In our household, we do WWE. As a teenager I tried to convince myself that I was a fan of basketball and American football. I used to stay up late one night per week to catch whatever game was playing – just to engage with the NBA and NFL. I had the PlayStation games. I had the jerseys. But there just was never enough of a pull to make me really care about any of it. I didn’t care for the players, the teams or the sports. I had no loyalty. I started too late.

WWE was my foundation and had been since 1998. Why stray from it?

When Cameo was 2 and Marlo was an actual baby, the two of my boys met Braun Strowman. Months later they did the same with Rusev. They literally don’t know how lucky they were back then. But that was about three years too soon for the two of them to even care about WWE, never mind be excited about meeting their favourite superstars.

It all changed in 2022 when something clicked and Cameo got fully into it. He’s watched all the Raw and SmackDown highlights the morning after since summer 2022, gets every magazine, has now got a massive collection of toys and it’s all he wants to talk about.

Last year Cameo went to Clash at the Castle – the biggest WWE show in the UK since the early ‘90s. And it was truly a spiritual awakening for him. He hadn’t been to any event on that scale before and it blew his mind seeing so many people into wrestling just like himself. Cameo was 5 at the time – still a bit young for the whole experience but old enough to ‘get’ what was happening.

Marlo knew Cameo was getting an experience that he wasn’t, but he didn’t realise he was way too young to for consideration for a three-hour drive before a four-hour-long show. Since then he’s demanded that he get to do something to even the score and make things fair.

But we didn’t.

Instead, when we got the word that WWE was doing a live show in Nottingham we made sure the two of them got an experience like no other – close up (third row) seats, whatever they wanted from the merch stand, ice lollies – the lot.

The night out was amazing. It didn’t matter who was performing but it was a bonus that they got to see all of the following right up close:

It’s amazing that they passed by somewhere so local, but after that, anytime they’re in the country it’s going to be hard to resist all going together again.