It ended in tears. I guess that was always a possibility. After a weekend in which Jack’s successive bedtimes were 12.10am. 11.45pm, and 11.35pm, he was always a chance to fall apart. I thought that it was a bit rough that the catalyst was ‘going home early’ on Sunday. ‘You promised!’ he said. ‘You said I could stay to the end!’ It was 10.20pm and she had five songs to go. And Midnights isn’t her best era, is it? And what I’d promised was that he definitely wouldn’t be staying to the end. After all, he’d been there for 130 of the 130 songs she’d sung up to that point. When I say, ‘been there’, I mean in the stadium on Friday for night one, and then Taylorgating outside Gate 4 for Saturday and Sunday. I’d done 90 songs myself.
The whole weekend was so much fun. From the kids’ hair and makeup on Friday, to Very Swift Train rides, to walking Alice into her very first concert, to settling Jack down and watching sensory anxiety dissolve into pure delight.
Friday, Night 1
We were in the accessible row at the back of level 3. It’s fortunate Taylor was wearing the only cowboy boots able to be seen from the moon or she would have been just a speck. But she filled the stadium in the way a true star can, and Alice and I held hands, and danced, and marvelled at the joy and volume of it all. Jack, for his part, kept his head down and listened. People were dancing in the seats in front, blocking his view, and a thoughtful attendant wanted to move him to a clear unobstructed space in front of an aisle. ‘No!’ he said, somewhat frantically. He was in his zone. In a noise sense, he was at his upper limit. He didn’t want a single thing to change, in case it became intolerable. Besides, he has cortical visual impairment, and it’s really about the audio anyway.
It went pretty much perfectly. There was some crying beforehand as Jack panicked about possible noise levels, and some ‘I’m tireds’ from both kids during the more contemplative back roads of ‘Folklore’, but ‘1989’ arrived, and it was the best 1989 grand finale since the — no, I will not commit heresy here, however well I well I thought she strutted the sacred turf.1
Saturday, Night 2
‘Can’t we just sneak in?’ Jack asked, as he processed the idea that Taylor would be playing, but we wouldn’t be going. It went back and forth, and I explained the impossibility of attending without a ticket, but appeased him when I told him his uncle Ned wanted to go and sit outside the MCG with him. ‘We’ll have a picnic,’ I said. I didn’t say that uncle Ned had once sneaked into a Liverpool game by wandering in with the catering staff and then hiding in the Anfield toilets for three and a half hours. He didn’t need any ideas.
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