Neiuwegein Oudegein, Netherlands 3.30am

There is an element of superiority in weirdness and otherness, even when that weirdness is an affect of being marooned somewhere as banal as the service station at Neiuwegein Oudegeinoon the A2 autosnelweg, killing time at 3.30 am—the security staff won't arrive at the Ziggo Dome to open the gates to the yard until 6 am and we are only an hour's drive away so we wait.

Do the bus drivers and the truck drivers become addicted to being in these non-spaces: they have a compelling quality—it is one of the things I will miss when (if?) we ever stop touring. I won't miss the other non-places; the hotels, the airports, the dressing rooms—but I will miss finding myself in random roadside locations at ungodly hours.

There is a filmic, celluloid quality, a very peculiar sense of being alive. No one seems ordinary. But no one seems out of place—it is all very David Lynch. There are many such scenarios that I remember vividly; waking from sleeping on a picnic table at a rest stop in California and watching a coyote run across the empty interstate into the desert; by the side of a country road in central France as a mechanic from the garage four miles back where I had filled the tank with petrol instead of diesel drained the fuel from our van (we were saving money by not travelling on the Péage); sitting by a freeway intersection in North Carolina trying to numb a dental abscess with a quarter bottle of Old Grandad (I used the bottle as a hip flask for weeks and still have it somewhere); drunk, giggling men running around a shoulder high field of oats in Aberdeenshire under the stars—this not exactly a non-place but very David Lynch.