Feast of Fools

*sweatdrop* Where do you start? We joined the mass of people moving towards the end of the queue at probably about 10am. Queued halfway down the north side of Hyde Park for the privilege of queueing all the way back again, got through the doors fairly shortly after noon, bagged ourselves a nice spot right in front of a speaker and in decent line with both the stage and the first video screen. By miraculous coincidence, this picture shows exactly where we were - you can even pick us out if you look closely.

And lo, everybody jumped up and down. There's not much point me giving a run-down of the acts since I guess most people watched it on TV and therefore saw much more than we did - the video screen was good, but we couldn't see the people on the stage until it got fairly late and people had to leave to catch trains. I tried to take some photos but my li'l phone camera just wasn't up to it (Katy, as promised, I totally have some very small pictures authentically taken of the top of the stage and several people's heads while U2 were playing.)

My highlights:

Dido and Youssou N'dour's most excellent version of Seven Seconds. She observed that all Dido's songs had been transposed down a key. We speculated as to whether she had a hangover.

Razorlight, going from 'who the hell are they?' to rock gods in three songs.

Keane, whose lead singer almost certainly has hairy feet.

Ana Matronic of the Scissor Sisters making everyone wave to their mums before launching into Take Your Mama.

All the people shouting 'shut up!' when Mariah Carey was being a brainless diva. ^_^

Pink Floyd - well, I liked 'em, though I'm a bit young to fully appreciate the earth-shattering wonder of their re-formation. Got to admire anyone who can show up to play the last set of Live 8 looking like a bunch of tax lawyers on their day off.

And of course the finale, which was sufficiently euphoric that you could forget that you'd been standing up for fourteen hours in order to sing Hey Jude until your face fell off. ^___^

And then we walked back to her flat via some very nice police horsies and Leicester Square and collapsed in two small heaps of person.

Woke up Sunday morning and it took a little while to convince my knees that they were supposed to have inbuilt motion. Legs ache, mysterious bruises on arms (no idea how I managed that), sunburnt through 100% cloud cover, etc ect tec. But It Was Good. ^_^