BEST FRIENDS

I think that it’s really significant that Diamonds are supposed to be a “girl’s best friend”, but that traditionally, man’s “best friend” is his dog. Actually, I’m not all that keen on either diamonds or dogs, but then I’ve never really found myself to have all that comfortable a fit within society as a whole.

Fizzbok at the moment seems eager for me to grade my friendships into various categories or degrees of friendship, which seems like a recipe for disaster for certain personal relationships to me. Like having a “league” on your speed-dial, none of us want to be “graded” and find out that we are not considered to be “close” friends any more but have been “demoted” to the level of merely being a “passing acquaintance” or “someone I worked with once”.

This, rather naturally I imagine, is their response to the competition from other “social networking” sites who have their “circles” so that you can keep personal information about your more “wild” antics away from your more intimate relationships, which is only a natural thing to want to do, I suppose, but does move us all into a whole world of deception and secrets which might be considered an unhealthy shift in matters of personal openness.

You can say what you like about these sites (and many do) but they were developing a pretty level playing field and were very democratic. By telling one person something, you were pretty much telling everyone and, whilst some people wisely proceeded with a certain amount of caution, others seemed to forget this and would be shocked if their employer suggested that one or two of the pictures they posted were deemed “inappropriate” for the position they held, or when family quietly suggested that the overly intimate pictures of their children that they had posted could be seen by far more people than just dear old grandma.

“Best” friends… How do you define that anyway? If it’s someone you see regularly, I have none. If it’s someone you exchange messages with on a regular basis, those who would most qualify probably wouldn’t be the obvious choice that people who actually know me would consider. I did have a “best” friend for many years - or at least I think I did - but nowadays I’m not so sure that I have. Different lifestyles and priorities have changed us both beyond recognition and we barely see each other any more. I like to think that we both know that if either of us ever really needed the other, then we would be there for them, only I’m not entirely sure whether I’d even ask these days.

Anyway, when it comes to matters of a more abstract notion of gender, you can blather on about “Mars” and “Venus” to your heart’s content, the truth is that men are from Earth, and women are from Earth and we need to get used to the fact, and that pretty everything that men and women can do, apart from the obvious biological limitations, can be done just as well - and sometimes considerably better - by someone of the opposite sex, and we should stop trying to perpetuate some kind of gender war with our ridiculously stereotyped notions of what it is to be a man or a woman in this crazy mixed up world of our which has enough tensions in it without us deliberately adding further complexities to it.  Maybe if they can start making “Diamond Dogs” we’ll all be able to have a “best friend” so maybe that famously occasionally androgynous Mr Bowie was on to something after all.

It’s strange, really, Mr David Bowie has a lot of fans amongst people I know and whom I have yet to determine the category of. Perhaps it’s their ages? Maybe musical preferences might be a good way to go in terms of sorting them out into their various pigeonholes…? It’s something to consider, anyway.

Somehow, however, as musical influences go, Mr B somehow never really managed to get onto my radar. My sister’s record collection which ended up being a big influence on my own musical tastes later on, making me aware of things like “Hawkwind”, “Harvey Andrews”, “Zeiger and Evans” and “The Monkees” when other people my age had all but forgotten them, did contain one LP called “Pin Ups” but I don’t recall it being played very much – I think that I was more fascinated by the bizarre cover art - and so his music did rather pass me by.

Apart from “Space Oddity”, of course, which was always on “Top of the Pops” for a while and probably piqued my interest because of all those “space” references, and my friends probably danced a lot to “Modern Love” and “Let’s Dance” whilst I stood at the side of the room being too “cool” (or – more likely - far too self-conscious) to dance at the Sunday night youth club and other parties.

Sudden flashback to watching the silhouettes of the vicar’s many daughters moving and shaking very beautifully through the near-darkness of some living room or other, all happily blaming “it” on “the boogie” whilst I sat on the couch being ignored by them and trying (and failing) to look “cool” about it. Happy days…

One former girlfriend did have a selection of David Bowie’s LPs which, I think, were (for a time) all that remained after she cleared out, and even those I don’t remember us playing all that much either, and certainly not afterwards. I guess it’s those little personal experiences that can influence how we respond to certain musicians and what they do, and it can sometimes have nothing to do ith their talent or ability. If it reminds us of something sad, we’d just rather not listen. I did once buy a “Greatest Hits” double CD set, although that just seemed to gather a lot of dust, too.

It’s all rather ironic, of course, that, when I think back, I can remember the record sleeves far more than the tunes, which probably just proves that I was always far more interested in the visual arts than the aural ones... 

SHUTTLING OFF

Of course, the “piggy back” fly-pasts were impressive, invoking the image of those very similar test flights with dear old “Enterprise” in its own Jumbo Jet Combo back in the 70s, and I’m sure that the exhibits at each of the three - or is it four? - destination museums will be suitably impressive and awe-inspiring, but there was something quite sad about the transportation to their final resting places of the remains of the once rather glorious fleet of Space Shuttle Orbiters.

