The Idler

Swindon

It’s probably my own fault.. as a man with stock phrases, using ‘like a wet weekend in Swindon’ as the last word in pejoratives for any dreary event was probably asking for trouble. But then the year before, my girlfriend had taken us to Rome for my birthday, so you could understand why I got excited when just before the next birthday she’d told me to leave the weekend clear and pack a bag. She didn’t explicitly mention a passport, but I packed it anyway..

I guess she didn’t really know what she was letting us in for. After all, she was from Birmingham so not only did somewhere in Wiltshire sound impossibly glamorous, but even Swindon probably seemed like some West Country Xanadu…

We lasted less than 24 hours. From the dingy hotel with its hysterical guide to the highpoints and history of Swindon (including the wonderful claim that Oasis had taken their name from the town’s leisure centre) to an afternoon at some particularly down at heel and rancid retail park on the other side of town, it was just a protracted trudge through a grimy 70s theme park. We still held out hopes for the evening’s entertainment, although when the least vile bar we could find was some kind of confused Che-style kitsch style job we should have known it was a non-starter. I can’t remember where we ate - I suspect that’s not because it was unmemorable but because it was so unspeakably bad I’ve battled long and hard to keep it deeply, deeply buried in the boxroom of my mind - but I do remember the chilling moment when we realised that the best the evening offered was a Specials covers band at the pub near our hotel… which was sold out. We stuck it out in the upstairs bar, just able to make out the sound of ‘Too Much Too Young’ being murdered through the floorboards until we gave up and headed back to the hotel. We would have made our own entertainment, but 10 hours in Swindon could dampen Mick Hucknell’s libido.
We left by 9am, virtually running to the station. I’ve never been so pleased to see West London.

My girlfriend and I are, surprisingly, no longer together.

Lee Fisher