“This one’s for all the doctors and nurses. Especially the nurses.”

Say what you like about Irish megastars U2–and you might indeed think them to be slightly pretentious, self righteous middle aged rock stars (hey, you might even want to pick yourself up a “MAKEBONOHISTORY” T-shirt and wander around with it on, I think I might when we see them in Barcelona later this year, you know, just to test the Spanish sense of irony)–they certainly know how to put on a good show. Several songs into Saturday’s Twickenham concert, Mr Vox, their diminutive lead singer, spotted a girl in the crowd with a silver helium balloon in the shape of a heart, which he proceeded to take off her and release towards the heavens while throwing his hands to the sky. Now, if you or I stole someone’s balloon and let it go, we’d probably get slapped, or worse, but when Bono does it he has 80,000 people enthralled. There’s just no justice.

We’d arrived at Twickenham much earlier, and spent our first couple of hours there in the pleasantly shaded beer garden of The Cabbage Patch, a pub I used to frequent rather too frequently back when I lived in the area. And we made the right decision, as well, because even though we spent our first few hours in the area sitting comfortably outside the pub, and not sitting in the full sun outside the stadium with the other overly keen standing ticket holders, we still managed to arrive there in time to bag ourselves the hallowed green wristbands that allowed easy entry to and exit from the enclosed standing section right at the front, where the stage juts out into the crowd. We had plenty of room to move around, as well, although perhaps this goes some way to explaining the slightly confusing conversation I had with a chap standing near us while we watched the second support band, Athlete: he’d moved in front of us, so Sal and I stepped around him to the side to get a better view of the four skinny indie kids onstage playing their lightweight rock songs.

“Excuse me, do you mind telling me what you’re doing, standing beside me?” he asked. Now, I know I’m tall, and I could understand “What are you doing standing in front of me?”, but beside me? That’s a new one on me: perhaps he was expecting to have Twickenham to himself and was working his way around the crowd one by one asking everyone.

U2, of course, were a lot of fun. Pretty much what you would expect: lots of wandering out into the crowd on their protruding stage bit (although sadly despite our being only a few feet away, at no point was Bono quite close enough for us to tell if, as we suspected from a TV interview last week, he does indeed dye his hair, and cover up his impending baldness with a weave…), the obligatory hauling up onto the stage of at least one member of the audience (who was handed a camera with which to film Mr Edge and yer man Bono–who my spell checker keeps wanting to call “Bongo Ox”–and then failed to notice for the whole length of Mysterious Ways that she was holding it upside down, as 79,999 people simultaneously turned their heads to the side), and lots of impressive flashing lights once the sun had gone down. And much jumping up and down from our section of the crowd.

They closed with a second run through Vertigo, in a slightly endearing, “it’s as if we’re a new band and we’ve only got one album” sort of way. The cheeky scamps.