The Space Shuttle Discovery’s last flight, and the similar one made by Enterprise to New York a few days later, really felt like they marked the very end of an era, or at least, the beginning of the end of an era, as the remaining shuttles have yet to be transported.

After its 39 missions in space, a short hop on the back of a jumbo jet to take it to its final resting place at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. was never really going to be quite as impressive or spectacular as any of its previous flights, of course, but still the crowds came out to see what was, in the end, at least in part the final act of a programme which, whilst it might not exactly have “thrilled” the majority of us, was part of life for over thirty years.

It was also, I suppose, likely to have been one of those “last chance to see” moments in life as, seeing as there are a limited number of Orbiters and a finite number of places to which they are likely to be taken, it’s fairly unlikely that anyone will get that many chances in life to see one of them actually in the air, albeit hitching a ride atop another aircraft and not travelling under their own steam.

Well, not unless a bloody great asteroid turns up on a collision course and a maverick group of Space Jockeys are needed to blow the thing to kingdom come and one of the retired shuttles is the only thing available, and, I suspect that’s a fairly unlikely scenario.

Well, getting the shuttle out of mothballs and making it airworthy again, that is. Give or take a decade and I’m not sure anyone will have the knowledge and experience to actually manage that. 

However, I’m not quite as convinced about the unlikelihood of the asteroid...

It used to be all so different. The shuttle program(me) once represented the great hope for cheap, efficient reusable space travel in the days when we all thought we’d grow up to see hover-cars and personal jet packs and clothes made out of tin foil.

I wonder what happened to all of those dreams?

When I was younger, I seem to remember (although I am willing to be persuaded that this is an instance of my increasing susceptibility to “false memory syndrome”) that the Space Shuttle “Enterprise” did indeed once do, at the very least, a “fly-past” of the Manchester area on one of those Jumbo Jets during the years it was being tested. It may very well have even touched down at Manchester Airport, but I’m less sure of my “facts” about that.

In some ways they were always slightly disappointing from a certain point of view. After all, didn’t evil  zillionaire Hugo Drax build his own fleet of space shuttles to assist him in his plans for world domination in 1979’s “Moonraker”...? Where’s a bit of private enterprise when you need it, eh? Obviously, the whole “wiping out most of the world’s population” part of the plan might meet with a certain amount of customer resistance, but somebody building a private shuttle fleet does have its plus points. In fact, just to show that I’m not as averse to appreciating the march of capitalism and the power of market forces as some might have you believe, I think that the shuttles he built in the “private sector” were far better than the ones which NASA were building with public funding. Drax’s did, at least have working engines which made the whole opening scene a possibility, otherwise that entire James Bond film would have to be dismissed as a lot of old tosh...!

Oh, right... I see where you’re coming from now...

Still, back in the real world, I’ve written at some considerable length about the “Space Shuttle Program” before, of course, so I’m not planning (you might be surprised to hear...) to go over any more of that well-trodden old ground today. I merely wanted to take a moment to mark the perhaps final passing into history of one of the greatest engineering and scientific projects of the age.

As a post-script, the link below will take you, if you are so inclined, to an article I found online about the various final resting places of all of the surviving shuttles, which I hope that you will appreciate, and it may very well persuade you to take a trip to go and see one or more of them some day.

I know that I would like to...

Enjoy!

http://www.collectspace.com/shuttles/

WHY MUST THEY ALWAYS CHANGE THINGS?

“Chunner... chunner... Blogger upgrade... Chunner... chunner... Me no likey... Am I always so resistant to change...? Discuss...”

“When's it happening?”

“Well, I got transmogrified today, but I kind of guessed that young professionals like yourself probably clicked the link months ago and I was the last of the 78 r.p.m. brigade left in the world... You know me, always reluctant to change... I mean it seems straightforward enough, but everything's in a different place to where I'm used to and I really no likey that sort of thing... Hence... Still no "timeline" hereabouts... (although I'm sure that's "imminent" too...).”

“If I did then I missed it...”

“Oh, I'm sure forward-thinking young bucks like yourself have been working on "new-style" blogger for months now so you probably wouldn't even notice the final rollover when it occurred because you'd already embraced the future. It's just old "stick-in-the-muds" like me who try to hang on to what's familiar for far too long... so unless your latest posting contains much that adds up to utter confusion, I'll assume that you're probably quite safe...”

You might not have noticed much in the big wide world at large, but here in BlogWorld, behind the scenes, huge changes have been afoot and, in all honesty, I really haven’t enjoyed them very much.

You see, the simple daily pleasure of rattling out a few words for the general amusement and/or entertainment of whatever passing stranger might come across them has had something called a “new interface” foisted upon it. This is supposed to be far clearer, simpler and ultimately far “better” than the old style one in much the same way as a plastic and chrome Datsun Cherry was considered far superior to the oak veneer and leather of a stately old Rolls Royce.

