Cream Tea at the Bedford, its historic birthplace

I wish I could say I had taken a proper photo of the cream tea, but to be honest I was far too busy chatting and eating it for that!  This lovely shot was taken by Portia Crossley for the Bedford’s website and I have shamelessly borrowed it as the feature pic here so that you get an idea of how good the foodie bit was.

This is me eating it with my personal trainer, the incomparable Jo Ellis.  She is hilarious.  She challenges me and supports me to keep pushing myself harder.  She is also no nonsense, and can devour a cream tea without any problems at all.  This may have something to do with the fact that she does the whole workout with her clients, swinging kettle bells around for sometimes three hours in a day.

The event had purpose, other than culinary delectation, I promise!

Our last photoshoot was a huge learning curve.  I honestly take my hat off to anybody who does their first one and walks away with everything they needed from it.  I realised that there were specific shapes I needed for my website – hello big blank space for the automatic writing in the template style – that I hadn’t quite got from that first session.  I also didn’t have all of my members on hand.  So I thought I’d tempt them to gather again with a bit of Devonshire’s finest.  More to follow when I have the pictures, but in the meantime here’s one of me with Clair Wellsbury-Nye wearing one of my favourite of her collection of T-shirts “For Fox sake, stop hunting”.

In addition, and still on the photographic theme, my lovely friend and founding TAWN team member Helen Northcott is putting together some stock photography of real women.  Most of the stock photography I found while trying to build my website involved bikinis, gym kit, wine glasses or shopping bags.  None of those stereotypes fitted us.  More on those when I have the photos through, but the first set from May are available here on alamy.  If anybody is up for being a future model, please let us know.

The other thing, and it was wonderfully unexpected, was that we were joined by a handful of ladies we didn’t already know.  The room layout was fairly traditional, but not entirely conducive to making new friends, so we moved it around.

As a first impression, for some people this might not have looked good.  It wasn’t exactly peak organisation skills to change it once everyone was there, but actually it was done very smoothly.  It was also specifically highlighted as something one of our new friends really liked.  This is handy, as it’s exactly the kind of thing we do – tweaking to fit the needs of the women in the room.

There was quality conversation.  There was a lot of love in the room for TAWN team membership.  There were tears (good ones) and then there was laughter.  Oh my goodness, the giggles.  When most of the ladies had left and it was down to the last handful of us doing stock poses for Helen, the banter was free flowing, the wit quick and the ribs… well my ribs were starting to ache from the laughter.  I look forward to the next gathering with these totally awesome women.

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A special mention…

We also had a little man in the room, who did incredibly well throughout the photos, and then the cream tea and all the chatting too.  His mum Anna Lake is a marketing consultant and fantastic mum.