The Humble Living Room

After our transportation frustrations yesterday, we decided to stick close to home and vowed to avoid descending onto a single tube platform today. As usual when a day in our neighbourhood is what we're after, we walked up to Clissold Park to see the deer

and the birds.
The park was filled with neighbourhood folk and their canines, enjoying their Sunday afternoons.
We started to walk through Abney Cemetery on our way to the high street,
but it was a bit too mucky from the rain, so we cut that part of the walk short and took the bus down to the Geffrye Museum to have a proper wander through its galleries, something we didn't have time for the last time we were there. They have a lovely sitting room overlooking the back garden:
and their displays of period English living rooms are lovely and informative (and much, much more interesting than that may sound, I promise). Here's their representation of a middle-class English living room from 1800-1830:
Their temporary exhibit (which, like the rest of the museum, is free) of paintings of (primarily London) domestic spaces from 1914-1960 was well worth seeing. Most striking for me, though, was the fact that I knew where most of these streets and neighbourhoods were--somehow that made the already intimate images of home and family seem even more so. All those images of taking afternoon tea meant that we had to have some of our own, and the wonderful restaurant in the Geffrye was the perfect spot to do just that.
We sat at the window having our afternoon snacks (tea and carrot cake for Bob and espresso and lemon cake for me--don't worry Dianne, it wasn't as addictive as your lemon cake!), looking out at the garden and the urban landscape beyond, before heading out to the high street to do a few errands and then settling in for a night at home, with me watching my first whole show on our new TV and Bob listening to a hockey game on the computer . . . enacting our own Hackney living room of 2007 London!