On Landing.

It’s hard, in some ways, not to make these blog entries sound something like the narrative parts of “The Wonder Years”. It’s not supposed to be an online diary; it’s supposed to look at US culture through my eyes. But, given the fact that there are still eleven-and-a-half days till I actually go there, the best I can do until then is to walk you through my memories and expectations, plus the mind-numbing lunacy which is moving halfway around the world.

At the moment I’m waiting for a quote for shipping all my stuff. And when I say “shipping” I use the term advisedly. It’s probably going on a boat, on the sea. Probably through Panama. It might arrive with some exciting breed of spider tucked in between the Terry Pratchett books and some photos of Durham. That might be quite cool. Actually, given the fact that Stacey’s hometown was where they shot the film Arachnophobia this might not be the healthiest train of thought. Either way, my stuff is going in cardboard boxes, on a boat, halfway round the world, and it’s expensive, although not as expensive (or as ruinous to the planet) as flying it all there. Exactly how expensive remains to be seen.

It looks like it’s going to be around £800. I had thought £600, but that was when shipping companies were telling me sweet little lies, and before there were revolutions in oil-producing countries, shoving the cost of jet fuel, well, sky-high. Speaking of which, if anyone on the British side of the Atlantic feels like REALLY moaning about petrol prices (because let’s face it, it’s either moan about that or the weather, and it’s sunny at the moment) have a look at this. Prices are true as of April 26th; $1=£0.60 . Sickening, isn’t it? Never mind.

Unleaded Fuel Prices	$/gallon	=	£/litre
San Luis Obispo, CA	$4.17	=	£0.56p
Whickham, Tyne & Wear	$10.58	=	£1.41

But anyway, I’m waiting for an exact quote from various freight companies. There’s only so far you can string that subject out for, and packing is dull, so I tend to daydream. What, for example, am I looking forward to in the first week after I land? There’s the obvious task of renewing old acquaintances, but it’s not a very cultural subject. So, moving on…

Breakfast at the Hacienda Hotel

It’s not an overwhelmingly glamorous affair, breakfast in a relatively modest hotel in El Segundo, a relatively modest part of metropolitan L.A., next to Los Angeles International Airport. It’s not Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Claridge’s or Harry’s Bar. But breakfast at the Hacienda promises the world. On a day when you have breakfast at the Hacienda, you feel anything could be accomplished. Their menu is here. I would gladly have it in a frame on the wall. The reason you feel able to accomplish anything after breakfast might be that a Hacienda breakfast contains an appreciable fraction of the calories required to lift the space shuttle into orbit. In Britain, a hash brown is a perfectly respectable little thing, the size and shape of a deck of cards cut in half corner-to-corner. At the Hacienda, they are golden discs six inches across. They take your jet-lag on and they make it cry. You get two.

 

Highway One

If California State Route One was a person, it’d be Harry Connick, Jr. Oh, so he can play the piano? Just a little, or really well? Ok, phenomenally well. That’s fine, but you say he can sing too? Sure. He can carry a tune? No, he’s got a voice like melted chocolate. And he composes and directs. Writes songs? No, wins Emmies and holds US Patents.

Well, fine, so the guy’s a musician, that’s his job, it’s what he’s good at- wait, what? He’s an actor too? Oh, for crying out loud. Anything I’ve heard of? Memphis Belle, Independence Day and Will and Grace. I see. All this success must mean his personal life’s hell, right? Misery and disaster? Or is he, by any chance, just throwing this out there, married to a Victoria’s Secret model with whom he has three children? Yeah, ok. Well, at least he’s got the good grace to be an ugly bugger, eh? No? Just thought I’d ask.

Highway One is the automotive equivalent. It follows the coast from Orange County to Leggett, 180 miles  North of San Francisco; 655 miles in total. It passes through Huntington Beach, Seal Beach, Santa Monica, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Pismo, Morro Bay (see left) before heading towards Big Sur (Yes, as in The Kooks’ song, see right) crossing Bixby Bridge (Yes, as in the Death Cab For Cutie song). That’s just the first 300 miles of it. I’ll be where I’m going about 50 miles before the bridge, having seen some of the most beautiful coastline in America by doing so, but having missed out on some of the most beautiful coastline in America by stopping halfway.

