THE MAN WHO MISTOOK THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE FOR A HAT

There aren’t many cities in the world that I visit that I can genuinely say that I could quite happily live in. I’m very fond of Bristol and the granite splendour of Edinburgh and both of those places have tempted me on occasion, but I remain in my ramshackle little house, teetering on the brink of Disastershire and I’m generally very comfortable being there.

Whilst I’m in that little house, I watch an awful lot of television, mostly from lovely shiny discs because I don’t watch a lot of the kind of telly that a lot of other people seem to like to watch. I’m fickle like that. I’m sure there are high court judges who could recognise more of the so-called “celebrities” that try and sell me yoghurt and so on than I do, but I digress. I’m sure it’s my loss. Anyway, what I do watch a lot of is American crime dramas. They fascinate me. They’re all so well made and all in such comparatively huge quantities too. We seem to think we’re producing a lot of a “quality” drama series if we get thirteen of them. In the average US series, the season long story arcs are barely out of the starting gate by episode thirteen, and there’s the prospect of about the same number still to come. Somehow, unless the show is something outrageous and preposterous set in Miami, they manage to maintain a surprisingly high level of quality, too. Now I know we only get the best of it and that the TV system over there produces a fair amount of dross, too, but when it’s good, it’s very good indeed, and, being crime drama, sometimes quite terrifying, too.

Of course, all this exposure to the seamier side of American popular culture does tend to give you a rather jaded view of what life is like over there. Now I know it’s only fiction and the vast majority of Americans live their entire lives without once coming up against the kinds of villainy, mayhem and wickedness that gets portrayed in those shows, but nevertheless some of the cities don’t get painted in the prettiest of lights when it comes to the way they are seen by the viewer. Las Vegas looks frankly terrifying. Miami looks, well, worse probably. It does also have the added disadvantage that a ginger-headed policeman with a crab-like gait might possibly sidle up to you sideways and growl at you, or, worse still, attempt one of his smiles, but hopefully that’s not the reality that the fiction is trying to emulate.

I do love California, though, and one city I absolutely instantly fell in love with was San Francisco, the City by the Bay. To me, the city of “Dirty Harry” and “Bullitt”, “Ironside” and “Monk”, with Mike Stone and Steve Keller patrolling its “Streets…” (A “Quinn Martin” Production... Tonite’s Episode: “Tourist”). Despite all of that, it’s the one city I’ve visited in which I think I could be truly tempted to live, and that’s also despite the constant threat of earthquakes and the whole Yellowstone super-volcano thing dangling over the place. I can be a nervous soul, I admit (and don’t get me started on the risk factors in Naples) but for some reason, in that city, I can suppress them enough to happily get by.

I first visited San Francisco fairly fleetingly on my first solo venture to the USA in the mid 1990s. For a long time I’d had a big, laminated “Times” Map of the World hanging on my wall which always struck me as being one of those things that every home should have. “There’s a great big world out there,” it reminds you constantly, “don’t let your own little problems make you forget it.” One miserable Sunday afternoon, I’d been looking at that very map and wondering just how small a circle you could draw on it to encompass all of the very few places that I’d been to in the world at that particular point in my life. When I thought about it, it wasn’t that big a circle, to be honest, and I resolved then and there that I would do something about it, and decided to fly to Seattle, mostly because I’d heard the coffee was pretty good there.

On that trip I travelled around quite a bit, working my way down the West Coast and I was only in San Francisco for the briefest of time. I had an excellent travelling companion and guide for a while in Nancy, the mother of a friend of mine in England, which meant I got to see the very best of it, which is why I think that the place that stayed in my thoughts the most from the entire trip – even slightly pipping the rather magnificent Yosemite Park - was that beautiful white city. It might have something to do with the light, which I can only say seems to me to be like no other light I’ve ever experienced anywhere else I’ve been, but there was so much else as well. Standing on that oh-so iconic Golden Gate Bridge which Hollywood seems dedicated to demolishing every so often; the Ghirardelli Chocolate Mall; Lombard Street with its twists and turns; Coit Tower; Fisherman’s Wharf; and Pier 39. I didn’t visit Alcatraz that time, but it strikes me that it must have been one of the crueller aspects of making the island a prison to have a view of that beautiful, vibrant and lively place just a short span of water away, and know that you could see it but never join in with all that life that was happening over there.

I never really thought I’d be lucky enough to get to go back, but, eight years later, courtesy of probably the finest birthday present I’m ever likely to get, I was. That time I was able to use some of my own “local knowledge” to act as something of a guide myself, and as I had more time in the city and was more able to get around on foot, I was able to explore it more fully. Mel’s Diner remains a fond memory but so does the annual book fair at Fort Mason, the Maritime National Historical Park and a lot more… but really, to me, the best memory is of just walking around in that incredible light and feeling like I belonged there. Every so often I get a yearning to go back and I’ll “Google Earth” those familiar streets just to try and recapture a tiny bit of that rather fabulous feeling.

Anyway, this is a photograph of some idiot who seems to be trying to wear the Golden Gate Bridge as a hat. I think he looks quite happy, which is unusual enough occurrence in itself, and, do you know what? For once, I think maybe he was.