Seven in the afternoon at Lovebox; I’m developing festival deep vein thrombosis from standing so long and I have a violent amount of underboob sweat. Peering backstage it’s clear nobody has a clue what the fuck is going on. Then, after setting up the equipment in its entirety, all we get is a lacklustre announcement saying “due to unforseen circumstances Lil Kim will not be performing today.”

Now feeling a little bit like it was time to start using my Queen Bee CDs as coasters, I left that Sunday feeling dejected. Not even the young man who almost broke my hand trying to get my wristband off could console me. I’d already waded through a crowd of mouth-breathers wearing face-paint and bindis for Kim, so I wasn’t going to stick around and “make a day of it”. Kim’s PR were slow to respond to the shit-show and Lovebox took the opportunity to stick the knife in and state that she hadn’t turned up on time. Kim’s camp eventually said otherwise. Who was lying? Did Kim get too mash-up? Did her entourage get too mash-up? Did she turn up with So Solid?

Come Monday, after a barrage of abuse, she took to Twitter to arrange an impromptu meet-n-greet. COULD IT BE? A silver lining; the chance I could finally get myself in stroking distance of the Queen?

Having exhausted every other possible avenue of contacting Kim, I was totally down for loitering outside a hotel on the hottest day in London since 2006. So I valiantly went down and joined the queue armed with only my disposable LOLcam and a dictaphone with two per cent battery left #JOURNALISM.

Here was the queue outside the Andaz Hotel at quarter to three. Lots of city boys kept sauntering up and asking “Who’re you waiting for then? A rapper? Puff Diddy? Jay Zed, yeah?” like they do anything but fist-pump to Calvin Harris with hired girlfriends on the weekend. It’s tough being a mega-fan for a day and not being patronised.

The guy at the end wasn’t with theses ladies, he’d just eavesdropped and become particularly passionate about our discussion that Kim rapping about getting eaten out was timeless. This was all punctuated with cries of “SHE’S SHARED A STAGE WITH BIGGIE.”

This is my new buddy Scott. I was angling to get snaps of his friends who were dressed far more flamboyantly but they assured me he was the real fan-boy. Turns out he’d been right up at the front at Lovebox before his dreams were shattered too. Except he’d already seen Kim on stage before, infact he was an encyclopedia of Kim-Knowledge. I nodded along politely. I am a fraud.

Then there was this angelic bunch. I know right? The average age of these guys was SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD but my guy on the left still went in on Hard Core and The Notorious K.I.M., having discovered her music through that popular music platform…Twitter. It kind of warmed my heart that Kim can prevail when other teen fans blindly follow Miley “black guys and twerking and MDMA, oh my!” Cyrus into Hades.

For no real reason here are two more ladies I didn’t really ask anything useful but, whutevs, they had matching glittery red lipstick and were better turned out for a Monday afternoon than I could be if I hired a small militia of stylists.

This guy calmly holding The Source was like a rap sensei. He theorised that “There isn’t a place for Lil Kim to perform in the UK, she can’t be at something like Lovebox…or even Wireless…and be performing those explicit underground tracks. People forget she came up with the best of them”. What I think he was saying is that a weekend festival built for the cream of Romford to gurn to deep house at was not an appropriate arena for most rappers let alone the Queen.

The girl on the far right of the group was the greatest super fan I will ever meet. She alternated between tears of joy and abject rage at the thought of anyone thinking Lil Kim wasn’t the greatest hip-hop artist of all time and that they should shut up and “lick her cunt” if they thought otherwise. Then she offered to “take a needle and pop all of Nicki Minaj’s fake bits”. Yes, that is a The Notorious K.I.M. album nestled in between her tits, too. Yes, she’s incredible.

This lady stumbled out of the meet and greet in euphoric tears. Apparently she’d woken up at stupid o’clock to get down to London and then had to take a fifteen hundred hour train back home immediately after. I didn’t get to chat to her long cos she was doing the bad-crying…

…But she did manage to compose herself for these pictures while flaunting the MASSIVE Lil Kim lyrics tattoo coooovering her entire thigh. Dedication, AMIRITE?

Then some of Kim’s team popped out to video the (sort of) baying crowd. I asked (what turned out to be a production manager) for an on the record confirmation of what happened and was offered “I can’t go into details but just know that LIL KIM LOVES THE UK” etc. Dejected, I went to get some more fan-quotes but this bitch of a guy at the front, who I imagine is the type of human being that puts “freelance stylist / model / photographer/ socialite ;)” in his Twitter bio, started berating me saying “MAYBE YOU SHOULD GET YOUR JOURNALISM RIGHT” before I could finish my sentence on Kim’s no-show the previous day. But, whatever, by then I was only 15 minutes away from seeing the Queen.

This is Lil Kim’s man-mountain security. He seemed stunned that I wanted a picture of him. I guess that happens when you’re, like, 8 foot 11 and yet about a hundred people have completely blanked your existence in favour of getting a selfie with the Notorious K.I.M.

And so here we are. A slightly grainy photo of the living legend that is Lil Kim with her newest protege Tiffany Foxx (Kim looked great BTW, better than the sack of shit I’m going to look like aged 39, anyway). Nobody was allowed to take pictures themselves, so by the time I’d condescended this guy about how to use a disposable camera I was being ushered on to leave.

I tried to pass my card onto her team and the mood swiftly changed from Vaseline smiles to “Jesus eff, you’re a journalist, why in the name of sweet fuck have you come to a meet-n-greet you sociopath?” I asked one of them for a business contact and she helpfully wrote down a Twitter username. Which was great until I realised she’d literally written an “@” and then a bunch of unintelligble lines…”IS IT A LITTLE “L” OR A BIG “I”, I DON’T KNOW?!”

What did I take away from my vaguely successful stalking sesh? All it takes is a Junior M.A.F.I.A marathon and maybe a few views of the “look how many famous buddies I’m with” video for “No Matter What They Say” to remind you how hard it is to shit on Lil Kim’s legacy. Plus she doesn’t seem to be short of hysterical fans just yet. My real Jerry Springer final thought of the day, however, is that the Queen might want to re-evaluate some of her closest #TeamLilKim before she drops that difficult forthcoming album.

Follow Jo on Twitter @FUERTESKNIGHT