The countryside, right, is a great and magnificent place, full of wonder, and trees and other green stuff. But I like walking in cities. I like it a lot. I like it because it walking past houses, seeing little snippets of other people’s day at the bus stop, or in shops, or just on the street, makes me tell little stories in my head about who they are and where they’re going and what they do and how they’re feeling about their day.

And around every corner is a surprise, or a view. Or a hidden stairway where it’s too steep for a road to be. Oh, be still my beating heart. A stairway! They’re like the four-leaf clover of walking in San Francisco, except, unlike four leaf clovers, there are lots of them.

There are little wooden ones leading to hidden alleys of cottages; there are ones that divide in two and curl, graciously, elegantly up the hill like the lobby of a posh hotel; there are ones made of stone with wide treads, where you’ll find annoyingly fit people competing for space so they can jog up and down and up, and down; and ones that are all use, no ornament, concrete and iron, punched into the side of a cliff because you couldn’t reasonably pave it (though god knows they probably tried) -and there are the semistair-sidewalkcases where there’s a normal sloping pavement and stairs cut into it as well.

And I really do get ridiculously excited about them. Honestly: show me one on a walk, it’s like offering a donkey a donkey-treat.

I’m a complete sucker for stairways*. They’re brilliant. They’re part of what I love about the city - and what my friend David hates. He claims the fact that ‘the town planning is arrogant’ is one of the main reason he wouldn’t want to live here. The fact that all logic and good sense would seem to suggest that there might be more geographically sensible ways to go than the usual American grid system (what with the sharp ups and downs the whole city is based on), but no, no, they were pigheaded and just went for the grid system all the same.

But that’s precisely what I love about it.

A hill? You say? Almost vertical in gradient, you say? Fuck it, we’re going to pile that street in a straight line up it anyway, for we are pioneers, and have brains made of Solid Gold Nuggets!

So if you ARE walking in San Francisco - and I advise it as not only a hell of a workout, but the best way to see and get to know the city (you get to surprise yourself with incredible surprise views at every corner AND pat yourself on the back for getting there under your own steam) - be advised: there are hills. Sometimes it’s hard to gauge them from a distance.

One tip: if you’re looking toward a hill and you can tell that all the cars on it are parked at right angles to the curb, that’s a good sign of a pretty serious gradient. Wind yourself up and prepare. If you’re lucky it might get so steep that there’ll be stairs. Yay! Stairs!

It’s worth it though. One of my favourite things about my new house is that if I’m feeling tetchy or anxious or like I haven’t moved around enough for the day, I can stick my shoes on, walk out of my house, turn a corner and power up a street that ends in this view:

And if I get even more bloody-minded - which I do, and often, I am like a nugget-minded pioneer that way - I can power up the even bigger hill behind my house, like I did on Sunday. Where you are rewarded with even better views of the same thing:

Even, if you have a somewhat unplanned walking strategy like me, and end up getting lost a couple of times and walking a whole bunch further than you said you would.

This is perhaps one of the reasons I seem to be narrowing the pool of people who will agree to walk with me happily.

Granted, I have a sense of ALL the reasons it might be. It’s almost certainly because I plot out a route before I go anywhere by seemingly stabbing my finger at two or three places I know I want to get to and pay little attention to what the gradients might be inbetween them. I also have a habit of saying things like “Blimey. That WAS a steep hill, wasn’t it. Oooh, that one looks steep too, lets go and do that one!” and that old thing about going “OOOOH!” and shifting my route every time I come across a staircase where a street should be.

OOOH! STAIRS!!!

(you see?)

Actually, that particular set of stairs was right at the end of the walk I did on Sunday, on my own, after looking at the map and deciding that since it was a sunny day, without the fog lapping over the top of Twin Peaks (that big hill behind my house) I was going to put my shoes on, music in my ears, and go up it. And then, because taht didn’t seem enough, go and find the Vulcan and Saturn stairways (near the Castro district, I just liked the names of them), and then home.

If I hadn’t got almost completely lost at the beginning, it still would have been about 5 miles and three good hilly bits. As it was it ended up being six and a half and even more good hilly bits, so hurrah for unintended exploratory excursion (otherwise known as getting lost).

