Saturday, 25th August 2001.
Slane

Now, I've been thinking about that smelly waiter, and it occurred to me that perhaps he was wearing a polyester shirt? Polyester always makes me smell a bit ripe shall we say, so perhaps he isn't always pongy?

(and would the people from the Equal Rights For Smelly People Coalition please stop emailing me)

Getting up at 6am when you don't have an alarm and your name is Ian is not an easy thing. I have a well-deserved reputation as being a grumpy bastard in the morning, and getting out of bed at that kind of hour doesn't help matters.

Charmari and I wandered round the corner to meet with Matt and the others. The drive to Slane was quiet, which isn't unusual considering that it was bloody early in the morning, and that the four other people in the car were all deaf. We parked the car before 8am, and we had joined the ramshackle queue just on 8am.

Deaf? I hear you say? Er, yes. Allow me to explain. Charmari and I had scored a couple of tickets for the U2 concert at Slane Castle courtesy of Chris, a friend of Matt, who works with Charmari. Both Chris and Matt are deaf. So why are they into U2? (no jokes, please!) Well it's a story I'll tell in excruciating detail later perhaps.

The queue at Slane wasn't organised at all. Security turned up some time later, and started erecting barricades around us. The weather forecast had been for fine weather, so in a bout of optimism we didn't take anything to protect us from the inevitable Irish rain. It rained consistently for about an hour-and-a-half, leaving us soaked.

When the gates finally opened, we rushed in and somehow managed to get passes into the nearly-inner sanctum. Which was nice. It would be a couple of hours until the first support act took the stage, so we found a patch of grass and flopped for the majority of the day. The rain had lifted, and it stayed fine for the rest of the day.

The penultimate support act was a band called Kellis, who are complete and utter dogshite. (sorry about the bad language, gentle readers, but I have honestly never heard a professional band play such poor material! I would rather go to an Indecent Obsession tribute gig than listen to that foul steaming crap again!) The final support act was the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, and they rocked! Although Anthony Kiedis has a very dodgy PSM (porn star moustache).

Charmari and I had planned to be not right at the front, but not right at the back (sounds like going to a concert with Goldilocks and the three bears) of the section we were in. When U2 hit the stage that was still the plan. But as soon as Bono strutted along the catwalk that extended towards us Charmari lost her head and charged towards the front like a starstruck teenager!

The concert was awesome, the crowd went right off. It was streets ahead of their concert at Earls Court on Wednesday. We took heaps of photos that didn't come out. And it took us over four hours to get back to Dublin. Nice.

(PS: sorry this was such a dull entry, it sounds a bit like a high school essay or something... "and then we did this and then we did that and then Dad stopped the car and told us all to get out and we had to walk the rest of the way home and Danny wouldn't stop crying so I punched him and then Mum smacked me and then a snake bit Kylie and Mum had to suck the venom out and then Mum got out a bottle of her special medicine and drank a whole lot of it and we asked Mum what disease Jack Daniels cures and she said it's the cure for children but Dad told me that it was the cause of children so I don't know who to believe...")