 

 

Seeing Pelicans

They really are the most fantastic of birds. You will hear me rant about them out of all proportion to their achievement. They just make me laugh. They fly impossibly slowly; you imagine that anything that big, flying at such low speeds, must simply drop out of the air out of sheer embarrassment. They can also dive in the most incredible manner. After gaining height and selecting a target, they pivot on one wing and roll the other over. They plunge into the water from a height of sixty feet or so, breaking the water like gannets. But the gannet is an undeniably beautiful bird, with a pointed bill and kohl-like markings round the eyes, somehow reminiscent of the early jet-powered RAF bombers of the 1950s, all sleek lines and anti-flash white. The pelican looks like a toddler’s drawing of a pigeon. It’s like something out of the Flintstones. They are inherently comical-looking. I saw one land on the railing of the pier at Avila. Slowness of flight is one thing, but grace and control are quite different matters and its momentum nearly took it beak-first into the sink used by fishermen to clean fish caught on the pier. It flapped its wings and hopped from one foot to the other, and by some miracle of balance, completely at the bottom of whatever scale Olga Korbut was at the top of, it stayed upright. I can’t help feeling though, that however comical they look, the pelicans have it all their own way, so the joke must be on us. I love them to bits and I’m determined to get some really good shots of pelicans soon.

 

SLO Farmers’ Market

I am a big fan of the Farmers’ Market movement in the UK, which has exploded over the past decade or so. It has made available high quality, ethically farmed produce available to British consumers at prices which, while not low, are worthwhile and cut out the middle man. For example take the good folks at Broom House Farm in  Witton Gilbert, near Durham. Some of their prime Aberdeen Angus is pictured to the right here, moments before being turned into  steak and ale pie. They also produce Saddleback pork and wonderful lamb and mutton. The meat is phenomenal; it practically cooks itself. I met them at the monthly Farmers’ Market in Durham and have never begrudged a penny I’ve ever spent either there or up at the farm shop itself. The Farmers’ Market has been good for everyone; British consumers, British agriculture, and the market towns where they are held.

The events themselves, however, are somewhat…quaint. Check flannel shirts, flat caps seem to predominate. No matter where you are in the country, everyone behind a stall seems to have a Yorkshire accent. There is the faint feel of Country Life and Horse and Hound. If one stands very still, one can almost hear the Archers theme tune playing, as if by a heavenly orchestra. One is suddenly in a land of Agas and Hunter wellies. Incidentally, I’m not entirely sure whether the pictures of lithe young women showing more than a bit of thigh while wearing rubber boots is either supposed to be ironic or represents a little-suspected but not-entirely-surprising outpost of the underground fetish movement of this sceptred isle….

Anyway, as J.B. Priestley, a fellow northern city boy, put it, it’s sometimes hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins. Two redoubtable and praiseworthy institutions, neither of which I belong to, nor would I wish to. I don’t feel excluded by the people at farmers’ markets in the UK, but I don’t feel like I’m part of their club, and I don’t feel as if I’m missing out.

Predictably, in California they do things differently. In the county seat of San Luis Obispo, Farmers’ Market is a weekly social event. Restaurants from the town erect huge, broad stands. Large areas of Higuera Street are turned into open-air kitchens, where fast-working me and women see to it that skewers are grilled, pizzas are baked, ribs are roasted, tacos are made, gyros are turned, churros are fried and shwarmas are shwarmed. The air is filled with the smell of sizzling meat, spices and charcoal. There are recruitment drives; Democrats, Republicans and various charities seeking donations and membership subscriptions. Naturally, there are market stalls, selling fresh flowers and fruit, vegetables and bunches of herbs the size of footballs.  This is a flavour of what’s going on there tomorrow, at the various street intersections along Higuera:

NIPOMO STREET -- Kappa Alpha PSI - musical petting zoo [really??? What, like, bunnies with banjos?]
BROAD STREET -- Cal Poly Women's Programs - SAFER Event [for more, see here]
GARDEN STREET -- United Cerebral Palsy - Life Without Limits event
CHORRO STREET -- Loren Radis - local singer songwriter [pretty good: see here]

The market has a facebook page. It’s an amazing way to be made to feel part of the town. And you can eat yourself sick for $6.

 

And there you have it. Lots to look forward to. I’ve just booked my stuff to be shipped on Thursday 5th with Anglo-Pacific. Better get back to the packing.

It rhymes with “mucus”….

 

Cayucos, California will be my new home as of two weeks’ time.