At the top of Twin Peaks I decided I might head straight home, but then, just when I was about to take the road to the closest bus route home - always carry your bus fare, that’s another tip, but we’ll get to those later - something perked me right up:

Yes, I suddenly stumbled upon Uranus.

In fact, I didn’t see it was there, I was just looking for somewhere to get a some more liquid, and there was a little shop, so I headed toward it … and before I knew it, I was staring straight up Uranus. And then I refreshed my thirst at the little place just around the corner from Uranus, and was on my way.

We were all right in our previous suspicions though. I don’t think I would have liked to have lived up Uranus. If nothing else, getting up there with a full load looked like it might have been a big job even for the strapping young men we had helping us move.

Anyway. That was it, really. Just, you know, after all our talk about the potential lurking up Uranus, and what with me wanting to see it for so long, it perked me right up, and I went on my way.

Etc.

So I went to find the Vulcan and the Saturn stairways, which I’d been saving for a sunny day because they had such lovely names.

And then, rather than get the bus home, I walked. There was one more hill between where I was by then (Castro) and my house (in Noe Valley) and it’s a fair size. I munched on an energy bar and every half block told myself that I should just go back down and get the bus. And then didn’t, and carried on up the hill. And carried on, and carried on and then, at the top, was pleased at myself for having made it one more hill.

And then I saw that stairway.
Man, I love stairways.
So I just did that one extra stairway, and then cruised downhill to my house. Cruised in the sense of ‘hobbled a bit because my shoes are quite new’.

Is that too much? I know this isn’t a guidebook - not yet, obvs. But I love walking in cities. And I love walking this city particularly. And I keep promising to write about it more, and then I don’t for fear that everyone’s going to find it boring, but fuck it: I do love it very much. So there.

I’ve even got a tattered old map where I draw on all the routes I walk in felt tip pen. I’m trying to cover as many streets as possible. Compulsive collector that I am. So I might write about it more, that’s all. Just warning you. Actually, the collecting things is something I need to write about a whole other day. Never mind.

For the meantime then, the first tips I can think of:

THINGS TO TAKE WHEN WALKING IN SAN FRANCISCO
a) Either some nice music or someone you like talking to.
b) Some water, and a couple of dollars for more.
c) Two dollar bills for a bus transfer. If you suddenly get tired, jump on a bus heading vaguely the right direction and use the transfer to get you home from there.
d) An energy bar. My very favourites are called Larabars. They’re just fruit and nuts and things that are good for you, but manage not to taste like cardboard.
e) Something to take pictures, if you like to do that.
f) Good walking shoes. And I mean something with support. Walking up hills on hard pavement is bad: walking down can be even more of a killer, we don’t use those muscles much.
g) A little map (or a map in a Moleskine City Book, my favourite, though you can guarantee if you’re going to get lost it’ll be in the crack where the pages meet or falling off the edge of the page: sod’s law) but don’t use it too often, getting lost is the best bit. And you can guarantee that if you want to get somewhere and you can see it, just head toward it: the grid system of roads and lovely lovely staircases mean that you’ll get there directly enough.
h) Your best bloody-minded attitude. Because the view will be even better if you just go up that next hill.

I can’t think of anything else for now.

That’s all there is to it, though.
I walked miles, mounted Twin Peaks, tackled a Vulcan and, most importantly, I’ve seen Uranus.
It was a good Sunday walk.

Our flat is basically made of cardboard. Thick cardboard, yes; but cardboard.

We knew it when we walked in - but it was one of the only negative balanced against a whole heavy pile of positives when we sat down and made the pro/con list of all the places we’d seen. Location? Price? Flexible Lease? Cats? Vibe? Yes yes yes yes yes. Possibly made of thick cardboard? Yup. Or plywood. Or really old biscuits taped together with sticking plasters.

It’s all absolutely fine. It’s a lovely flat, it’s friendly and cosy and it’s starting to feel like home.
It’s fine and lovely AND it’s made of cardboard.