It’s the kind of idiot thinking that shifts a major news programme two hundred miles away from where all the government and other entertainment industries are, but I shouldn’t keep returning to that familiar old story... That ship has (unfortunately) sailed...

Oh, I’m sure many, many people claim to “love” it and will embrace the change as it makes it, allegedly, far, far easier to work with, but for those of us rather too familiar with the old ways, it really doesn’t seem to make all that much sense.

And not due to my usual resistance to change, either, the bloody thing’s just that little bit more horrible, that little bit more bland and homogenous, and parts of it really don’t work all that well. Certain operating systems are now “no longer supported” which means that some bloggers who were perfectly happy with the way things were are now no longer inside the loop and must be forced to change in order to adapt and survive.

That said, my “state-of-the-art” relatively new telephonic device named after a soft fruit really doesn’t seem to like it at all, so maybe those rinky-dinky little designers have forgotten a few things along the way in their hurry to embrace the future.

Some people would call that “evolution” or the “survival of the fittest”, but change for change’s sake is never a good reason for making the change in the first place, really.

Some aspects are now more “instinctive” which means that you click on a picture instead of a word in a box which to my mind is pandering ever more towards an ultimate general level of public illiteracy that those of us who consider ourselves just the slightest bit prone towards being thought of as word-wranglers might find just the teeniest bit offensive, but then any insistence upon embracing the so-called “old” or “traditional” ways is now starting to look as if it might get a bit ugly.

A few days ago I was presented with a link to a “hilarious” image of a row of people reading on the tube with their various devices and I was supposed to find it amusing that the man on the end was reading a book.

Oh yes, very funny, all very 2012…

What really ticked me off about it, however, was the long list of “I reckons” attached to it which somehow seemed to imply that the chap actually reading the “book” was somehow “retarded” in some way, whether fiscal or otherwise, as if there was something fundamentally “wrong” with him for blatantly displaying such an object in public.

I did wonder whether the great and the good of those making up the passengers of the London Underground were now likely to start bullying and taunting anyone found reading something so very “retro”, who would then be laughed at and pointed at for their “eccentric” habits, and people like myself who regularly slip a paperback into our pockets on long journeys are likely to try and hide it away from public view for fear of being mocked and shunned.

Meanwhile... Designers, eh…? Tssk! They just love to change things…

It’s a brave new world, boys and girls, and don’t you lust love it...?

HOW TO EMBED A MEMORY

Just how do you go about “locking” a memory into the mind? I only ask because I’m starting to find that some of the more “significant” ones keep on managing to somehow slip away from me, almost as if they never happened at all.

For example, as anyone who regularly reads these musings will already know after me tediously going on and on about it for several lifetimes now, I recently went on holiday.

All very well and good. Yes, I had a nice time, thank you for asking.

A couple of days ago I was watching a TV programme that had been filmed in much the same neck of the woods as I visited during my trip and I was able to say, in that way you might have, “Been there!” only…

Somehow it was difficult to grab a hold of the memory and convince myself that I actually had “been there” if you see what I mean...? Somewhere, in the back of my mind there’s a bit of me that knows with something approaching absolute certainty that between one huge slab of working days at the start of the year, and the latest ongoing slab that I’m currently negotiating my way through, there was a definite two-week period when I was far away from all this in another land, enjoying other experiences and trying to live in the moment, but somehow it’s very difficult to believe that I was ever really there.

I think that it’s got a lot to do with everyday routine. The days can all get very similar when you stack them up one after the other in the average working year. Day after day, all of them exactly the same, with very little variety. I’ve had entire decades manage to slip away into that particular sea of monotony, as, I believe, many other have, too. Of course it is always those little variations that do help the individual days become slightly more “memorable” than those that immediately surround it, but, after a while, the repetitive routine seems so “normal” that it is the aberrations, the ones that stray from the mean, that somehow don’t quite fit the pattern that the brain is trying to construct and so it seems to download them to a deeper, darker file that is far more difficult to access.

Instead the brain remembers a whole pattern of similar days and the ones spent in the sunshine, on the beach or whatever don’t quite fit in some way, and are therefore buried and it’s sometimes just very hard to imagine that you ever did anything else at all. You look back and your mind tells you “Work day, work day, work day…” etc., back as far as you can remember. There’s a “blip” between the work days a few weeks ago, but the brain dismisses that and the pattern can feel like it is just an endless, unchanging list of those very similar days.

I don’t know, perhaps it is just me, but I really struggle to get a grip on those days filed away as “other” which is why I’m grateful for the photographs even if it’s becoming very difficult to believe that it was actually me that took - or was in - them.

I do have some theories, though, about how to combat it. Perhaps I need to book my holidays far longer in advance. This would, I trust, increase the levels of expectation and anticipation by such a significant degree so that hopefully, when the great day of departure itself actually arrived, it would seem far more “special” or “memorable” by having been so looked forward to, and subsequently, the arrival (“Finally got here!”) would seem that much sweeter.

