Room

I read a book this week called "Room", by Emma Donaghue. It's about a boy, named Jack, who is just turning five years old, and lives in an 11 by 11 ft room with his mother, where they are being held captive. They are looked after by "Old Nick", who takes out the trash after Jack has gone to bed, and brings them food and the things they ask for for Sundaytreat. Jack knows of nothing else, and has trouble understanding when his mother explains to him that there's an Outside World to Room.

I was talking about this book with my mum, and the way it was written - how Jack calls the different things in room as if by title, Table and Wardrobe and Rug are the centres of Jack's world.

I thought about it and we all live in a Room, I suppose. Maybe mine's broader - the places I constanly go between are Home and School and the Pool and Poppy's House. There's greater distance between them than in Jack's Room, of course, but it's the same - I've been in the same place for a long time and feel slightly like I'm growing out of it. A combination of an age thing and a dash of wanderlust.

I'm definitely not comparing life in a small town to being held captive as such but it seems to be like living any way for too long – whether in a village populated three hundred or in a huge city, we develop a routine and habits and it becomes our Room. It’s probably healthy, and natural instinct for us to surround ourselves with things that we know to feel safe. But I’m starting to feel too safe. I want to go Outside: maybe not forever, maybe just for a ten minute walk, but the trouble is I don’t know how and although reading “Room” it frustrated me, I’m definitely starting to understand how five-year-old Jack feels, of course in a very different way. But still; not sure whether it's better to be on the Inside, isolated and suffering, or on the Outside, lost and scared, overwhelmed and exposed.