Mark Owen concert!

Last night, we threw ourselves away... but we made it out all right.

Yesterday my mother, Emily, Joe, Daisy and I attended Mark Owen's concert at the O2 Academy in Bristol. We got to the queue an hour and a half before the doors opened and my feelings, as we waited, were more of awe than excitement; I couldn't believe we were actually going to see Mark Owen live! The O2 priority queue extended much further than our non-O2 line, but we once the doors opened we managed to find a decent spot. The support act, Animal Kingdom, came on earlier than we anticipated and we enjoyed their songs, but the early start lead us to believe there would be another support act to follow. It turned out there wasn't; we realised this when we watched the rug, which Mark picked up from the set of Alan Carr: Chatty Man a few weeks ago, being laid out on the stage. The excitement continued to bubble up, then at 8:50pm the lights went down, the music began and Mark appeared! He started off with a couple of songs from the new album, which we weren't very familiar with as our (super deluxe, signed) copy had only arrived a few hours earlier, then he launched into the new single, "Stars" (available to download here), before Take That favourite "The Flood". By this point I was getting really into it, and still in disbelief at how close we were to Mark Owen, when a very familiar tune started and tears formed in my eyes as I realised we were about to hear one of my absolute favourite songs: "Makin' Out"! I put my all into singing along and dancing, while Em trustily filmed the song, and it was glorious! The rest of the show was the perfect mix of Mark's older solo hits, songs from the new album, and rousing Take That anthems, which were lovely to hear and sounded wonderful even without the other 3/4 members. "Shine" was another song which made me well up: I have so many memories attached to that song, which I didn't fully realise until we were there, hearing it live and dutifully singing along. Over all, it was an absolutely fantastic night that I will never forget!

Exam free!

At exactly 3pm today I put the pen down for the final time on an AS exam (unless I have to retake next year, but I hope I won't). Psychology 2 was a pretty good paper, I was happy that the twelve-marker was on stress because that meant the other stress questions were shorter, and the abnormality section was as good as I'd hoped it would be. I sat psychology 1 two weeks ago and it was all right, but I much preferred today's exam. This Monday I did biology 2, which was my least favourite of all the exams, but I had a good go at it. Chemistry 1 occurred 13 days ago and it was great (for an exam); I finished with 25 minutes to go, but of course used that time to check, and I'm confident I got at least a B. The second chemistry test was always going to be worse, but it wasn't as bad as I'd feared, and the question based on the pre-release document was fine. I now have four days of peace before returning to school to begin year 13, but even during the first week back I still have Animal Crossing: New Leaf and seeing Mark Owen in concert to look forward to!