If only I could get away from all that fretting and worrying about things that I do…

This is, after all, why people spend so much time and energy in planning their weddings, I suppose, otherwise you’d just get up, get hitched and carry on with life, which might seem a bit “Meh!” in retrospect.

The other option is far less practical and involves taking a week off both before and after the fortnight of the holiday itself in order to allow the brain time to adjust to a different set of circumstances. I do believe, after all, that retired people really seem to enjoy their holidaymaking far more and get far more benefit from them than the average working stiff does, and I can only put this down to that their brains are entirely focused on the holiday itself and all of those tricky little things like deadlines and emails and meetings don’t clutter up their minds in the same way and, instead, they can just allow themselves to concentrate entirely on the tricky little notion of enjoying themselves, capturing the moment and having a bit of fun.

Whatever that is…

I’ve often struggled to manage to “live in the moment”. Recently I tried to capture some moments on video using a function of my little camera, but it’s still difficult not to remain detached from them when you’re sitting in your own living room watching them on TV a couple of months later. It can still feel like it was really someone else having all of that elusive fun.

Even if  I genuinely try to sit myself down, gaze towards the horizon and really try to force myself to remember a particular moment, whatever it might be, and make a real attempt to seize it and hold on to it tightly for all it is worth, I can still find it hard to picture myself there, even though I know deep down that I must have been.

Bloody hell, it’s hard being me… I know it is, because I’ve been there. Well, at least I think I have...

THE BRIDGE

The one thing in California that I am constantly drawn back to is the Golden Gate Bridge which is rapidly approaching the 75th anniversary of its opening although, like a lot of things which become “instantly iconic” landmarks, it really does seem like it should have been there forever.

The bridge has featured heavily in every single visit that I have made to the so-called “Golden State” over the years. Every single time I feel drawn to it, as if I need to see it because the bridge impresses me… and perhaps the bridge obsesses me… or even possesses me… even though I know that this is just melodramatic hyperbole and it’s just because, as bridges go, I do find this one particularly beautiful.

Every single time I take a ridiculous number of pictures of it, and yet every time I return to it, I still feel the need to take some more, often from the very same viewpoints that I took the last lot from, and looking very much the same as it did six, eight and sixteen years ago.

The very first time that I saw it “in the flesh” as it were (or should that be “in the steel”…?) was during that very first trip, and the very first thing I did, after becoming ridiculously excited as I exited the road tunnel immediately to the north of it on that long-ago February afternoon, was to drive across it. There it was in front of me, the north tower and, before I knew it, that now familiar “clunk, clunk, clunk” as the tyres passed over each panel of the roadway was being made by the green Mustang that I was driving and I was actually driving across the Golden Gate Bridge…!

Little old me from Nowheresville, Eng-er-land. Who’da thunk it?

The next day I walked along the Fisherman’s Pier on the sea front, just down from Pier 39, and took a ridiculous number of pictures of it as it “spanned the gate”, and then I drove across it in the other direction, parked up at the vista point, and walked across it and back, snapping away with my old Nikon, in what has turned out to be one of those more thrilling personal “moments” that we sometimes get to remember in our lives. Then I drove up onto the headlands, to the rather more famous viewpoints, and took a load more pictures.

And every single time I am lucky enough to return, I pretty much go and do exactly the same thing, more or less. One time that walk was taken after walking across the city and through the Presidio all the way from the Coit Tower and yet the excitement of being on that bridge again and taking those same photographs again almost managed to make me forget quite how much my feet were hurting.

On another visit, to those headlands viewpoints, a sea fog had rolled in which almost made the bridge invisible, but still worth the visit, even if my pictures taken in the fog were nothing like the beautiful ones which feature on so many of the postcards. How many pictures of that bridge could I possibly need? And yet it constantly draws me back, and I constantly find myself clicking away on the shutter of whatever camera I happen to be carting about with me this time.

I even buy books about its construction, (sometimes with the excuse that I once intended to write a play about it which I never seem to actually get around to doing…), or pictures to hang in my little house of the eye-wateringly vertiginous views that were taken whilst it was being built back in the 1930s, which I never could have taken if I’d been the photographer, such is my fear of heights.

I know that a lot of the workman involved in its building were there because of the absolute poverty brought on by what we now call the “Great Depression”, but I’m still pretty sure that I couldn’t ever have been persuaded to go up onto those high towers to hammer in any rivets, no matter what they were offering. I still get mildly giddy if I walk on the pedestrian sidewalk next to the roadway, and, strangely, I find myself feeling more queasy when I stand next to the towers and look up at them than when I look down at the drop towards the waters below. I even get slightly wobbly when the cyclists whizz past me as, in my mind’s eye, a topple over the handlebars could take you over the handrail and the inevitable sad outcome.

This time around, however, we did actually manage to find a new angle on the bridge. At least it was for us at any rate, although I’m sure millions of tourists both before and since have seen it in much the same way. We took one of those hour-long “Red and White” cruises to go out into the bay, pass under the bridge itself and then return via the island of Alcatraz, which gave us opportunities to see both of those iconic tourist destinations from what were completely new points of view as far as we were concerned. It’s always good to look at something familiar in a new light - It quite changes your perspective on it.

