outside and sleeping under the gazebo, Popey said no but I thought the idea was grand and decided to venture outside and sleep outside, it was a lovely warm evening so sleeping outside was alright. Then Popey and Kazzie followed with the idea haha, Popey however decided to sleep on the trampoline haha, Kazzie slept under the Gazebo too but later on the evening went back to sleep inside with inn! Meh! We soon settled in and got some sleep!

Sunday 6am: The 8am BBQ Breakfast

Like I mentioned before, I was pretty sensitive to light so I’d be awake in an instant when sunlight came shining onto my eyes, so around 6am I started to wake up, I felt like I couldn’t get any further sleep so I decided to pack up, and get ready for the day, I got changed, brushed my teeth and even went on the board. It was around 7am that Popey decided to wake up too, I told him we should get the BBQ started now for our breakfast since Inn had to catch her train back at 2.52pm. So eventually quietly got the BBQ set up and ready to go. We had a nice chat and drank some orange juice (I think Popey drank Lucozade haha). Popey began borrowing my camera and took some photos of stuff that morning too, once the BBQ was ready we started cooking the Sausages, once that was semi ready it was about 8am, we decided to wake people up… BAD IDEA…

Kazzie was sleeping like a log but inn was a light sleeper so she woke up pretty easily, we told her that we have breakfast ready but she told us to fuck off for waking her up at that kind of time haha. I wasn’t too bothered so we just let them have their sleep and continued to cook the food (since it would still take some time to cook). The sausages were nicely done around 8.30am but the heat was dying AGAIN! So yes, we had ANOTHER BBQ to cook the bacon and remaining sausages, we shoved the other sausages in the oven and let it warm up there.

It was around 9.30am where the food was ready where we decided to just make our (me and Popey) food first and let the girls either cook their food or something. I cooked the baked beans but used quite a high heat and resulted in some quite mushy beans haha. Popey kept whacking the beans back into the pot because he liked doing that to food (a bit Oliver Twist esque if that makes sense) . Eventually me and Popey had our food ready and ate it outside under the gazebo. It was a lovely BBQ breakfast, the orange juice in particular really gave the thing a kick.

Once we finished eating it was around 10am, we began cooking the other meats and decided to wake everyone up again, but once again inn wasn’t too pleased, she was still in a grumpy mood and said why did we cook the food haha, I think she was still oblivious to the fact that we decided to cook the breakfast in advance so everyone could enjoy a lovely breakfast as soon as they woke up. I guess you can understand that working people do need their sleep and all so I wasn’t too bothered about letting them getting more sleep and all. Me and popey were bored so we went on the muse board to look at the stuff, I left the meats to cook and put the stuff around the edges so it would cook slowly. In kazzie’s room I managed to do some CSS editing on stu’s blog since I didn’t like his sidebar link hovers haha. We then decided to play some New Super Mario Brothers. I got my DS lite out and found Kazzie’s DS Lite hanging around in the kitchen. I also took random photos of lamps and cupcakes, one in particular was a tribute to alice’s lamp pic:

It was a fun game since anyone could win at it, in this case Popey beat me ah well, I can’t win at everything. Kazzie woke up later on and got nice and tucked in with the food, her mum later on appeared and she had some of our breakfast food too. Kazzie enjoyed it quite a lot and waste grateful that we made it in advance. Inn was still asleep bless hehe. Around the time Kazzie finished her breakfast and was battling Popey at Mario, inn arrived and told how she didnt like being woken up at 8am, I told her that I woke up at 6am and just wanted to get the day started properly. She then went to take a bath or shower and said she’ll forgive us if we prepare her breakfast, since we were in the wrong a bit for waking her up at 8am (though we didn’t really set a time to wake up) I decided to make the meal for her (though most of it was ready anyway).

The bacon was extra extra crispy since we left it out for so long, I really should of left mine on the BBQ too

We went nuts on smash brothers again, this time I decided to make the damage ratio x2 which meant one hit can send someone flying to hell haha. Popey loved the new rule since he could occasionally beat me, Kazzie and Inn joined in and things got pretty intense, it was quite a challenge beating 3 people ganging up on you Sometimes I would win sometimes i didn’t however the last battle I managed to beat all 3 of them and left it like that.

We then tidied up and put the gazebo down. It was time to leave so kazzie drove us back to Watford Junction where we bought our tickets and went back home. Inn paniced a bit near the end since her train departed at 2.52pm and the train we took to Euston arrived at 2:44pm, she eventually missed the train however managed to get on the next one and avoid having to pay extra since the person just stamped it and didn’t notice the time. I had my lunch and went to my local Caffe Nero to chill out before going back home, was lovely :).

That was about it, I’m dreading silly for Wembley, so many people this time!