On December 24th, 2006 I posted on the blog I had then, a list of ten things I’d done:
- [Bungee jumped from a railway bridge over the Zambezi River at Victoria Falls](https://listed.to/@and another thing/61511/ten-things-no-1)
- [Got on the property ladder, got married and had three children](https://listed.to/@and another thing/61531/ten-things-no-2)
- [Having a happy family life](https://listed.to/@and another thing/61613/ten-things-no-3)
- Held down employment x amount of years.
- Got as far as 1st kyu with two black stripes with GKR Karate.
- 1/3 of the way through a psychology degree
- Travelled for 56 hours on a train between Delhi and Trivandrum. Chai. chai, chai. chai…
- Grown a lawn from seed
- Displayed photography in a public exhibition
- Addressed an audience of more than 200 people at once.
Not quite 20 years later and thought to add a bit of detail. I’m on to no.2…
The first home I bought was in 1997. It was a three bedroom flat in Hackney. A ground floor flat on the Whiston Road Estate, London E2. The Regents Canal runs adjacent to the estate. The block we lived in was within spitting distance of the water We would sometimes see from our kitchen widow canal boats chugging along to or from Pickets Lock at the southern end of Broadway Market. Victoria Park was a 15 minute walk along to the tow path to the east. The Angel Islington about 40 minutes to the west. The City of London was just over 2 miles away.
I was in my late twenties. My wife a couple of years younger. We lived here for just over two years before our first child was born in September 2000. We enjoyed where we lived. We went clubbing, went to festivals, visited museums and galleries, ate out, had walks in the park.
Like now, back then I used to get about mostly on a push bike. I loved riding in London, playing in the traffic. I enjoyed weaving in and out of vanishing spaces. Racing London bike couriers on the congested city streets. When I worked near Kings Cross I could cycle there from home in about 20 minutes. Good times.
We moved out of Hackney in 2001. We were looking for a house with a garden. Though property in London was much cheaper then than it is now such a property was still out of our price range. My family is from Kent. I went to school here. We could afford the kind of place we wanted in Medway. We could have compromised and bought somewhere in London a bit further out. We did not. Counterfactual pondering aside we have no regrets.
There is no town called Medway. There is though the Medway Towns. The name Medway comes from the name of the river that runs through the area before emptying into the Thames Estuary near Sheerness. The towns comprise of Chatham, Gillingham, Rochester, Strood and Rainham. There is also the still quite rural Hoo Peninsula where there are a number of small villages and a power station on the Isle of Grain. We live in Chatham. Chatham sits on what is a dip slope of the North Downs. An AONB (Area of Outstanding National Beauty) that stretches between Farnham in Surrey down to Dover in Kent.
So we moved to Chatham in 2001. Bought a house with a small garden. We were living here when sons two and three were born in the nearby Medway Maritime Hospital in Gillingham. Maritime due to the fact it was built as a naval hospital in the days when the Royal Navy were stationed in the docks here. The navy was in Chatham Docks for nearly 300 years. Maggie Thatcher and her defence minister John Knott brought an end to that in the 1980’s. Thousands became unemployed. It took more than a decade for the towns to find their feet again. Some might argue that things are still a bit wobbly.
Still things were working out for us. After another five years we moved again. Still in Chatham but to a bigger house with a bigger garden. The house was built sometime between 1910 - 1920. It’s a mid terrace. As such the garden is no wider than the width of the house but is about 100 metres long. Just under a year after moving in son number four was born in 2007. We’ve been here ever since. Two of the boys live away from home now. One at university and the other in the area where he went to university. They’re close enough to visit. We all get on.