The other interesting thing about our new flat is how neighbourly it is. We’ve bumped into all our neighbours in the stairway, or the entrance hall of our little 4-flat community, and they all seem very nice. Very friendly.

But there’s the rub. From the living room, you can see the fire escape that everyone uses to get to their flats, or from their flat to the laundry below us. And when they’re going up it, or down it, it’s natural to look if you catch some movement out of the corner of your eye. But often that movement is one of us, sitting on the sofa, looking up to see what movement we just caught out of the corner of our eye.

Suddenly you’re sitting there. In your house, your private space, nodding at a person outside it.

“Stoppit!” I whisper sharply at My Beloved, when I catch him doing this. “Stoppit you’re breaking the fourth wall, stoppit!”

Because, in my mind, it’s a barrier you don’t breach. For the person outside, it’s like inviting yourself into someone’s flat without asking. For the person inside, it’s like realising you live in a dolls house, and any moment now, a giant hand might burst through, lift you up, and put you in the bath, fully clothed.

********

The other day we were lying in bed.

Don’t worry, this still isn’t one of those blogs. Although there will, in a paragraph or so, be quite a graphic description of an activity that My Beloved and I engage in, at bedtime, I would like everyone reading this to know that the terms “Plastic-sheathed electronic personal entertainment device” and “fast of finger and heavy of thumb” and “doggedly focused on the little man in a red car” should be understood to be NOT euphemisms. We have been together six years: they are literal.

The other day we were lying in bed doing what we often do when preparing ourselves for sleep: we were playing MarioKart on our Nintendo DS things - those plastic-sheathed electronic personal entertainment device things you can wirelessly join up with other people to play together.

“Did you just throw a shell at me?” said my beloved, nonsensically (to anyone who hasn’t played it before. Makes perfect sense to me)

“Me? Never…” I said, a demon on the race track, fast of finger, heavy of thumb.

‘Eee-ee’ He said. At least I thought he did.

“What?”

“What? Nothing. Are you trying to distract me?” he said.

‘Eee-ee’ came the noise, again.

We both looked around. The cats were sleeping on the pile of clean laundry already. There was no other source for noise, apart from…

‘Ee-ee. E-eee’ It was upstairs. People going to bed, we thought. And started another race.

‘Eeeeee-EE!’ the noise came again.

‘E-ee, e-ee, E-ee, E-EE’

…

“You don’t think…” I started

“PLAY THE GAME” said My Beloved, blushing, doggedly concentrated on the little man in the red car in front of him.

‘Ee-ee! Ee-ee, ee-ee, ee-ee, ee-ee!’ said our newlywed neighbours.

We stared at our screens.

The race was a pretty straight forward one. And we’d done it lots of times before. Several tunnels, a few tricky hairpin bends and a couple of interesting junctions where you could choose to head up a tight alleyway rather than the main street, but nothing too hard to handle.

My beloved was in the car he always picked - streamlined and powerful, with a big thrust and an ability to handle rough ground. I was in more of a starter vehicle, picked for the handling rather than the speed.

My beloved kept mumbling things that sounded like ‘I didn’t think of this. I hadn’t thought of this’

‘Ee-ee, ee-ee Ee-ee ee-ee, ee-ee-ee-ee-ee’, our newlywed neighbours agreed.

We bumped through the familiar courses - first to three wins would be the evening’s champion.

‘Ee-ee, ee-ee, ee-ee’

First I would take a game, then he would. I’d pull out ahead, he’d catch up. “Suck it!” he’d hiss, watching a well-timed projectile knock me back. First I was top ranking, then him. He thought he could take me, but then I’d push him behind once more. He’d race up the inside, I’d wipe his smile with a booby-trap, he’d fight back by forcing me into a slick of slippery liquid. It was a familiar, and well-fought routine.

“Should we just get up and do some more work for a bit?” I asked.

“Shut up and play the game”, whispered my beloved.

‘Ee-ee ee-ee ee-ee ee-ee ee-ee’ said our neighbours.

We continued in silence.
Not really silence, obviously. The random squeaks turned into more regular ones, the regular ones turned into a steady rhythm.