The problem with anything that is quite so familiar and (possibly – although I would have to dispute that) over-photographed is in finding a “new” way to do it. For example, this year’s San Francisco Visitors Planning Guide, to celebrate that 75th anniversary of the bridge, has it on its cover, photographed from a spectacular “new” angle (although I suspect that the agency employed to deal with it did have to wonder long and hard as to whether there were any new ways of taking a photograph of it) taken looking straight down the north tower on the Marin County side and it’s a pretty breath-taking shot which certainly caught my attention.

I can also be fairly certain that it’s not an angle which I will be considering photographing the bridge from myself any time soon, if I ever get the chance to return. That last angle, I think, will always be denied me. After all, the only real option to do so, apart from applying for a job in bridge maintenance which, I think you’ll agree, we’ve already pretty much ruled out, is to trust my fate to one of those helicopter trips, and, to be frank, I don’t think that you’re ever, ever, going to persuade me that getting into a helicopter is a good idea.

Even if it was to fly over that most iconic and beautiful of bridges.

SIGNS

One of the things that I love about America is its signage. It can be so fiendishly complicated that it makes exiting the Freeway the most terrifying of prospects, and yet so fiendishly simple and direct at the same time. In marketing terms, no opportunity for a bad rhyming couplet is ignored so that a small town pizzeria, for example, will survive on the most excruciatingly awful punnery.

“We toss ’em… They’re awesome!” is the one that has stuck with me (which goes to show that it works…) but there were plenty more, and such techniques really become ubiquitous as even a little pizzeria like that will have signs bearing its slogan on the highway anything up to fifty miles away so that a silly little phrase like that one will have already stuck in your head long before you get to the town itself, and the familiarity of seeing it again and remembering it from when you were on the road is very effective.

We didn’t eat there of course, but I’m pretty sure we got some nice shots of the outside of their shop.

Wherever you go, some little shop or other will be doing its level best to draw attention to itself. That is, of course, only to be expected in a country which is so brutally led by market forces. Sometimes it seems as if every available surface has been covered with as much marketing material and signage as is humanly possible, and then they’ve added some more.

In Sonoma, for example, every sign we saw seemed to bear the logo “Sonoma Signs” in the corner, as if someone had personally made it his mission (or at least his job) to provide as many signs as it was humanly possible to do in one small town. Still, perhaps even in America there must come a saturation point where nobody else feels that they need any more signs, and if that were to happen, what would become of his small-town sign-making business?

More evidence of this could be seen in the central valley where every farm seemed to have a hand-painted sign in very similar style showing the name of the farm, a picture of the farmer and his family, and a picture of whatever fruit or vegetable they grew. It was almost as if a sign-painter had gone to every door of every farmhouse and asked them if they wanted a sign painting for next to the highway, which is, I suppose, precisely what did happen.

As we were strolling around the various small towns we visited recently, I became rather obsessed with the signage, and started pointing my camera and clicking at just about every sign I saw. Perhaps it was the latent graphic artist in me resurfacing, whilst I was supposed to be “off duty” (although can anyone who works in the visual arts ever really be “off duty”…?), but I did so much so that I probably have far too many of the dullest set of holiday pictures ever taken.

Interestingly too, I was mooching around in a gift shop towards the end of the trip, wondering whether the luggage weight allowance would allow me to buy a couple of books of old postcards which I was looking at when the proprietor of the restaurant attached to the shop came in and told the woman behind the counter that she was to allow the young girl with him to take anything she needed and charge it to him. Then he rather proudly gave his reason. This young girl was going to be creating their “new” signage in the near future.

He seemed very impressed, in that way older men can sometimes do when around a young girl, that she was able to recreate “By hand!” pretty much any typeface she wanted to. Even though I was inwardly snorting with derision at another example of a graphic artist convincing another customer that something that comes so easily to us is something deceptively complicated, on later reflection I realised that the old sign-writing skills are probably very rare in this day and age where much of the typography that you see is laid out, created and rendered on machines, and perhaps the ability to hand paint such things is far more unusual than it was in my day when hand lettering skills were ten a penny.

Certainly now, when I begin the endless trawl through all of those photographs that I took, I’m more aware of just how many old hand-painted signs there seem to be in the parts of America which I have visited, and they are the ones that I remember especially clearly, and on the old photographs in that postcard book that I did eventually buy and bring home, it is the old signs that speak to me of  old-time America and how different a “Go get ’em” world it seems to have been from the repressed, understated ways of old Europe.

I suppose that maybe, like a lot of holiday snaps which include certain things that might seem currently a little mundane, perhaps one day they’ll be seen as historically fascinating even if, at this precise moment, even I’m just looking through them thinking “Why on Earth did I take that one…?”

