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sidled past four hundred hysterical year 10s to get to the aisle.
    This gave me a good opportunity to face the stage and check out what all the fuss was about, and honestly, I do not get it! The “guys” were all leap-frogging each other and yelling to different sections of the audience, but let’s face it, anyone could do that. Even me, and I’m hopeless at gym nastics. They were all quite good-looking in an obvious say, but there wasn’t a skinny-nerdy-brainy type among them; in fact, a couple of them looked like the only test they’d ever pass would be one for steroids.
    And then there was Jazzy D. The Divine Jazzy D. Or Jason Devaney, as I was determined to call him. Well, yes, he was quite pretty, I suppose, with big wistful eyes and a quirky way of holding his guitar (all of which I could only see on the massive screens either side of the stage, as the stadium was so huge that, in reality, they were just action figures in the distance).
    I looked again at Jason. What was it about him? He started to sing, and I suppose he had quite a good voice. A light tenor in madrigal terms. He danced as well as the rest of them, though not as often as he appeared to be actually playing his guitar. And he did look quite muscular, with biceps flexing whenever he strummed a chord, and a powerful neck that made his costume collar look a bit tight so he had to loosen it every now and again, to the massive excitement of the thousands of tweeny girls in the audience who obviously thought he was about to rip off his shirt any moment. ‘Keep it on!’ I wanted to shout, every time the cry of ‘Off, off, off!’ rippled around the stadium.
    Not my type. That’s all I’ll say. And remembering that the one who was my type was under the misconception that Dolores was his type, I hurried down the near-vertical stairs and ran out into the vast corridor that circled the arena.
    It took me nearly forty five minutes to trot around the entire venue, looking for ‘Manager’s Office’ or ‘Mr Scowl’s Trailer’ or similar. Eventually I found a sectioned-off area which obviously led directly from the stage, as it was manned by some very burly … well, men.
    ‘Can’t come through here, love,’ said the nearest of them. ‘You’ll have to go back to your seat.’
    ‘Is this where Jason comes off the stage?’
    I fished around in my bag, and he suddenly looked quite alarmed.
    ‘Security did check your bag, right?’ He held out a hand. ‘Best give it here, sweetheart.’
    Now several of the others were lurching towards me too. At this rate I was going to get thrown out. Finding what I was searching for, I pulled out my second lette r to Jazzy D and handed it over.
    ‘ Just an envelope, that’s all,’ I said. ‘Look, nothing else in my bag. I’m a friend of Jason’s from school in Jersey and I wanted to say hi afterwards.’
    ‘Right,’ said the man, clearly not believing a word.
    ‘It’s true – ask him what the Year 1 teacher was called at his school. It was Mr Favreau.’ Wow. I’d almost convinced myself we genuinely were mates in Jersey.
    ‘If you say so, love. Now, back to your seat.’
    ‘Please,’ I said, sounding a teensy bit desperate, ‘just give him the letter in the interval and tell him I’ll see him afterwards.’
    The man seemed almost sorry for me. ‘There’s no interval, darling. It’s not a the-atre, you know.’
    ‘Oh.’ No interval? There was always an interval at choral events. ‘Well … just give it to him when you can.’
    He nodded in a completely unconvincing way so I knew that the letter was going in the bin the second my back was turned. For a moment I considered taking it back from him, but he’d folded his arms by now and his biceps were even more bulgy than Jason’s, so I just nodded back at him, and shuffled backwards trying to do some kind of Jedi mind-trick on him until I hit a wall, then turned and ran back to my seat.
    I’d missed almost the whole thing, thank the stars. In