This is a hairdryer, dating (if I'm remembering correctly) from the
1930's. It's in "The Secret Life of the Home" section in the
Science Museum.

We were at the Science Museum on Saturday because we were celebrating Bobby's birthday (he turned 39 on Friday), and the Science Museum is one of his favourite places.

This pole is labelled "Don't Touch", and when does the inevitable and goes ahead and touches it anyway, it delivers a (small) electric shock. Amazing how much fun it can be to get an electric shock.

This is also in the energy gallery - a fun DDR-inspired game.

The gallery as a whole is quite impressive looking.





Being able to go to places like this is one of the reasons that I love
living where we do.

Here are Bobby and Stephen emerging from the underground at Oxford Circus.

My parents had given Bobby a Borders gift card for his birthday , so we thought we'd go spend it after we were done at the Science Museum. Only, the whole of the Circle Line was out of commission, as was the bit of the District Line that we wanted, as was part of the Northern Line (planned engineering, apparently), as was part of some other line that we didn't want to travel on anyway, because of (according to the noticeboard) a "person under train." Which makes the inconvenience of having to take an alternative route seem a bit minor ... So anyway, because of all that, we had to take an extremely circuitous route through the underground, and we had to take it along with far, far, too many other people, and it was very hot and very noisy and very sardine-like, and we were very relieved when we finally surfaced again.

But Borders was fun. Bobby bought himself two books - this
one and this
one. Stephen got a climbing magazine, Emily (rolling in money
thanks to her paper round) bought this
book by Philip Pullman as well as this Margaret Mahy one and a new pencil case, and even Sophie spent some of her pocket money on a beautiful stripey lunchbox. I didn't find a book for myself, but I'm looking forward to reading everyone else's.

We ended the day with a fondue at home.

You can see that Stephen is not that much into the funny faces when waiting for the timer to go off. He did enjoy the fondue, though. Bobby lit the fondue and the candles with the official all-clear mammogram letter which finally arrived yesterday, so there was lots of good energy of all kinds around last night.