It's early...

but Paul's happy! Tesco last night had a queue by 9:30pm which exceeded in length the number of Xbox 360s they had for the midnight launch, so the almost-reasonable plan of returning later last night was ruled out. GAME had told me they were opening at 7am today, and would have no full systems, and only "one or two" hard drives to go with an unspecified number of core systems. This didn't sound like good odds, for such an obvious retailer.
Paul was clearly excited at the prospect of retaining extremely-early-adopter status though, and after tossing and turning all night exited the house at 6am. Which, amazingly, was early enough to be first in the queue at GAME, so we now have a core system with all the extra bits including a hen's teeth rarity HD (probably worth more than Paul paid in total, if we were to stick it on ebay now). No high def video cable yet though (so no surround sound, boo hoo), but still, a new toy just in time for the weekend :-)