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Personally, I used to collect snow globes. I’ve still got hundreds of them at home. In fact, if anybody has been inspired by this and wants to start collecting something, I’d be happy to give you my snow globes to get you started. Although, now that I think about it, one of my daughters – Scarlet – would probably kill me if I did. I think she’s got her eye on them.

Having collected the snow globes for years, I just decided to stop one day. I do that kind of thing sometimes. I kept a diary for eight and a half years and then suddenly stopped. My wife says it’s possibly the most boring thing she’s ever read in her life. ‘Oh God, rain again today. Hope it clears up tomorrow.’ Riveting stuff. I started to ask myself why I was writing it. Was I hoping that somebody would read it when I was dead? Or was I hoping to publish it so that people could see how windswept and interesting I was? Then I decided I would rather have a big book with random writings and collections of theatre tickets and bus tickets and things I had done that day. So, if it was a boring day, I wouldn’t write anything. I finished only one page of that before I got bored shitless and didn’t do it any more.

After Springfield, I headed towards the Kansas state line, riding on Route 66 out of sight of the interstate through rolling wooded hills and wide-open green prairies. It was perfect country for leaning back, enjoying the road and singing its fantastic signature tune to myself.

Although most of us associate ‘Route 66’ with Chuck Berry, or maybe Nat King Cole, or the Rolling Stones, it was actually written by a former marine called Bobby Troup. He’d made a bit of money writing a few tunes for Frank Sinatra, Tommy Dorsey and Sammy Kaye, so he bought himself a second-hand Buick and set off with his wife for America’s entertainment capital, Los Angeles. According to Troup, they stopped for a bite to eat in a restaurant and his wife suggested he should write a song about travelling west by car. At the time, they were on Route 40 east of Chicago, and Troup didn’t feel at all inspired, but the idea intrigued him.

A few days later, having joined Route 66, Bobby’s wife tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Get your kicks on Route 66.’

‘God, that’s a marvellous idea for a song,’ replied Bobby.

He wrote half of the lyrics in the car, but then got stuck. A while later, Bobby was working with Nat King Cole and played him the sections he’d written. Nat immediately urged Bobby to finish the song. More in frustration than anything else, Troup simply used the names of some of the towns and cities he’d driven through during his trip: St Louis, Joplin, Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Gallup, Flagstaff, Winona, Kingman, Barstow and San Bernardino. (Winona is the only one out of sequence, as it was included to rhyme with ‘Flagstaff, Arizona’.) Somehow that list of places managed to encompass the allure, sense of freedom and romanticism of the open road.

Nat King Cole recorded the song and it was a big hit, earning Troup, who went on to write many more songs and star in movies and television series, more than four million dollars in royalties. Over the years, dozens of artists have recorded it, although they often change the lyrics. In most cases they use a shortened version of the song that omits a couple of verses and doesn’t mention a string of towns that appeared in Nat’s original version – Tulsa, Albuquerque, Tucumcari, Needles, Essex, Amboy and Azusa. All of these places still lay ahead of me.

Approaching the Missouri–Kansas state border, my eye was caught by a sign for a place called Precious Moments. Then, outside Carthage, a town near Joplin, huge billboards started to loom up on both sides of the road. They all featured pokey wee characters similar to those ‘Love Is’ cartoons that used to appear in the British press. The wee figures on the billboards would always be saying holy things to one another under a ‘Precious Moments’ banner. My curiosity had been well and truly piqued by the