My husband was a huge fan of a band called Gene many years ago but sadly they split up in 2004 and he has missed seeing them live. At our wedding reception we took over the DJ and the music consisted of Gene, The Smiths and Morrissey for 90% of the evening.

Fast forward to 2011 and Martin Rossiter, Gene’s lead singer has started a solo tour of gigs which has made my hubby very happy. He has seen him a couple of times this year but we also found out he was performing in Stockton on my husband’s birthday so we booked tickets and arranged a babysitter.

A couple of weeks before the gig we were driving somewhere with a Gene CD playing and a song came on, my husband said “I’d give £500 to hear this song live It’s my favourite and I’ve never heard it sang”. Of course immediately my mind started plotting. How could I make his wish come true? It seemed like mission impossible but I’m always up for a challenge

Twitter seemed like the obvious place to start and sure enough, with a bit of looking I came across Martin Rossiter on twitter and so I followed him and waited for him to tweet (I find if you tweet people when they are obviously online you are more likely to get a response). Over the next couple of weeks I probably tweeted Martin about 5 times in total (nobody likes to be bombarded) asking him if there was anyway he could add Drawn to the Deep End to the Stockton set list as it was my husbands favourite song and his birthday. I never got a reply and so I assumed we would be disappointed but it was always worth a try right?

And so Friday 23rd September 2011, we are sat in the tiny Georgian Theatre in Stockton listening to an amazing gig, he sang his full set list, came back on for 2 encores, finished those and was about to leave but then he paused, sat back down at the keyboard and said “actually you can have one more” and this happened….

Sometimes birthday wishes do come true and my husband truely couldn’t believe he had his favourite ever song played to him, for him on his birthday