“Did we have any plans for tomorrow?” I said, quietly, trying not to let my words fall into the beat of the

‘ee-ee! ee-ee! ee-ee! ee-ee!’

“You mentioned lunch with someone, but other than that, I …” my beloved tailed off, coming to the final corner of the last race, accompanied by the

‘Ee-EE! Ee-EE! Ee-EE! Ee-EE!’

He went swooping through the finish line.

As if by some crazy, wild, coincidence (the kind made all the more special when tinged with humiliation at realising you’re in your thirties and a cliche) the last

Ee-EE!

faded away just as the little man in the red car held up his hands in victory.

The man of the house had won.
And then we went to sleep.

________________

Turns out the breaking of the fourth wall wasn’t the loosing of mental privacy boundaries I had thought it might be.

But combine it with the fact that the fifth wall turned out to be the ceiling? That was the killer.

Alright, in my searching around for a thing to write more about I have found an untapped vein of things, all wrapped up in a thing: here’s the thing. Here’s two things, in fact. A thing about America, and a thing about me.

Reader: I swelled. Apparently it’s quite a normal thing for British people moving to North America. To swell. I moved to America, and then I swelled.

And when I say swell I mean, of course, I got fatter. I swelled like a big fleshy balloon. And it’s not that I’m blaming the country - frankly, 380 million people didn’t all come to my house, persuade me not to exercise, lift some slices of pizza and place them in my mouth for me. I did all that myself.

But there are environmental factors that helped: frankly I don’t care how many studies there are ‘proving’ that High Fructose Corn Syrup is no worse for you than sugar. I have an inch of arse to disprove every study.

To those who don’t know: America has a lot of corn. High Fructose Corn Syrup is a byproduct of corn, a way of boiling down some bits of the plant that make it into fructose. It’s a cheap alternative to sugar, basically. And it’s in EVERYTHING.

If you come to the states from the UK, and pick up a can of coke, it will taste subtly different. It’s somehow a bit gloopier - and weirdly, much more filling. This, my friends, is the HFCS. The UK version of coke is made with sugar. As it is in most countries, with the volume of sugar adjusted to fit the national palate.

It is in Mexico, for example. Made of sugar. Which is why you’ll find most British geeks in San Francisco drinking MexiCoke - small glass bottles of the imported sugar-based stuff rather than the High Fructosey Corn Syrup one. I’ve heard that New York geeks do the same with kosher coke, when it’s available. Because it tastes different. Better. Because it’s made of sugar.

(Which is not to say sugar is great. I’m not saying that - though the unpopularity of High Fructose Corn Syrup has led to adverts from companies proclaiming the health benefits of their product because it is ‘packed with real sugar’. This is also wrong)

The Coke it just one example. This stuff is in chocolate, and ready meals, added to fruit juice and biscuits and cakes. And I believe that if a body that isn’t used to it get thrown into a vat of it, it’s not going to react well.

Mine didn’t.

My insides, for much of the first half of the first year we were here, hated me. And my fat cells went on strike. Not, sadly, on hunger strike. On the kind where they sit there, chains themselves to the railings and refuses to move.

In the two years or so before we moved here, I’d lost a whole bunch of weight. Stones and stones of it - slowly, through exercise and managably healthy eating. In the first six months of living here, I’d put about 80% back on. Perhaps 100%. There was a whole period of time I avoided scales, mirrors, jeans and cameras, in the sorry knowledge that I knew what was happening but couldn’t face it.

And oh GOD, this was depressing.

It was for understandable reasons: you just move somewhere, of course you want to try all the new things, test out the best places to eat, to drink, to snack - the crazy-looking products you’ve never seen before, the mixture of flavours that anyone at home would call a person crazy for mixing.

But combined with not doing enough exercise in the run up to moving, or the time after arriving? Basically fatal. Not literally. But felt like it.

So for six months, reader, I swelled. Blew up, like a balloon filled with jelly, felt miserable about letting it happen, and then comfort-ate to calm the misery, because I’m a frikking GENIUS like that.

