A certain someone promised me that they would control themselves this year at Royal Ascot and that they wouldn’t get into any trouble. The first message I received this morning as I was getting ready was that they’d lost their underwear. Hmmm … an auspicious start. But continuing on. I had such a fun time on Ladies’ Day at Royal Ascot last year that I couldn’t say no to going again this year.

We decided that we would repeat what we did last year and enter the Silver enclosure with our picnic food and this time also some drink. Not only did that save a lot of money but it also meant the drink was right there and we didn’t have to go hobbling all over the racecourse to line up in long giant queues to get any. 🙂 We decided Silver Ring too because finding the right dress would have been too much hard work (plus I haven’t found a dress yet that suitably covers my cleavage …) I thought that finding a reasonably priced hat or “substantial fascinator” would be a problem as well but it turns out I had to go with a hat anyway as I couldn’t find a fascinator to match the colour of my dress. For some reasons fascinators, in Accessorize anyway, were coloured cream, black, hot pink or blue this year!

Speaking of dresses – due to how busy I’ve been in the last two months I only had one afternoon after work to find a dress for today’s event. Talk about poor planning! However, its not like I meant to leave it to the last minute – I’d done some browsing previously but was really disappointed in what was around and I just couldn’t find anything I liked. I was pretty desperate really to find something but thankfully I found a dress in Debenham’s. Ironically the dress at £35 was nearly the same price as my hat ensemble!

Lots of people opt for driving or being driven to Royal Ascot which I can’t really understand because the train is just so convenient. There’s no traffic, it comes fairly regularly (every 15 minutes) and if you time it right you can generally get a seat. I heard some horror stories of people being stuck in traffic for hours thereby missing most of the day!

We ran into James and D who it seemed had the same plans as us so it was like our anniversary event! Clearly they enjoyed themselves last year too and had been planning to attend Royal Ascot for a while. We all arrived fairly early on the day and like last year were able to snatch up a table which was so much more comfortable than being on the ground. Especially for us girls in dresses.

The second time round we felt like regulars at the racecourse knowing where to stand (basically on top of your chairs!) to get good views of the racecourse (as a result I had slightly better luck of getting a decent snap of the Queen), we placed bets with the bookies. One called Kenny was our favourite for a while – I could barely understand what he said half the time but he cracked Pauline and I up. But when our luck dried up with him we moved on to another bookie and so on. Overall I think I was down for the day but I did have a few big wins.

The only disappointing aspect of today was the lavs. Last year they were amazing – women never had to wait, the buildings themselves were huge so plenty of space to touch up your hair, dress, make-up etc. by the mirrors and were generally quite hygienic. This time around for some reason they’d opted for basically small demountables with about six loos in each. Not only were they small but in our area the men’s demountables (four) outnumbered the women’s (two)! Really bad planning. Plus by about halfway through the day the loos started to flood.

But other than that the day ran pretty smoothly, no one got too drunk (heh heh) and we all retired to Belgo’s in Covent Garden for a satisfactory half chicken dinner and …beer.