A week before Eurovision and we’re pitching up in Liverpool city centre to do a full-scale recce. 

Going anywhere with Lachlan requires a lot of advance planning – thinking about parking for the wheelchair car, toilet facilities, cafes we can get his wheelchair into comfortably – and that’s in addition to my own obsessive need to plan everything out in my head. 

Getting into the city all went smoothly and as we were driving in right past the waterfront, we (well, Lachlan and I) were up to a 10 on Eurovision anticipation. First mission was getting some merch for L.

Not yet 11am on a Sunday morning and already there was a 20 minute queue at the Eurovision pop up store. But the tingle of standing with our tribe was lovely – the city is full of folk giving a silent nod of recognition to each other and exchanges of appreciation of particularly excellent tshirts. Swag acquired courtesy of ££ from Granny, we carried on exploring.

By chance we came upon the Liverpool Lush store. It is magnificent, spread over 3 floors of an old building, and even has a bath bomb belt (like the conveyor belt in Yo Sushi). I knew there was some kind of hook up with Lush and Eurovision. Sure enough, super friendly staff were happy to help out and told us about planned activity for the next day. 

We went to explore the waterfront area to figure out where the arena and fan village were situated. It was hot and sunny and the area was uncomfortably busy so we gave up on the village and instead walked up towards the hall where the welcome ceremony was happening that night but, a bit disappointingly, the entire area was hoarded off and roads closed, so you couldn’t see anything at all.

While we had planned to do something else the next day, in the morning, the blog-hosts running the Lush Live Lounge announced that Norwegian EV royalty, Keiino, (whose pop-Sami joiking song slayed in 2019) were going to be at Lush, so L and I headed into the city. 

You might have seen our updates about this on social media but we managed to get in to Lush and get a spot near the front – there were some folk with kids and the EV audience is nothing but lovely – and waited for Belgium’s Gustaph to come out.

We didn’t really know what to expect but they said they’d take a couple of questions from the audience after Gustaph had sung his song and L started writing almost straight away. I was super impressed by his confidence and that he asked a good question. Couple of logistical issues getting the mike to reach him and explain that, no, it needed to be pointed towards his Tobii computer, not his mouth…but it all worked and Gustaph was visibly moved at getting a question from L. He was so impressed that he had got to ‘interview a Eurovision artist’. A magical day.