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.

A PAIR OF GIANTS BALLS

A few weeks ago, I told you the strange story of my virgin cricket ball’s one glorious day in the sun*, despite my long-maintained desire to protect its honour from the rigours of just the sort of activities for which it was originally fashioned, and how such a simple thing as a tapping on my door on a blissful summer’s day took my principles and flung them headlong into the bin in the pursuit of self-indulgent happiness. Sadly, during those years, my own principles were never similarly tested with regards to protecting my own virtue, as my own person was never called upon for the purposes of unexpected lustful slaking by any of the terribly distracting young women that lived on that campus coming a-rapping upon my door in similar vein, but when you go through life resembling a potato, and a surly potato at that, then you come not to expect such things and find other means to get through your empty days.

It was only after I’d shared my experiences of the many long years that cricket ball spent sitting all pristine in my various hovels that I made a small connection in my mind and realised a couple of things. Firstly, it is something that I still do, and secondly, I may very well have got worse.

Sitting behind me on a shelf, amid all the other paraphernalia and ephemera cluttering up my environment are a pair of baseballs inscribed with the word “Giants” in the sort of blocky typeface that is probably most appropriate for such things. The text is black with an orange edge, no doubt because those are the colours that the team itself plays in, and is set on an arc in front of an outline drawing of a baseball, which gives the effect of a baseball on a baseball, but luckily that’s its limit when it comes to infinite regression. The rest is, I imagine, much the same as with all baseballs, a white leather ball with that distinctive iconic stitching pattern holding the thing together.

The significant thing to my thoughts today, of course, is that I’ve had them now for five years, since our last trip to San Francisco in 2006, and they are still pristinely sealed in the cellophane wrappers they were sold in. Once again, a couple of bits of touristy souvenir tat have become elevated to a level of importance that they really shouldn’t merit. Many is the time that t’beloved has suggested releasing them from their tiny plastic prisons only for me to resist this development, hoping that the cellophane wrapping barrier will somehow protect these clean, fresh objects from decaying if exposed to the ‘rigours’, ‘perils’ and general gathering of dust that makes up our day-to-day life here in Lesser Blogfordshire.

A right pair of Charlies

That trip in 2006 could in some small way be known as the ‘baseball trip’ because, not only did we visit the Charles M Schulz museum in Santa Rosa which has a fair few baseball connections, but, upon our return to San Francisco, one of the things we arranged to do was to do the tourist ‘behind the scenes’ tour of AT&T Park, the new(ish) home of the San Francisco Giants, a venue which has so far had three names already in its brief history having already been known as both Pacific Bell Park and SBC Park prior to this. Tsk! The wonders of corporate sponsorship and takeovers, mergers and acquisitions, eh? Having worked in that industry myself once, I know from my own experience how often these companies swap their assets around. It makes keeping your C.V. up to date a nightmare, I assure you. Some fans still call it by its original name, apparently, which proves, I guess, that these things do kind of stick no matter how ungainly or naff they might first seem to be. Others call it the ‘phone booth’ for obvious reasons connected to the various telephone companies it has been named for.

A phone booth of dreams

The Giants moved there from the infamous Candlestick Park, where The Beatles played their last official commercial live gig and Richard Nixon pitched the first ever pitch, but I guess time marches on, and other iconic moments will one day play out in their new home. When we dropped in, around about the Autumn of 2006, it had only just had its squeaky new refurbishment for its grand rebranding the previous March and a very pleasant elderly gentleman and baseball fan took our group on our tour all around and through and over the stadium, and we looked it over, took our pictures, asked our questions and laughed at his jokes before ending up, as seems inevitable with these things in the gift shop.

Now, I’ve never followed baseball. It is after all, a sport, and therefore unlikely to have leapt to the top of any list of interests for me, but a few weeks or months before this, one of the more high flying of m’colleagues had been on a business trip to ‘New Yoik’ and had bought back for his friends (so not me, obviously) and colleagues (if the two aren’t mutually exclusive) gifts of baseballs for them and I’d found these things endlessly fascinating as they sat upon the various desks around me, and, as I’ve been known to fidget when I’m feeling nervous (and I always felt nervous when having to talk to people in that job…), every so often I would pick one of these balls up whilst I was blathering away, trying to make my pointless point, and I found that it kind of served the same kind of purpose as those ‘stress relief’ squashy things that you occasionally see on people’s desks.

So, when we mooched around the gift shop and t’beloved was buying the usual bits of souvenirs and presents for her family and friends, and I was busy getting another souvenir T-shirt that I’ll  never actually wear, and my half-size replica baseball bat which I would then fret about having in my luggage in these security-conscious days, I spotted a great big barrel full of souvenir baseballs and just had to get one. Actually, we ended up getting one each, neither of which are ever going to ever fulfil their proper reason for being on this sad planet, but both of which look quite impressive perched up there and reminding us of happier days spent in faraway places with corporate sounding names.

* "A Cherry in the Sun" http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2011/01/cherry-in-sun.html (January 28 2011)

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.