A cheeky shot

I've gone no further than the aerodrome today and even that was hard work after our epic day at Strictly.

Don't feel you have to trawl through the rest of my words here if you have no interest in Strictly.

We are both exhausted but it was well worth it.  
Left home at 7.30am.
Dropped John at Heathrow as his daughter and her husband were flying in and the three of them are going to Scotland for a week.
Arrived at Elstree studios and joined the audience queue at 9.30 am.   Even though you get tickets you are not guaranteed to get in so it is first come, first served.  Quite a large portion of the seating is reserved for friends and family of the stars and crew. We were 167th and 168th in line so knew that we would make it in.     3 hours in the pouring rain was made less painful by the very jolly people around us.  We were all very cold and wet so the minute our tickets were numbered and our seats secured we went en masse to the nearest pub to warm up and eat.

Between 2.30 and 3pm we changed in to our glamour gear, in the car, in the civic car park.   I don't think anyone was lurking about filming but it was very funny watching almost every car there full of mainly ladies struggling to get their tights and glitter on.  Some odd  shapes were being thrown through the steamed up windows!..... perhaps they weren't all audience people after all......?!

We trooped back to the studio and by 4.15pm we were all seated.  We were 3 rows back behind the judges so pretty good view.  A spectacular evening.   Fascinating watching what goes on behind the scenes.   Claudia Winkleman is very, very funny.  She and Tess  were wandering about amongst us before filming started.    All the staff, celebs and dancers were really very lovely and friendly.     The dancing was incredible and the costumes and set made our eyes pop out.

A very long day, we were in our seats for 6 hours with only a 20 minute break for snacks and lavatory.   It might be an idea for the BBC to provide a few more ladies loos as there are at least 20 women to each man in the audience.    

Of course you are encouraged to whoop it up, boo, cheer and clap as much as possible so by the time it all finished at 10.15pm everyone was pretty much wiped out.   Queuing for 30 minutes to get out was rather tiresome and quite a number of people got a little cranky... not us of course, but we had all had enough by then.    We generously donated a small jacket and large umbrella to the BBC as the thought of queuing for a further 30 mins to collect them was unbearable by that point.  

Having said all that it was a fantastic experience and we were thrilled to be a part of it.  We were very lucky as they told us that 1.6 million people had registered for tickets.

Home just after midnight we were both fast asleep before our heads even touched the pillows.

Quiet day for us.    Shame that we didn't have this glorious sunny, dry yesterday.