Graduation day!

After an early Pilates class I caught a train to meet a friend at Waterloo and we went to have lunch in the Skylon restaurant..in the Royal Festival Hall building. It was such awful food and service terrible too, do not go there! I have been there before and the food was OK then if not great.  
However we did have a window table and something interesting to look out on during our very long lunch.(long because of poor service despite plenty of waiters!)
It was graduation ceremonies for the University of Roehampton in the Royal Festival Hall. Today there were four ceremonies through the day so we saw people coming out of one and going into another. It was the MSc global degrees…so the majority looked as if they came from overseas?? I’m presuming they had hired their gowns and the hoods looked really stiff and not nice with a few exceptions which hung properly! Although most had dressed smartly eg the men in suits I did notice some with white trainers! As you can imagine they were taking endless photos and selfies etc.
After our disappointing lunch we walked via Whitehall and  St James Park to the Kings Gallery to see the exhibition of Royal Photographs. There were soooo many tourists the paths and pavements were so crowded and not helped by lots of fencing ready for a 10K run tomorrow. The exhibition showed photographs from the early days of B&W photos up to the present day digital photos. There was quite a lot of info about photographers and their techniques such as Cecil Beaton and David Bailey and also about how they touched up photos after feedback from the royals before digital photos. An interesting show with many photos I recognised….only a couple of Princess Diana?!  Quite a noticeable absence considering how much she was photographed. 

Very warm again so quite a tiring day. Staying at home for the next few days!