In July 1995, when I was 25 years old and working as a reporter on a local newspaper in the north of England, I made my first trip to America, by inveigling my way on to a junket for business journalists to Boston. On the last day of the trip, I jettisoned the itinerary and set out before dawn for the small town of Lowell, 30 miles away.
Lowell is the town in Massachusetts where writer Jack Kerouac is buried and where, a century ago this weekend, he was born. I’d discovered Kerouac about four years earlier, when I read On the Road, during a long coach journey to the bull-running festival of St Fermín in Pamplona, Spain, and then hoovered up his dozen or more roman à clef novels and books of poetry and dream, anything I could get my hands on. I was a fan.
