"The inhabitants sat on deck, clattering with plates and cutlery, while cats arched their backs between pots of geraniums." p. 25

"a few weeks later Sonja came to see me. She was pregnant. ... That day at the grocer's she had handed in her notice; she intended to move to a houseboat on the Lea." p. 50

"I remembered the feeling of astonishment I always had when the train put the yards, buildings, roofs, and scrap heaps of Hackney and Bethnal Green behind it and plunged into open countryside. ... It felt strange to be standing in the very landscape whose sudden transition from town to country, seen from a train window had seemed so unreal to me, and even stranger to think of passengers looking out of passing trains and seeing me standing here now. Somebody peering out of a train window on their way to the airport or the Thames Estuary and astounded by the abrupt change of scenery, momentarily anxious perhaps that she had boarded the wrong train, was probably watching me now, registering me as one of the disconcerting features of the landscape, a nameless item of the incomprehensible and sparse Walthamstow Marsh furniture." p. 56

"We drove past the airport, under the signs for Mississauga. Again and again along the way the city already seemed to be crumbling away into rows of one-storey shops, car dealerships and workshops with gaps between them, only to catch and hold its breath again with yet another suburb." p.102

River by Esther Kinsky

All this is a case for river and sea bound cities, and one reason suburbs strike horror in my heart. So many children's books wax eloquent on this ephemeral land-- a house at the edge of town. I always have an image of the inland shore of Jamaica Bay toying with the back of my mind. If we can't afford rent here, maybe there. But I'm afraid to visit it. I'm afraid it's not as lovely as the shore on the edge of my mind. And that the trains don't actually stop there. That's what makes these landscapes so otherworldly.
The unreachableness.