If you spent all day moving past 1m people in front of you to be offered a Wembley ticket at 3 times the advertised price, I pity you. You are a victim of the silliness of watching a very average live band relive their glory days – more than 20 years ago.

I tried it…

Statisticians will have worked out that the capacity of Wembley for these kind of events is around 80.000, which makes you having 320,000 people Infront of you and probably 50,000 people already with tickets

You can cheat the queue and buy a seated ticket for little more than £1,000  and this will doubtless prove attractive to those for whom the fear of missing out is equal to the means to pay. There are some interesting lessons in here (somewhere) about the temporary value of money and the regret risk which may follow as a year passes without any gratification.

Indeed the possibility of these concerts being cancelled will be a source of anxiety , especially to those whose ownership of tickets is “second-hand”, who get the refund?

And of course the face value of tickets may not be the original price but created by demand. Just as one Easyjet passenger can be paying £450 for an identical experience to another paying £20, so ticketholders will find themselves having booked on the same day through the same agency paying wildly different amounts. “Demand pricing” meant that the longer you were in the queue , the more you paid.

Presumably most people in the queue dropped out. I was a curiosity seeker and kept my browser open for about an hour in which time I advanced 10,000 or so places. Either this represented 10,000 sales or 10,000 queuers working out they weren’t going to get to the front, is a matter of conjecture. The queue presumably worked as a kind of tontine where the last queuers standing might have scooped the pool and got a ticket – albeit a ticket at a highly inflated price.

There will be readers of this blog – or more likely just the headline – who will regard me as vindictive and callous towards those who spent the last day of summer on their devices in a state of frustration. They will be balanced against those who now have tickets at a price they expected who got lucky.

But my general point is that the queue itself does not seem a happy place, like the queue to pay tribute to the Queen prior to her funeral or the queues outside the proms (which are a form of social recreation).

The queue for Oasis tickets, like the scramble for Glastonbury tickets , looks a temporary feature of cultural capture where those in the queues are captured by FOMO and those operating the queue prey upon this captive state through financial extortion.

Of course those who run the primary and secondary markets for such tickets are not doing anything illegal, but they are behaving in such an anti-social fashion that I would be surprised if an interventionist Government, as we appear to have now, will step in.

I’m not for intervention, let stupid people behave stupidly and let’s hear nothing from them on social and broadcast media. If you made a serious attempt to buy a ticket yesterday and wasted your day , you have no-one to blame but yourself.