A meticulously planned sequence of events designed to allow me to get to The Feeling gig on time last night (despite being booked on the 6:30pm flight from Gatwick to Glasgow) had one major flaw. Before setting off on my travels earlier in the week, I decided to do something completely alien to me, planning: I intentionally stuffed everything I needed for my short trip into my laptop bag so I wouldn’t have to check any baggage. Granted, I did have to compromise on some essentials due to the 100ml rule… like deoderant… but who wants to smell good all the time anyway? I checked in online at BA.com to get a seat right at the front of the aircraft, resulting in having to push past the lowest possible number of pregnant women in rows 1-4 to disembark the aircraft first. Surpsiringly, my return flight was on time and touched down at 8:05pm. Ok, maybe I’m just surprised because I’m used to flying Ryan “we’ll fly you ‘roughly where you want to go” Air or Sleazyjet. I was in my flat by 8:35pm and calling Glasgow’s finest taxi company (0141) 3390339 in advance resulted in a friendly taxi driver waiting outside my flat by 8:45pm to take me to the gig. “To the Glasgow Academy please, driver.” I said… Ok I didn’t say it *exactly* like that but you get the idea. I arrived at the Academy at 8:59pm…. WOW I thought. How did I manage that? Stuart kindly left my ticket at the door, so I approached the door staff who let me in to speak to the box office. The girl started searching for my ticket. Five minutes passed, I’d tried variations of my name, phonetic spelings, Stuart’s name, Jane’s name, Andrew’s name… still nothing. I called Stuart who assured me it was at the box office. Some more time passed and he called me back and said “I’m in the foyer, I can’t see you.” … by this time the gig was just starting… but I couldn’t hear any music coming from the main hall.
Me: “Where are you Stuart?” Stuart: “Barrowlands of course, you?”
<hangup>
So I got taxi #2 to the Barrowlands and arrived at about 9:30pm. Despite missing half of the gig had an absolutely excellent night. In hindsight, some clues I was at the wrong venue included:
The words FRANKIE BOYLE, TONIGHT on the board outside the academy The girl asking me where I was ‘sitting’? I thought this was strange but thought there may be some kind of seating option. The rather mellow crowd standing in the smoking area outside the academy as the gig was about to start
I guess that was a kind of long way of saying… “I went to the wrong place.”