And so, since Christmas, the last nine months - apart from a bit in the middle where we were just basically trying to stay afloat - have been about reversing the trend. And now I’ve actually got a handle on it, I’m going to write more about it, because it’s not just me. It’s not just a struggle that I and no one else in the world has, clearly it isn’t. And so I shouldn’t be ashamed to write about it - particularly if I can bring a bit more humour to it.

See, though it’s been a big theme in my offthenet life i the last few years, I haven’t written that much about body issues and fitness and weight and things - and there are several reasons why:

a) Because it’s a really touchy subject. I don’t know many people for whom it isn’t.

b) People know how touchy a subject it usually is, and it’s the first place they will go if they want to hurt you online. And people do. I’ll never understand it, but they do.

c) Putting it out in public is both an acknowledgement of it as a problem, and some kind of commitment to do something about it. If something happens and you somehow *stop* doing something about it, you end up with a bigger sense of failure than you had in the first place, because now it’s public failure.

d) It’s quite boring, and I only want to write about it if I can find a way of doing it that isn’t going to be boring.

In the months after Christmas, I first stated that I would not be getting on a plane back to Britain unless I was doing it wearing the same damn jeans I wore on the way over here.

And since then it’s been about balancing entertaining guests with knowing I should be abstaining from the things of entertaining that I enjoy the most. It’s been a heavy slew of exercise when I can bring myself to do it, and lots of shouting at myself when I can’t. It’s not eating late at night, not baking, even though I love baking an awful, awful lot. It’s cooking almost everything from scratch, giving up on processed foods and pre-packaged foods almost entirely, at least for now. It’s running. Running, ffs. Me. It’s not shouting at myself when changes happen very, very slowly, because no matter how hard I kick my metabolism, I have to admit she just hates me.

The thing I learnt the first time I tried to rid myself of a whole bunch of weight was that when people ask how you’re doing it what they want to hear is that you’ve given up Mayonnaise. You’ve given up Mayonnaise and miraculously, 4 stone fell off the week after.

And it’s not the case. Might be for some people. Isn’t for me. It’s a long process, but one which I’m now really enjoying. And I want to write about it, because it’s been a big part of my experience over here, with the food and the drink and the exercise and the … all of it.

So I’m sorry this post is so long.

I just wanted to get it out in the open because it’s something I’m often ashamed of. And if I can get over that, then there are lots more things to write about. Food (recipes and things). Walks, and running, and things that make a difference and things that don’t. And … well, lots of things. Things that I couldn’t mention before without laying this on the line first.

So there we have it. And no, there will be no flashing weightometer on the side of the blog. I’m just opening it up as another topic I may occasionally touch on, that’s all.

You know I mentioned a couple of months ago that a vase of flowers, a cat, a dining room table and an act of mischievous gravity had resulted in the death of my beloved little Macbook.

I naturally thought this was an isolated event: a coincidence. Just “one of those things”.

In recent days, however, I have had occasion to question this.

We found the first pair of dead iPhone headphones in the top of my beloved’s bag. The clean break in the cable looked like he’d made some kind of mistake; snapped a clasp shut on the backback without noticing and caught it. Nothing dodgy. Nothing suspicious.

But then, heading out to the gym, I turned back halfway after discovering that I’d managed to pick up another pair of deadphones. Weird. Were they the same ones, I wondered? No, said my beloved, he’d thrown the first pair away. I picked up some old ones, and used them for three days - until, shortly after discovering Widget, the Littlest Cat, wrestling them out of my handbag. Shortly after that they didn’t work any more. A couple of sharp little breaks in the cable, with the wires shorn straight through, ensured that they would never, ever be used again. Yesterday, forgetting to place them in a zipped bag, another pair died.

There is only one real explanation for all this.

My cat has been approached by a clandestine employee of Microsoft - perhaps even by Bill Gates; I believe once you’ve made a certain amout of money you probably do start reaching out to domestic pets on revenge missions - who has somehow brainwashed her against all things Apple.

Does she attack any other headphone leads? No.
Does she spill things on my new little PC? Why no. She sits by it. Purring.
When she mews, does she do it in tune to the bonk-bonk-bonk-bong! intel chimes? Well, no, but I sense she might, soon.

