River Lee Gets Gritty

1st November.

My eldest daughter started nursery in Islington today. My baby has been ‘settling in’ (crying all day) with the childminder nearby. The whole family was up at 6am to trek down the towpath through the scrub-land of Tottenham marshes. Commuting from here is not sustainable, but as we could not get a winter mooring this year we have yet to come up with a suitable Plan B for how to juggle work, childcare and continuously cruising boat life.
“You could almost be in the countryside here,” I remarked to The Doctor as we walked through parkland. “You wouldn’t know that it was London.”
“If it weren’t for the dead body hidden in the undergrowth,” says the Doctor. Perhaps the wild grasses also conceal beer cans and smack needles, I muse to myself. There are electricity pylons overhead and huge cranes in the distance near Tottenham Hale station. The River Lee just got gritty.
We dropped the baby with the childminder at 8.30am and at 9am the Doctor and myself proudly accompanied our eldest daughter to her first day at Willow nursery class. I spent the day there helping her to ‘settle in’ (no crying).
Having roamed for so long I have no idea where I want to settle down, but if the Doctor gets another contract at the university here it would make sense to settle near Angel. It’s near our workplaces, childminder, new nursery and my support network of N1 mums. The only trouble is, a winter mooring (when you can get one) is much cheaper than a month’s rent in an Islington flat. So although we’ve inadvertently ‘based’ our lives there, it’s possible that we can’t afford to actually live there.