When it comes to my snapshots, for example, I can get quite irritated when a modern car sneaks into the frame but, in about twenty years time, perhaps I will look through them again and be intrigued by all those old cars and bizarre fashions that we once wore and have to remind myself why all the people who kept getting “in my way” were looking at tiny little screens as they walked along.

The potential for million “Channel 57” retrospective evenings about the first part of the century, with social observers, columnists and radio DJs burbling on about things like “Do you remember iPhones…? Yeah, I had one of those… I could never get it to work properly…” comes to mind and I shudder at the thought…

NICENESS COSTS SOMETHING

Sonoma is a nice town. We’ve always thought so, ever since we first visited and did the whole “wine tour” bit nearly a decade ago. Somehow we find Sonoma Valley (or  “The Valley of the Moon”) the slightly more pleasant destination than its more famous neighbour the Napa Valley when it comes to a straight choice between Californian Wine growing regions to the north of San Francisco.

Sitting just forty miles or so to the north of the Golden Gate bridge, this made it the obvious choice as a place to acclimatise and recuperate from the journey, and to adjust to the cultural shift required when you plonk yourself down inside a new country where even things like the urinals in the so-called “restrooms” can suddenly seem strange and unusual and mysterious and difficult to handle.

Sonoma is, like many American towns, based upon a grid system which is centred on a town square. This meant a bit of confusion for my flight-addled brain as we arrived because I forgot quite which of the roads to take to get to the motel we usually stay in, and so I found myself exploring roads running at ninety degrees to the ones I thought I was, getting frustrated and, in the end, giving up the search and heading towards the “Visitor Center”.

This can happen a lot if you’re driving in a grid matrix and don’t have that notion of place that Americans seem to be born with hard-wired into their brains. North, South, East, West, Left, Right and Town Name comma State seem to give the natives a very precise sense of place which I find rather incredible coming from the geographical vaguenesses of England. I’m not sure that I’m explaining this very well, and perhaps it is just me, but I’ve never really had that same sense of place as the ordinary people seem to have in the States.

Despite the fact that notions of “Left” and “Right” make perfect sense to me and were learnt at a very early age (something to do with tying shoelaces if I recall correctly...), somehow they get “flipped” when I’m in America, so that, when somebody tells me to take the next left, for example, I will understand perfectly and yet my brain and all of my instincts will insist that left is right and I will act accordingly even though I know better. This can get very bewildering when you are on the Freeway, when you are being told about “right exits” and you keep on looking for them on your left. Eventually, of course, you adjust, right up until that moment when you panic and your instincts start to kick in and then you can very quickly resort to being all over the place again.

Maybe it is just me. It’s just a very odd state of mind to explain and to get across to other people, but it also leads to a certain amount of geographical confusion when you’re trying to navigate yourself around in an unfamiliar town.

As to that basic certainty everyone giving you directions seems to have about where the cardinal points are, well, again, it’s just not the way we think about space back in England, Europe.

Someone will tell me to go three blocks North, for example, thinking that they are being perfectly clear, not realising that they’re talking to someone who has a vague understanding that his garden has a South facing aspect, but the road to get home twists and curves so much that the sun can be setting behind me (in the West... right?) and then to my right, and then right in front of me, sometimes within a quarter of a mile. Grid systems obviously make a sense of direction in relation to the larger planet a very sensible way of thinking about things, but probably doesn’t sit well with our older and more shambolic and eclectic town planning systems that are still, in some cases, taking into account street plans made in the middle ages and earlier.

Anyway, I was going to write about Sonoma today, wasn’t I? Going to the “Visitor Center” proved to be a good call, to be honest, and I wish that I’d just bitten the bullet and gone there straight away instead of insisting to myself that I knew where I was going. A pleasant chat with an ex-pat Scottish lady who’d lived in the States since 1976, a lovely clear map of the town (always a plus), and a discount on our Motel of choice quite cheered us up. We also noticed that the “Cheese Factory” shop was still around, but sadly that the shoe shop where I bought my Converse Trainers six years ago was no longer there.

“Yes” we thought, “It’s still a nice town.”

This is a town, after all, where much of the economy is based on Wine Production which probably makes for a very mellow outlook on life. Historically, it is such a centre of reasonableness that apparently all four sides of the Town Hall were designed to look the same so that all four sides of the Town Square had the same view of it and all of the businesses could claim to be opposite the Town Hall.

A compromise, yes, but one built on “niceness” and a sense of civic pride.

But living in a “nice town” does tend to come with a price. A couple of things did give me pause to wonder whether that price is worth paying. The first was the request to sign a “city ordnance” as we checked into the Motel, one which required us not to make any loud noises after 10pm at night. The second was when we went for lunch and tried to order a beer. Now, neither of us are exactly youthful, but the friendly barkeep was rather insistent that we could not be served a beer without picture I.D. and was absolutely resolute about this. Unfortunately, this was the one time when the Passports had been locked in the safe back at the Motel, so our lunch was accompanied by lemonade that day. We were told that this was likely to happen anywhere we went, so we spent the rest of our time with our Passports resolutely kept about our persons, but this was the only time it happened and so tends to become more of an annoyance retrospectively.