I wonder if there’s some kind of training school we could send her to. Apple-reconditioning for cats.
Trust me, if there’s anywhere one could find this kind of service, it would be here.

I shall commence searching for a facility, perhaps with the words “Please help, my cat is a PC”.

In the meantime, I need some more head phones. And a very VERY secure place to keep them when I’m not using the fucking things.

It is Saturday afternoon. The supermarket is heaving with people picking up pieces of picnic for the opera being simulcast at the baseball stadium again this evening.

There had been no baskets at the door, so I am balancing dips and meats. And of course some tiny bottles of wine I am hoping to smuggle into the ballpark against the rules, hidden under our picnic blanket (trust me, this was nothing, I will later discover someone in our party has brought a full bottle concealed in a hollowed out baguette - though I think this is less necessity, more because it made him feel cool and spyish)

I am wandering between the till queues, trying to work out which is shortest, when I pass some people looking up at the till signs and down at the queues, trying to work out the same thing. At this point I overhear my favourite overheard thing in ages.

“15 items or less?” a woman says

“Well, we’ve got a drink and some chips and a sandwich for all of us” she continues “and there are … one, two, three, four, FIVE of us, right? Well, hm…”

She thinks for a while, then comes to a definite conclusion

“Well, my math is just TERRIBLE. But what I DO know is that three times five is NOT fifteen”

…

Oh, madam. I think. You have underestimated yourself in the most glorious way possible.

Honestly, it made my day. If only because I very very rarely get to experience anyone in the wild who is worse at maths than I am. So thank you, random lady. Thanks very much for that.

I am aware that I don’t write about one of my main interests - television, the writing and creating and impact of such on culture and why pop culture isn’t the death of society some people like to whinge about it being - very much. That’s usually because I do it for a job. But, due to the recession I’m doing it slightly less for a job - particularly the American stuff - so I might be doing slightly more of it here.

Today, people, is an auspicious day. Today marks the death, ladies and gentlemen, of a venerable television institution that has been rolling along, unfettered by fashion, gloriously camp, reviled and loved in equal measure for more than 70 years - but that I, for one, will not miss very much.
(See, I’ve said that, and now Joan Rivers is going to die by the end of the day and I’m going to feel terrible)

Guiding Light was a radio drama, then moved to TV, and lots of people loved it. But no one watched it anymore, so now they’ve cancelled it.

Now, I don’t know why, but I just thought that maybe, just maybe, I should document this in case I ever decide to write a book about or someone tells me to write a book about it. Because it would be dreadful if I missed it entirely. it wouldn’t do at all.

Of course, I haven’t seen it. Ever. I don’t really do soaps (although American soaps are, without doubt, in a league of their own so I really should try harder) and so might not strictly know the names, relationships or storylines that are here being wrapped up. But I thought that that probably wasn’t very important as most of you who would read this probably hadn’t seen it before either.

I should thought I really should do it anyway, because it might prove very important to future pop culture historians. You don’t have to read it. In fact don’t. You’ll find it very boring. Unless you’re a big fan of the show, in which case you’ll get very frustrated and shout at me. Don’t do that. This isn’t about you. It’s about me, and how I saw the show (for the first time, on the last day).

Ahem.

So … (more…)

We sat on the window seat. It was the first day of my great “writing enormous amounts of things in cafes and libraries of my new ‘hood” adventure. My beloved was reading. I was writing.

The theory is that while I can get very easily distracted working at home, oddly enough in a very busy and anonymous setting - and, importantly, not being in a place where I can freely and easily get on the internet - I am less distractable. As proved by my very first attempt, this might prove to be slightly less true than I had hoped.

In front of us, there were two small tables. On one table was an older woman. On the other was a gentleman in his late forties, with one of those annoying bluetooth thingies and a laptop. Between the tables and facing away from them, straight-backed and looking serious, sat a woman about the same age as me. She was sketching.

After a few minutes she turned to the man on the table behind her.

