Lady Gaga at the O2

Last night was full of firsts. I had wondered whether to make this blog a bit of a rant about the Nokia navigation software, or a review of a really fun evening out. Because I can't make up my mind, it'll end up as a little of both, I expect.

Lottie and I went to see Lady Gaga at the O2 arena!

I've only recently discovered that I like Lady Gaga, having been a bit taken-aback by my first hearing of tracks like Poker Face and Bad Romance. However, I was surprised to find myself enjoying Bad Romance, and humming along to it whenever I heard it on the radio - it's not the easiest song to like, but it stuck with me. So when I found out that she was playing in England, I had a look, but tickets were only available for Manchester, which, with the best will in the world, is SO not going to happen. To my delight, on telling my niece that both the London dates appeared to be sold out, she informed me about Seatwave, a ticket exchange site. Now, while they may tell you they're a fan-to-fan ticket exchange, you can be sure they're not in it for the love!! Neither are the fans! They all want to get their money back, plus a little extra because they can. And Seatwave are making a damn fine living on this, too. Suffice it to say that our £50 tickets certainly didn't end up costing £100 for the two of us! I could, at this point, launch into a rant about "booking fees", something which caused RyanAir to lose me as a customer, probably for all time, but I'm concentrating on the happy of the event!

Over the weekend, in anticipation of the event, I had visited the Tube website to check that our route from Waterloo was still going to be the Jubilee line. I'd found no reason to suspect that we might have trouble with this, and so it was with quite some surprise that, on visiting the O2 web site (in the hope of finding out what sort of time I might expect the actual gig to start (the only information on the tickets was that the doors open at 1800), I found a great big box telling me that the Jubilee line was, in fact, NOT in service at all for the Bank Holiday!! OK, I'm no pansy, I can change my plans at a moment's notice! One thing I did learn, a fact of which I was completely unaware before this unexpected change, is that you can drive to the O2, and there are some vast car parks available. I toyed, briefly, with the idea of taking the train to London, and booking the Thames Clipper to get us to the O2, but there were only 2 stated boats available, one at 16:00, and one at 18:40, neither of which was really suitable for what we wanted. That idea being unworkable, I began to think about this driving plan. I mean, why ever not? The "special" price for pre-booked car park tickets for the show in question was £16.90 (including the aforementioned booking fee!!), and they had spaces. So I booked.

Allow me, for a moment, to digress. There was a part of me that remembered the horror of driving to Wembly Stadium (although I still remember, fondly, the Bruce Springsteen gig, to which I was driven on the back of a motor-cycle), and our complete inability to exit the car park after the gig - that was the Prince gig, to which I went with BMW sports and social, which is, by far the worst gig I've ever attended. Prince played for 1 hour. That's it. 1 hour. At Wembly. He then, after quite some time, came on and did 3 songs for the encore. 3 short songs. DAMN! We then sat in the car park for a further 45 minutes in the bus, first waiting for the rest of the S&C to arrive, and then for the bus to exit the car park, as thousands of fans streamed, probably unhappily, home. You can imagine my concern, I think?

I did spend some time fiddling round with the Nokia, trying to make the maps program navigate for me - after all, they've promised us free navigation, forever. I wont go into the whole thing, although at one point the program seemed to think that I was entitled to 11 free days of navigation between now and 31 August! Since that doesn't sound much like free navigation forever, I swiftly upgraded my copy of Maps from version 3.04(165) to version 3.04(165). Yeah - I dunno what's going on with that, but until I'd "upgraded", I couldn't get the free navigation forever part of it working for me.

