T O T K a t

I tried on the trousers from both of my suits earlier last week, ones I bought after I had reached my (third) target weight, only to find that my body shape has shifted significantly since I bought them. I've already had the summer suit trousers (from Kew) taken in once, but those and the winter (Austin Reed) ones are at least 3 to 4 inches too wide around the waist and just fall off me. And the jacket of that summer suit (it's the one I wore to Mike and Tara's wedding last year) is also hanging off me. So I took them all to Kew in Wimbledon. They do alterations and I took the chance that they'd take the Austin Reed trousers too. And they did. Which was nice. It means that I've spent £50 on alterations instead of £400 or so on two new suits (and that'd be in the sales and only if I could find ones I actually like). Now, I wonder if I can find someone to do alterations on my two formal dresses that are both several sizes too big for me now...

Just back from the qualifying at Silverstone. A bit sunburnt. The hospitality suite was alongside the pit lane entrance, less than 30ft from the race track itself. I could have reached out and touched the cars as they came down the pit lane...

It was absolutely amazing. The roar was unbelievable. The weather couldn't have been better. Over 500 pictures to sift through and upload; it's going to take a while.

Whole load of photos uploaded now (but I seem to have missed off the majority of the Red Bull ones... I'll rectify that later.

I'm quite pleased with some of them. It's just a shame there was no opportunity to get shots, oncoming or receding, around corners and on the rumble strips.

Still, I got the panning-with-the-car down pretty well quite quickly. I'd like to say despite the cheap, crappy zoom lens but I can't really find much of a difference between that 75-300mm and the nicer 17-85mm one I was also using. My shoulders and waist/sides are aching a bit today, from all of that twisting about with heavyish equipment at shoulder height.

This weekend was a busy one for birthday celebrations. We kicked off with a rather civilised punting trip in Cambridge, with champagne, Pimm's, cheese straws and splashing about along the Cam.

The river was pretty busy, but then it was a nice day and in tourist season. At one point we had to stop and reverse to help to retrieve a lost punting pole, whilst our ferry was wedged between two other punts... which was fun.

The second party of the Saturday was a fancy dress one in Clapham; Ross and Susan's joint birthday party. We arrived (the three of us), in civvies but Jon had already stashed his costume at Ross' flat. Pretty much everyone else had made a decent effort (there were even 3 Daisy Dukes!)

Spent a lot of the party with camera envy and being a little too drunk to take many decent photos in such low light. I still love my camera though.