As luck would have it all was not lost on Saturday in that I unexpectedly managed to see a fair proportion of Live8....thank the Lord for overruns, Harvey Goldsmith and the BBC production team may well have not been pleased from a professional or logistical point of view but I sure was.
I arrived at work on Saturday with a plan in mind to secure for myself the day off and watch Live8, or at least part of it. My plan failed dismally. I attempted to appeal to my boss' conscience and better nature with a small bribe, that if he allowed me to return home I would donate £100 to an appropriate charity and supply him with the proof....but he was having none of it. No comment!
Plan two, make an appeal to have the television in the canteen turned on for our lunch breaks....no go, apparently we don't hold a licence. Plan three, the radio, again no go, again no licence. My plans were all foiled and I set about my days work in abject disgruntlement!
The day passed slowly, I listened in my car during my lunch break and then finally at 20.30 hrs escaped to catch what I imagined would be the final half hour.
My drive home was unpleasantly eventful when I experienced what to date has been my very closest 'near miss' on the road traffic accident front....some damn fool boy racer took a badbendn seriously too fast, 'lost it' and came heading straight for me, joint impact speed would have been approx. 120mph and I had nowhere to go! It was one of 'those' moments, I braced myself, everything began happening in slow motion, it felt like an age but was only a second or two, I braked as hard as I could, swung my car as hard left as I could..... and still we remained almost head on. This was it, no more I could do, I felt the adrenaline flood my body, heard Joss Stone in the background and then with only a nano second to spare boy racer miraculously veered out of my path. In my rear view mirror I saw him swerve a few times more before regaining control. All thoughts of Live 8 temporarily left my mind!!
I am, as a rule, not easy to shake up, I have spent my life on massive motorbikes but this really shook me up. My heart was almost jumping out of my chest, my breathing was in panic mode and struggling, I was only maybe two minutes from home but I parked up on the side of the road, put my head on the wheel and heard someone shout 'fuck' at the top of their voice....it took a second or two to realise it was my voice and thankfully I had no witnesses for they may well have thought I was just losing the plot sat in the middle of nowhere shouting obscenitiess!
Trauma over, I gather my wits and drove the short way home where things suddenly improved dramatically as I discovered that Live8 was running by then, over two hours behind schedule. Yayyyy, sorry Harvey but you made my day.
I settled down, well I say 'settled' that is probably not quite the correct term for I spent the next however many hours,surroundd sound on, bass up, volume way above normally acceptable levels, dancing and singing along at the top of my horribly out of tune voice! Well, I figured, I only have one neighbour right now, he makes a fair bit of noise at the best of times and he could 'live with it' just for one evening. I expected a knock on the door, I was prepared to apologise and turn it down but it never came and I rocked until it really was too late to be causing a disturbance!
In the end I got to see almost all of the acts I had really wanted to, I didn't need a ticket, I was there, my body may have been in Scotland but my head was in Hyde Park. It was awesome stuff, Pink Floyd and The Who 'doing their thing' again after so many years was just incredible, yup I was back there in the 70's in an instant. Stevie Wonder as ever, stunning, Macca may not any longer be the 'Fab 4' but remains a 'Fab 1' and love him or hate him Robbie just ROCKS!!!
"What a night, what a day" ~ Geldof. 2.7.5
Tony Blair, George Bush, Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder, Vladimir Putin, Junichiro Koizumi, Silvio Berlusconi, Paul Martin, were you listening?
"Over to you" ~ Geldof. 2.7.5
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