Hey Guys!

I just got back from spending the weekend in London to attend the BAFTA’s! If you read my BAFTA Awards post, you will know that I attended last year as well, however this year I didn’t spend as long in London.

I’ve decided to split this blog post into two parts as we did a lot in both days!

My best friend Becci and I caught the 7:06 pm train down to London, which got us into London at around 10:15 pm, and as we were camping out that night, we headed straight to the Royal Albert Hall once we arrived. 
Last year, we didn’t camp out and we ended up with super high numbers and second row, so this year we thought we had no choice but to camp, especially since people had already started queueing on Thursday night! When we arrived we counted that there were around 100 people already there, and the next day we ended up with wristbands 115 and 116, so we were just about right in our head count.
If you live in the UK you will know that this past weekend, there were several warnings saying the country was going to be hitting -10°c temperatures… which wasn’t exactly ideal for camping on the streets of London, however, I personally found that I wasn’t actually that cold during the night, I was colder in the morning when we woke up and it decided to snow. I honestly can’t think of a time when I have ever been colder than Saturday morning!

Despite the cold, though, we plodded on. At around 5:30/6am our friend Katie (who had arrived slightly earlier the previous day so had a place closer to the front of the queue) and I decided to take a trip to McDonald’s to get warm. Whilst we were there we decided going to the toilet would be a good idea since we didn’t know what time we would be queueing until. Going to the toilet, however, turned out to be an absolute nightmare as there was only one toilet open and one person who decided to go in didn’t seem to want to come out again, they took so long, in fact that the staff were actually worried that something had happened to the person in there, and other customers were putting their ears to the door to see if they could hear anybody. In the end, they had to open the toilets downstairs, where I ended up going and nearly getting knocked out by a cleaner with her mop… FUN TIMES!

By the time we had hopped on a bus back to the queue, it was a little while later and our friend Alex had arrived, which was so exciting because we hadn’t seen her since the premiere of Mockingjay Part 2 in 2015 and we had missed her a lot, so catching up with her passed our time whilst sitting in the freezing cold and snow. 
Eventually after what seemed like years of waiting, security finally decided to give out wristbands, so at around 9:30/10am we had secured our numbers (115, 116 and 117) and we caught up with Katie to head back to our hotel to get warm and change our clothes and attempt to check in so that we could get rid of our luggage. When we arrived we weren’t actually able to check in as it was only 11:30(ish) so we just hung around in the hotel lobby area and caught up since we hadn’t actually seen Katie the previous day.

 After we had checked in and relaxed for a while, we decided we didn’t want to waste any more of our limited time in London, so we headed out and decided to hit up the Harrod’s food halls – seriously, it’s the best place in the world!! – so we hopped on the tube to Knightsbridge and had a field day buying lots of sweet treats and drinks. Whenever I go to Harrods I have to get a Creme Brulee donut and La Mortuacienne Lemonade, I’ve never been able to find this Lemonade ANYWHERE else, despite Newcastle having not only Fenwick’s food hall, but also a Fortnum and Mason food hall, so whenever I visit Harrods I always make sure I buy these two things, and they never ever disappoint! This time I also took a fancy to a Salted Caramel brownie, which turned out to be AMAZING! 
Whilst lost in Harrod’s initially trying to find the food courts, we stumbled across some form of dress exhibit, and the dresses were so pretty I couldn’t help but snap a couple of photos!

From Harrod’s, we headed to Leicester Square where Becci wanted to meet her friend, which called for our traditional visit to Costa. I got a Honeycomb Hot Chocolate and we sat on the wall outside soaking up the atmosphere, Leicester Square is one of, if not my favourite place in the whole entire world, it holds so many amazing memories of the best times of my life, so returning whenever I visit London is a must and it fills me with so much happiness – especially considering on most occasions when I return, I’m with friends who I share the same memories with!

Whilst in Leicester Square we also went for dinner at Pizza Hut, which is also another tradition amongst my friends and I. We had plans to go to stage door at the Hampstead Theatre that night as we wanted to meet Theo James and Emilia Fox, so we had quite a lot of time to kill before we needed to make our way to the theatre, so we decided to go to Waterstones in Piccadilly and browse around there. We ended up staying there for about an hour and a half/two hours until we decided to walk to Green Park to get on the tube to Swiss Cottage. We figured that even though it was pretty early, there would be a cafe or something where we could sit and stay warm. This turned out to be a slight disaster, as we found a McDonalds, where we could sit, however, this particular McDonald’s ended up being the target of teenagers with eggs, and we ended up having to make a desperate run out of the place, otherwise we were scared we would end up stuck there all night. London??? Really????

When we got to the theatre we soon found out that there actually was no stage door and that Theo and Emilia simply just come out into the bar area of the theatre to meet fans, so we decided to sneak in and buy a drink to try and meet them. 
Unfortunately, our dreams of meeting Theo were soon shattered as I saw him storming down a corridor and out of the theatre only minutes after the production finished. However, we stayed to try and meet Emilia. That was, until a security guard decided he was going to throw us out before Becci had even finished her OVERPRICED glass of coke. At this point Katie was stressing because the reason she was there was to meet Emilia and we had just been thrown out, so we were standing outside of the theatre trying to come up with a way that she could get back in to meet her. Eventually we ended up asking a woman if we could borrow her ticket so Katie could pretend she had seen the show, which the woman agreed to, but then the woman, who had just met Emilia, offered to go back in and tell her that we were waiting outside to meet her.  After that we waited a little while and once Emilia was finished meeting the fans inside she came out to meet Katie which was SO EXCITING! We were all nearly crying because she was SO cute, I decided to take candids of her with Katie and Becci filmed it – you’re welcome Katie! I also decided to take a selfie with Emilia since there was such a struggle to meet her!

After meeting Emilia we decided to head back to the hotel to shower and get some sleep as the next day was BAFTA’S DAY!!!