Last Tuesday I saw "Road" at the Bolton Octagon theatre with Lottie. The writer of the play, Jim Cartwright, is her uncle - and her cousin James played in it. She was excited for these reasons and it being a damn good play she hadn't seen since a decade ago. I was excited as I hadn't visited the theatre in years either, despite my thirst for inspiration. As it was, "Road" turned out to be inspiring indeed, as well as harrowing.

Simply put, the play is about a single Road in a Northern town, and the stories of who live there. It's set in the Eighties, against the backdrop of the massive industrial decline and poverty that struck England. Some of it is funny; the narrator Scullery seems without a care in this world despite sleeping on the Road and being drunk every night. Some on the Road loose themselves in drink, sex and music.. But some characters wonder why they can't escape the feeling something is missing - one boy in particular starves himself to death trying to find out what is missing exactly. And the play ends with four young people in a flat, listening to an old soul record, adding their poetic rants of desperation and crying "Somehow a somehow Ah might escape".. But will they? More than twenty years on, are their lives any different?

In my life now, working in a dreary office on a council estate (Wythenshawe) and living in a former mining town (Kearsley), I have to wonder. Since my move from The Netherlands, I haven't been a happy bunny exactly. My reason for living here, being with my girlfriend, can't be flawed - I'm happy and in love. But besides this it seems, there is only work, commuting and sleep. I re-read the play last Sunday and got out of bed at 3pm feeling angry. While so much more is within grasp - a motorbike license and its ensuing freedom, talking to my family on the phone, grabbing a train to Scotland for a weekend, getting started on my novel again - it seems I just can not. I don't know why. I have to figure it out soon though, as I can quite easily imagine myself sucked into "Road"-like desperation. It already seems to me that since the Twin Towers fell, the years have gone backwards. 2002 in reality was 2000, 2004 was 1998 and OK still, but 2008 is 1994 and it's getting worrying. Soon enough the Eighties will be here all over again - the fashionistas bizarrely dress up for it already. I'd like them to wear greys again as in 1999, when no bright colours were needed to stay cheery - and positivity seemed natural. Perhaps I only dreamt it then, but why then am I so awake now?