"It's not the size of the boat, it's the motion in the ocean."
It is the 11th November and as a certain Mr Murray ranted on air last week, "how is this Christmas?!" I love Christmas but it's over a month away and going into town to find all the little stalls selling Christmas gift bags and Starbucks decked out with its Christmas theme already is just stupid; I swear it gets earlier each year.

So obviously with this in mind and my complete refusal to believe it is even near Christmas yet, today I went into town for the Christmas lights switch on. Now I’ve been to a few Christmas lights switch on's, they usually make you feel all Christmas-y...when they're in December! However, this is not a rant about that. Nor is it a guessing game for you to guess exactly why I went to the lights switch on [as much fun as that would be]. The answer is McFly, just in case you were going to guess anyway...

McFly were in Leeds on Thursday to switch on the Christmas lights. I told Corinne to go. She didn'. Then I discovered there were at our light switch on too, though Birmingham got Simon Webbe to actually switch on the lights. Whatever. The key points here are: free music + McFly. And since I didn't care too much about being right near the front, I figured getting there about twenty minutes beforehand would be fine, compared to the *ahem* seven hours beforehand that I did for a lights switch on once.
As per Ali's information, there was a huge fairground at Millennium Point, which had so many lights it would be pretty impossible to get lost attempting to find it*.
Ten minutes later and I was right in the middle of the crowd in front of the stage and rather cleverly, I thought, I'd managed to stand next to some girl who had clearly come to see McFly. Ten minutes of boring crap later – and if you've ever been to a lights switch on, you know what I mean- and McFly finally took to the stage. They sang Please Please, All About You, Don’t Stop Me Now, Sorry’s Not Good Enough, Star Girl and finished on Five Colours in Her Hair. During their set I realised that the girl beside me had clearly trained her parents well since they knew all the lyrics too.




And then I extricated myself from the crowd two minutes before they switched on the lights. I was going to leave then for pure entertainment value but I got sucked in by the fireworks display and then ended up in the huge crowd attempting to leave at the same time, which resulted in a human traffic jam that was ten times worse than anything I’ve ever experienced in Oxford Street or Broadway.

"Nice ending."


*Once I tried to get lost in the Imperial War Museum on a school trip, purely for my own amusement. It didn’t work, I always knew where I was.

Labels: christmas, gigs, mcfly