And that’s what I mean really. In “the land of the free” it seems that it’s quite easy to sign away some of those freedoms by voting in bye-laws that make your life a little nicer, but also a little more restricted. I’ll accept that alcohol and noise control are probably not the worst things to have to deal with if it keeps your community a contented and happy place, but it’s knowing just where to stop, isn’t it? How many more of those “little freedoms” are you prepared to give away in order to keep your community “safe”, and at what point does the community itself start to resent this continual interference in its life?

Take a look at the picture of the sign over on the right which I took on another day in another town. It’s just a long(ish) list of “restrictions” to people’s basic “little freedoms” that I saw in a town that prides itself upon being a place where people go to have “fun”. None of them in themselves are unreasonable, and all of them probably make life less stressful for those people who are quietly going about their business on the boardwalk, but equally, perhaps the more you restrict those little outlets for what might be termed “youthful exuberance”, the more people might try to find other, less pleasant ways to let those needs out, and in a country where the right to bear arms is written in the constitution, it’s hardly surprising when a little bit of repressed “youthful exuberance” can sometimes boil over in to something far more tragic.

It’s just a thought, and none of it makes Sonoma any less of a nice town, but of course sometimes it is in those “nice towns” that horrible things can happen, and it’s usually then that people start to say things like “How can something like this happen here. This is a nice town”.

OUT OF SEASON

I’ve always been drawn towards places “out of season” as it were. There’s something comforting I find about them which I can struggle to track down when they’re buzzing and “fun” and full of life at the times of year when the tourists are packing the streets with their laughter and noise. Somehow I just like them more when there’s a hint of drizzle in the air and an all-pervading gloom and melancholia has begun to shroud the amusement palaces and funfairs, which gives them an almost abstract and functionless quality which just kind of works for me.

I can recall being sent to Great Yarmouth on a business trip in the run-up to Christmas more than a decade ago now, and somehow those icy winds, crashing waves and steel grey skies seemed to bring the various qualities of the slight sadness of a seaside town in winter, waiting for the people and the joy and the income to return, into some sort of sharp relief which pleased me on a level so deep that I can’t really begin to explain it. Somehow I get the impression that I just liked the town more in the depths of winter than when the gaudy, tawdry nature of the pursuit of “fun” is at its height.

Perhaps I am just drawn towards the more miserable side of life. I think, perhaps that it’s due to my long-held suspicion of what I refer to as “organised fun” in which I am deemed to be “supposed” to be enjoying what everyone else has decided is a “fun” thing to do, even if, for me, it patently is not. I don’t think that it’s at all unusual to think that way, by the way. I accept that it’s just sometimes easier to go along with what the crowd is doing, even if it makes you personally extremely miserable, but, rather a long time ago now, I made a decision that doing something you don’t like just because everyone else with you thinks that it’s going to be fun is a colossal waste of time, energy and effort, and, to be brutally honest, nine times out of ten, I’d quite simply rather not, if you don’t mind.

Thinking back, I can even remember writing an essay about the miseries of a seaside town in winter when I was eleven years old which contributed to my unprecedented ninety-six percent result in my English Language end-of-year exam that year. I don’t know. You’d think I’d have ended up as some kind of writer or something with that sort of a pedigree but, alas, that moment was a high point and it’s been downhill all the way since then. I can’t, naturally, remember a word of that essay now, of course, although I am beginning to wonder whether the eleven-year-old me put it all far more eloquently and succinctly than I am managing to do today.

There is a point to all this rumination, which I will now share with you, because that is, after all, rather the point and, for better or worse, it’s what I like to do for “fun” (or whatever equivalent it may have in my particular version of the universe). So it was that, a few weeks ago, we found ourselves in Santa Cruz in early March. Santa Cruz is, of course, rather famous for its coastal amusement park that exists on its “Boardwalk” and, consequently, might not initially seem like my kind of place at all, but I think that you might just be misjudging me, or it, or both, if you were to make that assumption. After all, February is pretty much “out of season” in anybody’s book. Now, “out of season” in California probably doesn’t much resemble  “out of season” in Blackpool or any other of the British seaside towns. The sun was still shining brightly and it was still warm enough for the beach volleyball nets to be fully occupied on a late Monday afternoon, but nevertheless, the Boardwalk was pretty much closed for business.

We had, of course, been drawn to Santa Cruz for various reasons. We’d been renting episodes of HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” before we went on holiday which had reintroduced me to the rather dubious delights of the idea of an old-fashioned seaside town, and my quick glance through the Guidebook had made me aware that there was supposed to be an original old-fashioned Carousel somewhere in the fairground which sounded like it might be well worth going to see. Sadly, it turned out that that little gem was all locked up for the winter along with all the other rides, but we did, at least, get a glimpse of it through the glass, and it still looked rather wonderful. After strolling through the park and back I now have far too many none-too-brilliant pictures of an empty fairground in all its tasteless, gaudy and tattered finery than is strictly necessary and it left me feeling rather gloomy as we walked up to the end of the pier, sorry “wharf”, as the sun started setting, taking far too many pictures of the birds, the sea lions, the seafront as viewed from the wharf, and the wharf itself.

