This place does that to you though, grinds you down, it's the whole sense of hopelessness about it the fear that you'll never get out.
It's those great grey walls that bear down on you, daubed with aggressive, hostile graffiti and the scuffs where kids have kicked balls against the pebble dash.
It's the sort of place that always seems monotone, there's no colour, no vibrancy, nothing. Even the dirt daubed faces of the kids who hang about on the street corners staring at the cars are souless and have the melancholy air of kids who don't stand a chance. Like the happy smiling photograph in a newspaper of some child who's been stolen away by some cruel sub-human, demonised in the tabloids as a 'monster'. It's the faces of those kids that stare at me now, they're sad before they even know what it is they're sad about.
They're like feral children around here, out on the streets before they are old enough to go to school, little sub-urban romulus and remus raised by the stray dogs that stalk through the estate, skinny from neglect with wild eyes rolling in their taut-skinned skulls and some old rope round their neck where some child has tried to keep them as a pet. They run wild, the children. Children and dogs all running in some great, directionless pack, hunting out a purpose and burying their tiny pale-skinned faces in the heaving rib-cages of the hounds trying to absorb some of the warmth from these surrogates because the street is more of a home than the place that they sleep.