Well, Nokia Maps has helped me out in the past, so I figured that unless I wanted to go round the M25 (on the evening of a Bank Holiday Monday? With all those holiday makers streaming home? Nu-uh!), I'd have to see what my phone could do for me. I'm not sure what sort of navigational decisions were made, but we ended up going the scenic route through London. Up the A316, down past the Kings road to Chelsea Embankment, across the river at MI6 (actually, that was pretty damn cool!), across various bits of London I've never seen, eliciting comments from Charlotte that London was a bit of a dump, and then across Tower Bridge, past the Gherkin, the Lord Mayor's office and the Tower of London - again, pretty cool! Actually, I lie - I know Elephant and Castle, but after Aldgate, I was completely at the mercy of the phone. Now, I say it seemed like a scenic route, but if you look at it on the map (I've started on the M3), you can clearly see that it's largely a straight line. I suspect that the detour at Earls Court was to avoid the congestion charging - I suppose it's not going to know that a) it's a bank holiday, or b) charging doesn't happen on bank holidays.

Actually, traffic aside (and there were some serious hold-ups after we'd crossed the river for the second time), we were directed wrongly only once. A turn that the sat-nav told me about, but about 10 seconds too late. An easy re-route.

Once at the Greenwich Peninsular, it was easy to find the O2 arena, and our car park. Inserting my card into the pre-paid entrance gate opened it smoothly, and within moments we were parked for the evening. It had taken us close on 2 hours to get there, but as always in London, it was the last quarter of the journey which took most of the time.

And so into the arena itself. After purchasing the obligatory merchandise (a t-shirt for Lottie and a flashing bangle for Lizzy), we decided we'd better get something to eat before the show. The choice of restaurants is huge - I saw a Slug & Lettuce pub, a Pizza Express and a Brazilian eatery before we found a Japanese sushi and bento place called Wasabi. I was delighted that Lottie, who isn't into Japanese food to quite the same extent that Lizzy is, said she'd rather like to try that. I've never been to a place where the dishes of food come round on little conveyor belts - not only was it pretty cool, but the food was largely good. I was a bit mean, not knowing how much we'd want to eat, and limited Lottie to the 3 cheapest dishes. The people with whom we shared a table were trying all colours of plates, including the violet and dark pink.

Satisfied after a lovely supper, we decided it was time to find our seats. And what seats they were. OK, I know, it's an arena, and there is, apparently, seating for 23,000 people - that's right, twenty three thousand!! So any seats we could afford were not going to be the really GOOD seats. Actually, they weren't bad seats, for all that they appeared to be up the side of a cliff, to which we'd have to cling in order to avoid falling headlong into the standing area. So precipitous was the climb, in fact, that Lottie spent the first 10 minutes after we'd removed our carabiners and coiled our ropes, pressed back in her seat, looking down with worry on her face. Thankfully it didn't take long to acclimatise to the constant danger, and by the time the concert started, we were able to dance with the rest of the audience. I have to confess, when Lady G shouted "Jump!", I'm afraid my response was more of a jiggle, because I really didn't feel comfortable getting both feet off the floor at the same time!

Oh! But she did a brilliant show. Costume changes every other song (indeed, some costumes saw only one song), light displays, a bit of a story, fire on the stage (now there's an accident waiting to happen), piano's, blood (stage blood, don't worry) and some great music made for a fantastic evening. I think that music tastes are so individual that I'm not going to try to convert you - either you enjoy Lady G, or you're not so keen. I enjoy the music, I find the spectacle delightful. I wouldn't want to criticise, but I'm surprised, given the lavish production of her videos, that the stage set was so, well, staid. Mind you, the monster and some of the more outrageous costumes made up for that. I have to say that by 22:20, on exiting the arena after the encore, Lottie and I were buzzing with pleasure!

Just before the encore, some people squeezed past us, so I explained to Lottie that sometimes people like to leave before the end of a show so they don't get caught up in the car park at the end of a show - remember Prince? I said, "Don't worry, we'll just sit in the car park as long as necessary so that you can see the whole show." But you know what? It took us maybe 10 minutes from getting into the car to being out of the car park. All those parking worries were unfounded.

Remembering our, um, interesting trek across London to get to our destination, I decided that our route home would be straight down the A2 and round the M25. That took us a bit less than an hour and a half!

I think the only thing wrong with the whole night was that my life would have been substantially better had Lottie NOT woken me at 02:30 this morning to tell me her hamster had escaped, and she'd woken to find him crawling on her! Yeah, could have done without that...