Of course, in this instance “gloomy” is good.

I had been to Santa Cruz a few times before. A brief visit back in ’96 had introduced me to the statue of the surfer which my travelling companion of the time was eager to visit, and two subsequent passes through the town on my way to somewhere else had found me both frustrated with its complicated one-way system (which seemed specifically designed to confuse the unwary traveller) and unable to track down that statue again. Eventually, after much ranting, raving and self-recrimination behind the wheel, the statue was found on the second visit, but by then the joy of actually finding it had been tempered by the aftermath of my display of temper, if you get my drift...?

Anyway, just passing through had, at least, left us with the feeling that it might be a nice place to stop and explore sometime, and so it finally made the list this time around, not least because of that Carousel that I mentioned. The Visitor Center put us on the a rather fabulous little hotel, the “Pacific Blue” which did truly amazing breakfasts that really do have to be seen to be believed, and they, in turn, recommended “Soif” which became our restaurant of choice that night, which had a band playing and halibut that was out of this world. The next morning, as we drove away, we also discovered that there were any number of wildlife reserves to visit in the surrounding area, and so we visited a couple, did a bit of bird-watching, nearly got blown off a couple of clifftops by the winds of a passing storm and generally left the area thinking that, despite being a gloomy old seaside town out of season, we’d rather liked the place.

RETURN OF THE PURPLY-HATTED MIMPSBY

(See also http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/purply-hatted-mimpsby.html  April 8th 2012)

Over in the corkscrew tree

The Mimpsby yawned and thought of tea

And ice-cream cones,

Of jam with scones

With cream from Devon

Which would be heaven

If only he could find a caff

Where he actually liked the staff.

He scampered down the corkscrew tree

With something almost (but not quite) glee.

Licking his lips and rubbing his tum

Whilst thinking of the tastes to come.

But his joy soon stopped at the edge of town

When he met a grim man who had a frown

Who asked him questions about his life

Like “Where do you live?” and “Where’s your wife?”

The Mimpsby shrugged inside his coat

And then he made a mental note

To add this bureaucrat to his “list”

Especially as he would persist

To ask these questions irritating

When there was good breakfast waiting!

This chap was neither pertinent nor proper

And even took against his purple topper.

“Did you not once wear a green hat?”

“No! That was my brother, was that.

My hat is purple, everyone knows!”

(Why’s he asking, do you suppose?)

“Oh, a brother... Where is he?”

“We seldom speak so don’t ask me!”

“A Green-Hatted man who looks like you

Last night stole a thing or two!”

The Mimpsby gulped and turned away.

His kin had always caused bother that way.

This is why he lived alone

And did not answer his telephone.

The people of the town he knew intuitive

Thought him most odd and a bit reclusive

And wouldn’t talk to him unless

They must, and only then under duress.

He worried now that this was serious

And this gentleman imperious

Had questions which he’d better answer -

“I’ll tell you everything I can, sir!”

“So what’s your name…?” He answered “Mimpsby”

And your first name…? He said “Mimpsby”

So your name is “Mimsby Mimpsby?””

(The man’s a fool!) “No! Just Mimpsby!”

The man’s grim face got even grimmer
The Mimpsby started to consider
That his previous acts of flippancy
Might not have helped his cause, you see.
He noted that a crowd had gathered
To watch this Mimpsby get hot and bothered.
He took but a moment to consider his plight
Then grassed his brother up real tight.

And once he’d told his tale of woe
He was told that he could go.
So off for his breakfast he went
But it tasted like excrement.
And all the people tutted and frowned
Once more made him outcast from town
Its most unpopular resident
Who was never allowed to explain or repent.

So every day he’d eat in isolation
They’d take his cash without conversation.
Sometimes he’d chatter to himself
Just to retain his mental health.

“I have no more games to play”

Is what they thought they heard him say

“And I have no more songs to sing”

Did he really mean this thing?

He stood up proudly and doffed his hat
Bid them farewell and that was that.

Then he looked them all in the eye
And emitting a huge sigh
Announced “My disappointment is absolute!

I shall depart. Perhaps learn the flute!”
And with that he went away
“He’ll be back for breakfast” he heard some say.

And so the Mimpsby sat alone

Trying to get a decent tone
From a flute he fashioned from a twig
That was not too small and not too big.

And high up on a branch of the corkscrew tree
Sad tunes were played by a lonely Mimpsby
That drifted out across the night air
And spoke of sadness and despair.

The people of the town felt grim
When that tune played they thought of him
And of all the sadness they had brought
Upon themselves by caring naught
For a lonely Mimpsby who’d had to tell
On his own brother (who’d gone to hell)
And now sat alone in a corkscrew tree
Alone with just his misery.