After a recent discussion with a friend about the film of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road – which we’d both seen recently after reading the book – I recommended she read McCarthy’s excellent Border Trilogy novels (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain).

I admitted in a text message later that when I find an author, musician or director I like I can often succumb to a kind of pathological need to track down their entire output and consume it in some obsessive kind of frenzy.

Tragic, obsessive, the best way to live life!

she texted back, making me feel like I wasn’t quite so weird.

It did get me thinking about how often I do this and have done since childhood. To prove it here’s a heavily edited list of highlights of some of the artists for whom I’ve had ‘periods’ (as in ‘my Scorcese period’). In roughly chronological order:

Authors

• Tom Wolfe
• Hunter S. Thompson
• Kurt Vonnegut
• Aldous Huxley
• Roald Dahl
• Peter Carey
• Tolkien
• (E.) Annie Proulx
• Andrew McGahan
• JK Rowling
• Ian McEwan
• Jasper Fforde

Musicians

• The Beatles
  This was definitely the first time I got obsessed with something from popular culture. I got this one early, around the age of eight, and it’s stayed with me to this day. (In the 1970s, before internet or even video, it was a lot harder to meet the needs of an obsessive – my main strategy revolved around checking out the record collections of any house we visited).
• Metallica
  For a few years in my teens I was a metalhead. There, I’ve said it. My friend at school introduced me to Metallica and, in a bizarre twist, within two years I ended up working at a metal magazine and interviewing drummer Lars Ulrich on the phone a couple of times during the making of their Black Album. I’m over it now, thank you very much.
• Hendrix
• Black Sabbath
• The Stooges
• The Rolling Stones
• The Ramones
• Sonic Youth
• Velvet Underground
• The Pixies
• John Spencer/Blues Explosion
• PJ Harvey
• You Am I
• Johnny Cash
• Jonathan Richman/Modern Lovers
• Holly Golightly
• The Magic Numbers
• Dylan
• Detroit Cobras
• The Shangri-Las
• The Drones
• Teenage Fanclub
• Dolly Parton
• Hoodoo Gurus
• Dirty Three
• Neko Case

Directors/TV

• John Waters
  When you’ve seen Pink Flamingoes you can hardly stop there, can you?
• Kubrick
  Ditto A Clockwork Orange
• Woody Allen
• Coen Brothers
• Mike Leigh
• Tarantino
• Scorcese
• Monty Python team
• David Chase
  Had to watch the entire Sopranos in chonological order
• Alan Ball
  As above with Six Feet Under

I can see that at least one of my children has inherited this disorder. Not sure whether I should be proud or worried..?

I grew up near Swindon, a humble town about 120km west of London in the UK. Actually, I grew up in Wroughton, a village just out of Swindon but when you live on the other side of the world – as I have since the early 1980s – and people ask what part of England you’re from you say Swindon. (If that draws a blank you zoom out a bit and go for “sort of near Stonehenge”).

Even as a child I suspected there was something fairly unspectacular about Swindon. I don’t mean that in a nasty way – I just knew it didn’t have the exoticism or historical monuments or tourist drawcards of other parts of the world. For example, for a long time the most interesting things I knew about it were

• The town’s most favoured son is Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a 19th century railway man. Isambard was important enough to have the shopping centre name after him.
• There is a crazy ‘multiple roundabouts’ roundabout in Swindon locals call The Magic Roundabout. Family lore has it that Nanna used to take the long way around town to avoid it. It was apparently voted ‘the fourth scariest junction in Britain’ in 2009 (putting it’s tagline in the same class as The Flight of the Conchords’ ‘fourth popular folk parody duo’).
• Kind of well-know 50s and 60s actress Diana Dors was from Swindon
• Something whacky and complicated happened with Swindon Town Football Club in the 1990s that saw them move up and down the divisions in the league

In recent years however this has all changed. It seems that no matter where I look in popular culture Swindon’s there, giving me a “and you thought I wasn’t cool” kind of glance.

One: The Office

It started with comic masterpiece The Office. In the Season One veiled references were made to the Swindon branch. In Season Two the branches are merged and the Swindoners become part of the team. Neil Godwin who becomes David Brent’s superior is heaps cooler than Brent. (That’s Swindon blood for you).

Two: Jasper Fforde and Thursday Next

Not long after this I started reading Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series of novels. For those who are unfamiliar the five six novel series (The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten and First Among Sequels and One of Our Thursdays is Missing) are a bizarre mix of comedy and fantasy peppered with literary and other high- and low-culture references. They’re set in an alternate history version of today’s world. No prizes for guessing where most of the action takes place – the books are full of locations in and around the big S. Like Fforde’s books his website thursdaynext.com is a world unto itself, and includes a section called The Seven Wonders of Swindon.

Three: The Curious Incident

My third random brush with Swindon in an unexpected context – and the inspiration for me writing this post – came when I read Mark Haddon’s excellent 2003 novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time a few weeks back. Yep, set in Swindon. In a pop will eat itself bonus the main character Christopher even discusses another literary reference to Swindon to add to the list – in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Boscombe Valley Mystery Sherlock Holmes apparently stops for lunch in Swindon town.

Where it all happens.

Feel free to add to the list in comments below.