things didn't get off to a super smooth start for me, my tube was running late and i was panicking all the way to victoria (what should have been a 35 minute journey took almost an hour, and my coach was set to leave at 8:30am) but thankfully i got there with a fair amount of time to spare, only to be met with the information that my coach was delayed and they don't know how long by... great! eventually the coach comes along and off we go on a relatively uneventful drive to manchester, arriving only an hour or so late in the end.
i met marnie at the coach station as she'd come down from glasgow on the bus too and we headed to the o2 apollo, via taco bell of course.
after eating we grabbed a taxi and by the time we arrived at the venue it was around 3pm and honestly we were expecting a pretty large queue, but there were 3 people ahead of us in the o2 priority queue and only 4 or 5 in the general admission queue... yay! a couple of hours later we were joined by karis and hannah, and steph phoned me to say she was gonna come along too we just had to pick up her ticket from the person who was selling one on twitter. she picked me up from the venue and i went with her (they were in the travelodge just down the way from the venue, we stay there all the time when mcfly play at the apollo so i knew where it was) we got the ticket, parked up and rejoined the queue. it was my instax camera's first outing too, so we took cute selfies!
eventually 7pm rolls around, the doors open and it's all systems go (sun hasn't died...) and we're running through the venue. i bagsy our prime spot on the barrier, to the best of my memory at least - it'd been 7 months since we saw them! seems like it was spot on though because:
the gig itself was incredible. atlas genius supported and they were pretty good! it still baffles us to this day that ryan remembered who we were from 7 months ago back in april but we're so, so thankful that he did! they did a beautiful rendition of U2's with or without you which almost left me in tears, haha.
photos by lucy jayne photo
after the show we said bye to steph and went to wait around by the stage door since we had 8 hours to kill until our 7am coach to glasgow... i tweeted ryan asking if he would be coming out to say hello and he replied saying 'give me five mins' - the next thing we know he's outside and looking for us! everyone is stood behind these barriers in this cattle pen type thing but we were just in the road talking to ryan. i was wearing my fluffy wolf/bear hat and he asked if i was warm enough, haha. we told him we were gonna be coming to glasgow, leeds and london. he asked if we had all our tickets sorted out because of what happened back in april when we missed out on london tickets so we said yes except for the other two brixton dates but we'll sort something out, then we mentioned how we've got 7 hours to kill until the coach so we're going to sit in the mcdonalds down the road, haha. he was so concerned and told us he'll try and arrange something to get us in earlier at the other shows if he could. so, so sweet! like he had no reason to do that? then some girl in the crowd asked if she could do that too and it just got real awkward reaaaal quick. ryan said his goodbyes and that he'd see us tomorrow then headed back inside, telling the other fans that the guys would be out soon. we went to sit on a bench along the wall before someone came up and asked 'was that the keyboardist? how do you know him?' which was kinda odd.
we were minding our own business not really paying any attention to the crowd, then suddenly there's some commotion so we turn around and see some people holding stuff in the air. turns out dan and wayne had come out, they stopped for quick photos and signed some stuff but couldn't stay out too long as they had a lot of shows ahead of them and couldn't risk getting sick.
after that we headed to mcdonalds because we were cold and needed food, drink and a seat. we charged our phones, ate all the food, drank all the drinks and surprisingly lasted til 5:30am without getting kicked out.
thanks for that, ryan!
we headed to the coach station for our 7am megabus to glasgow but totally mistimed everything and ended up having to wait there for an hour and a half and it was beyond cold! it felt like an eternity had passed but we eventually got onboard and were on the way to glasgow. yay!
five hours later...
love,
the wolfpack
xo
