Il Divo, U2 & Alan Partridge ... do I ramble?

Well, yesterday Becky and I went to see Il Divo in concert at the Hallam Arena in Sheffield. We saw them last year at the NEC in Birmingham, but we were sat in the main floor area and - lo and be-f***ing-hold - the "possessor of Birmingham's largest head" sat right in front of me so I couldn't see a thing. I still have nightmares ...

So this concert was for me a sort of putting old ghosts to rest, of no longer having the Pavlovian response of thinking of the backs of sizeable crania every time I hear Il Divo. As it happened we were sat quite high up and got a top view ... bit far back, but the sound was amazing. For Becky, I'm sure the concert was all about going to see Sébastien Izambard, the French singer in Il Divo (who the women go crackers for, despite him being French).

I'd been to the then Sheffield Arena in 1992 to see U2 on the European leg of their ZooTV tour, and I remember it very well that on May 2nd that year we'd queued for about 6 hours waiting to buy tickets ... it was the day my maternal grandfather died as when I got home there was just my dad there looking quite solemn.

We had a little drive through Sheffield before we arrived, with Becky driving her VW Beetle I had the opportunity to take some photos of the area, because as I'd worked a lot in Sheffield between 2004 and 2006 I wanted to capture some of the areas that I remembered (I've uploaded the photos to Flickr.com).

We stopped by at my old Liberata workplace in Attercliffe and took a couple of shots, before going on to the Holiday Inn Victoria Hotel near to the centre of the city. What a grand old building it is! We surmised that in its heyday it must have been one of the main hotels in the city, and sure enough there were lots of old photos of it from early last century with chaps in top hats and tailcoats proudly on their way to the train station (which I take was right next door, but has long since been demolished).

It seems such a shame that such a grand old place has become a Holiday Inn. Well that's progress for you, I guess!

It could have been worse, we could have stayed at a Travel Tavern, Alan Partridge style ("It's 3-star") ...