There are times where I’m a real spanner – and it looks like last week was one of those times.

You see, ages back I booked myself for the @Media conference in London. And then forgot about it completely.

And it turns out it was last week – the Thursday and Friday, to be precise.  Which means that last week would’ve been made infinitely more complex than it was, what with the Cambridge interview and the entire travelling to see AC/DC – but it’s still a bummer.

It’s weird too, in that I haven’t heard anything about it this year – nothing I’ve noticed on Twitter or Facebook, and none of the developers and techies I know having gone to it. Compared to a couple of years ago, when I knew loads of people who went, that just seems pretty odd.

It’s a pain to have paid for the ticket and not gone – but well, my company had paid for the ticket rather than me personally (it’s a semantic point in many ways, I know) so it could be worse.

Blimey, Bernie Madoff has been given a jail term of 150 years for his fraudulent investor schemes etc.

That’s one hell of a sentence – the kind of jail time you can’t even really imagine.

In a direct contrast to Wembley, the O2 have recently made their parking even easier.

The last couple of times we’ve been organising to go to the O2, the parking booking has had to be done via Ticketmaster – and most of the time, it couldn’t be done online for some fuckforsaken reason, so you ended up having to call the tosspots.

Now, though, the O2 deals with booking parking on their own site through a simple two-page form. (There may be more pages if you’re doing multiple bookings, or your address is different to the cardholders, but it took me two pages) And that’s it. Confirmation comes through to the email address, and it’s all done. No fucking about with Ticketmaster’s horrific system, no “you’ve got two minutes to fill in this form”, no godawful captchas to try and interpret, just a simple form.

So my parking’s booked for seeing Nine Inch Nails/Jane’s Addiction in just over two week’s time.

Again, I’ll be knackered by the time I get home – but it’ll be worth it.

Other than the aforementioned parking nightmare at Wembley Stadium, the rest of the AC/DC gig on Friday was utterly fantastic.  Bearing in mind we were about as far as it’s possible to get from the stage…

The view from our seats

So AC/DC themselves were about 1cm high. There were videoscreens either side, which made the viewing experience something akin to watching on a small TV from across the room, but that’s still OK. After all, it’s the sound you’re going for, not the vision – and the sound was storming.  Mind you, some people were obviously expected to be just there for the beer…

Carlsberg trailer behind beer tent at floor level

The two-and-a-quarter hours of AC/DC just rocked the place. Interestingly, they only played about five tracks from the latest album, Black Ice, and the rest came from all over the last thirty-odd years. And all of it was ace. Several firm favourites got played, including Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, Back in Black, Hells Bells and (of course) For Those About To Rock as a finale, along with cannon blasts.

It wasn’t a show in the same way as the one Pink did recently, but it was still a show – the lighting was spectacular (and improved through the night, as the sun went down) and everyone seemed to have a fantastic time. Personally I felt the ten-plus minutes of Angus’ guitar soloing was a move too far, and could’ve had a couple more tracks instead. But that’s just me.

The AC/DC lightshow

All told, a seriously good gig – I’d go and see them again no worries.

Ah, I do love writing letters of complaint.  In this case, it’s about the car parking at Wembley Stadium, and the exit nightmare…

To whom it may concern,

I am writing to you to complain in the strongest possible terms about the farcical car-parking situation at Wembley Stadium.  I understand that it is primarily a “public transport” venue – however, National Express don’t do coaches to anywhere within 40 miles of my location, so driving was the only way to come to Wembley Stadium.

Last night, after the AC/DC concert, we left the Stadium by 11pm, and didn’t get to leave the car-park ’til 12.15am.  75 minutes to get out of a car-park (we were in Green Car Park, on Level 4, so there was only one ramp to go down in order to exit the venue) is simply not an acceptable time.  The O2 manages to get people out within ten minutes, mainly because they have parking attendants guiding and managing the traffic.

In a venue like Wembley Stadium, where so much thought has been given to managing the flow of people out of the stadium, it’s deeply bizarre to then have absolutely no thought or management of the car parking.  Getting away from the Stadium is, by necessity, the last thing one remembers: it is the freshest memory, and colours the judgement of the entire event. In this case, while the concert itself was fantastic, the parking and exit strategy is going to be enough to make me severely reluctant to visit Wembley Stadium again. I would rather go to a venue like the O2 where the exit policy is smooth, organised and rapid than go to Wembley Stadium where it is nothing short of farcical and shambolic. Paying £25 for the privilege of being stuck for an hour and a quarter is just adding insult to injury, I’m afraid.

I look forward to hearing your response to this complaint.

Sincerely

Lyle

See, and not a swearword in place!  I wonder what the response will be?

So, yesterday was the AC/DC “Black Ice Tour” concert at Wembley Stadium – and right now I’m utterly knackered.

I left the house at 2.15 to go and collect the other person (the almost-brother-in-law) I was going with from Dereham before starting off for London at about 3.30 to go thrashing down to Wembley. We got there about 6pm – not too bad, although we could’ve done better if the satnav hadn’t decided to mis-direct us on the North Circular. Still, got there in plenty of time.

Wembley is bloody impressive – and effing huge. We were right up at the top, which meant that the band were about a centimetre high – although the big video screens either side of the stage meant they were much bigger – ooh, almost like watching a video of them live.

Anyway, two hours of standing, watching the gig – which was ace, and for which another post is due to be written (along with manky cameraphone pictures) – before heading home.

And that was where it all went a bit tits-up. You see, Wembley Stadium may be dead easy to get out of, but the car-parks really aren’t. Considering you’ve paid £25 – yes, twenty-fucking-five quid – to CS Parking (also known as City and Suburban parking) in order to park, I’d expect at least a couple of people out there guiding drivers and managing the traffic flow. But no. The parking situation when you’re coming out of Wembley Stadium is a total, complete and utter fuck-up. So we waited for half an hour, then decided to move, and all told it took an hour and a quarter to get out of Wembley Stadium’s car parking.

Once we’d done that, it was plain sailing – straight round the M40, M25, M11 and A11. Easy. I was back in Dereham at 2:45 and home at about 3:15.

But dear God I’m tired today -  and my feet fucking hurt, too. There’s a learning experience in that – possibly “lose some weight you fat bastard”. We’ll see.