I consider myself extremely fortunate for many reasons, but moving to Cayucos surely counts among them. It’s the town in the background of the photo behind this text. It nestles at the north end of Estero Bay, roughly halfway between L.A. and San Francisco. The pushpin on the map shows where, but only roughly. You could be dropped at a location covered by the pushpin on that map and still have a two-day walk to Cayucos.

Actually, it’s not the world’s best map. You have to appreciate that the distance between Cayucos and L.A. is the same as the distance from London to York. That cartoon drawing pin is probably about half the size of Wales. Well, probably not, but probably about thirteen-seventeenths the size of Rutland. Bigger than your average drawing pin, anyway.

Here (right) is a more useful scale map. Here you can see Cayucos in the top-left, at the north end of the bay, playing book-end to the slightly larger town of Morro Bay further south. Actually, Morro Bay has four times the number of inhabitants of Cayucos. The considerably larger university town of San Luis Obispo is off to the east. Even by the standards of small-town California, Cayucos is a fairly small place.

The town website calls it the ‘Last of the California beach towns’. Obviously this isn’t literally true. It’s at the other end of the beach from Morro Bay, for a start. But Cayucos, more than perhaps anywhere else, has retained the style and character of a real American small town.

Bill Bryson once went looking for “Amalgam, USA”- the perfect small town of the films of his youth. This was in the 1987 and 1988, following the death of the author’s father and, in his view, Reagan’s America compared poorly to Eisenhower’s. Bryson had yet to mellow into the cuddly, professorial uncle of his later books, and while his jokes were funny he was nothing if not acerbic in his criticism. He never did find anywhere resembling Amalgam, where

“Bing Crosby would be the priest, Jimmy Stewart the mayor, Fred MacMurray the high-school principal, Henry Fonda a Quaker farmer. Walter Brennan would run the gas station, a boyish Mickey Rooney would deliver groceries, and somewhere at an open window Deanna Durbin would sing. And in the background, always, would be the kid on abike and those two smartly striding men.”

                                  -The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson

But I always feel that he’d have been slightly less disappointed if he’d spent any time in Cayucos. It’s a town of 2,000 people; there’s next to nothing there. A few shops and restaurants. But the charm seems to seep up from the cracks between the paving stones and makes the whole world look better. The town was founded by Captain James Cass, a Bristolian by birth, who came to California via New England in 1867. His house, reputedly haunted, is now a rather classy-looking restaurant. If Bryson shifted his gaze a decade later into the twentieth century, and looked for somewhere where the protagonists in the Beach Boys’ songs might get around, possibly looking meet a California girl who’s had her driving privileges revoked, then he’d do worse than to take a stroll along the beach at Cayucos.

This place has an almost mythical quality in my imagination. Or rather, my memory. The sand is pale and almost powder fine. Just walking along it makes the soles of the feet perfectly smooth. Occasionally a bit on the black and sticky side too; natural tar, seeping from the sea bed in pleasantly mineral-smelling lumps, is washed ashore, melts in the sun and clags to the feet of walkers who may or may not care.  I do know that it’s the most remarkable public beach to simply walk along and watch wildlife from. The pelicans treat it as their own and I believe I had been there four or five times before the dolphins failed to put in an appearance.

The place absolutely oozes quirk from every pore. Having decided today, for example, that taking a crappy, half-plastic ukulele halfway around the world is not an efficient use of space on an oceangoing freighter, that I shall be able to replace it at Alternate Tunings Ukuleles? Oh, on closer inspection it seems they only do lessons and re-stringing now. Never mind- I can console myself by indulging in a bit of retail therapy at Bugga Boo Clothing, a shop selling "Tie dye baby clothing specializing in onesies and tees for ages newborn to 2 years old." Who knew?? 

And so we’ve managed to find a place to rent there. When I say "we", I do mean, of course, that Stacey was the one who did the hard work of finding the place, sorting out the lease and moving all the furniture down over a period of weeks. It’s a fair assumption that any time someone achieves something in concrete terms, it’s going to have been Stace rather than me. It’s small, but there’s just the two of us and the cat. There is an antique marble worktop whose stand needs painting. The grass needs cutting and the garden needs a bit of attention generally. There are shelves which need putting up, but I think Stace might just have saved them for me to do as a sop to my masculine pride after she shifted all the furniture.

I can’t think of a better place for two people who’ve been apart for far too long to settle down. I defy you to look back down the pier here and tell me I’m wrong.