Right place, right time.

It’s not a good start to the day when within 100 yards of your house you hit gridlocked traffic. The police have closed the A6 and we’re going nowhere fast.

As I weave my way through the back roads and rat runs, endeavouring to get past the problems, it occurs to me that given I’ve done about 1 mile in half an hour, I might end up late for my meeting. As the latest tune ends on Xfm and the DJ states “good news the Xfm Ticket Monkey has been found, so let’s go live…”, I take the opportunity to kill the volume and get the TomTom to ring the office.

I tell my secretary that I might be a little late and can she explain to my visitor if I don’t make it in time.

I turn the radio back-up and rejoice as I seem to escape the limits of the gridlock and head down the A34 unhindered.

The phone rings and the TomTom again does it’s hands-free duty and connects me. It’s Stuart, who starts the conversation with a repeat of my infamous words of the other week:

“I’ve got some excellent news, but you just need to be happy for me, because I have to tell you upfront not to get excited because it doesn’t involve you I’m afraid”.

“Oooh do tell!”

“I just found the Xfm Ticket Monkey!”

“You’re shitting me! You just got the Kaiser Chief tickets?”

“Yep, me and K are off to see them tonight. I just happened to be in Salford Quays when the read the last clue out and said she’s wearing a blue scarf by two blue tall things and I thought that’s the blue cranes 100 yards over there, so I pulled over and said to a woman with a blue scarf “Are you the Xfm Ticket Monkey?”. I was rather glad she said yes, else I’d have felt really stupid.”

How cool is that? Can’t believe I turned the radio off at the exact moment when S went live to the city. I’m so happy for him, in fact as I say, I could only be happier if it had been three tickets!

Stuart rings back later when I’m not driving to tell me more. Apparently in the chit-chat with the lass from Xfm (as a guy in a gorilla suit appears to actually hand over the tickets) whilst waiting to speak to the studio on the phone, she asked him if he had any other plans for the weekend. To which he replied that he was going to see Little Man Tate tomorrow night and Cherry Ghost and Polytechnic on Saturday.

Her response was “wow!”, of course if she’d known him better, she like me would actually have said: “who the hell do you think you are, Jude Adam?”