“Do you recognise this?”
“Is that Santa Monica Boulevard?” He said, hesitantly.
“It is.” she said, clearly proud of having it recognised.

At least I thought it was that. Turns out she was probably more pleased to have opened the door to conversation. “I’ve spent a lot of time there. That building in the back there? That’s the police station.”

There was a pause. Was she suggesting that all the time she’d spent in Santa Monica was at the police station there? Did she want asking about that? Did the man want to ask?

He flapped his lip a couple of times, weakly, like a nervous matador with a fleshy cape. And then, deciding against asking, turned his eyes back to his laptop. Almost.

“And that person there, that one with his back to artist. He’s someone I know. Someone so close … but there were complications. There are always so many complications, don’t you think?”

“Human nature”, said the man. And quickly started typing again.

It went quiet for a while. I tapped away for a while more. There were some more little flurries of conversation. Did he have a family? A grown up daughter, he said. She had none, she said. Was he from around here, wherever *here* was, she asked? Noe Valley, he said.
“That’s where you live?”
“No, that’s where we are now. In Noe Valley. I live in North Beach”
“North Beach” she said, dreamlike “I was there earlier today. Or yesterday. I ended up having a barbeque in the station house there. Do you know any of the police officers in North Beach?
“No.”
“They’re good guys. Great guys. We had a great time.”

It went quiet for a while longer.

Did he want her numbers, she asked? No. He said. No thank you. He said. She went back to sketching. And sniffing. Sketching and sniffing. Sniff Sniff Sniff, she went. Sniff sniff.

The older lady on the table next to her offered her a tissue from her handbag.

The woman laughed a little. Thank you, she said. Ah-hah, replied the older lady, terse. “I have a sinus problem, I have problems with my sinuses” said the woman. Mmf, replied the older lady, in the icy tone of a fast-flowing glacier that has been carefully nurtured to stop idiots midstep. “It’s just what happens when you’re coked up a lot” said the woman, medicalfactly.

The glacier stopped, mid ice. I almost spat my coffee out, a few feet away, sitting on the windowsill, trying to write about something else.

There were a few more highlights. The woman checking, just once more, just in case, that the middle-aged man didn’t want to go somewhere and have casual sex with her (this wasn’t quite what she said, but entirely what she meant). He still didn’t. Eventually she finished her sketch - if she ever had a coffee, I missed it - and announced her intention to leave.

She stood up, and gathered her things, and then floated out onto 24th street as if lifted up by a gentle breeze, and was carried away, who knows where. Though the nearest police station seems a fair bet. She likes the way those boys grill.

And I went back to work. Tapping away on something that wasn’t quite as interesting. Made up things never are, I find. But seriously. Real life people in coffee shops had better stop being so damned interesting, or I’m never going to get anything done.

The other day, we meant to go out to a matinee (of The September Issue, was very good) and possibly pick up a new dish-draining-thing. And a couple of vests. Yes, I know, the glamour. It’s sometimes hard to bear.

But by lovely happenstance, we ended up doing other things. Finding a new bar, and going for chinese food in Chinatown (where it is known, of course, as ‘food’) and meeting new people and generally having the kind of evening that reminds you that life generally becomes more interesting when you say Yes more often.

Anyway, because we’d only meant to go out for enforced-time-off and washing up goods reasons, I forgot to take my camera. Which was a shame, as the view from the window of the bar we ended up in was quite nice.

My friend Tom took a picture of it, which you can find here. I can’t work out how to put other people’s pictures on here from flickr and still link back to their page and all of that right now, because I’m too tired. But you should look. It’s a lovely photo.

I still need a new dish-draining-thing, for the record.

There are certain topics that I should address. The fact is, when I moved to San Francisco - more than a year ago - everything seemed different and new and exciting. Every shopping trip was a novelty and every conversation was a revalation.

But then, at the time, I was also extremely preoccupied with day to day things and working out how to work, and what to do, and all the other boring everyday things, having minor breakdowns, as I tend to - and just basically living it … and didn’t really have time to write about it.

A few months later, things had settled down a little and I had more time to write about them all. But by that point every thing had started to become commonplace and denoveltyised. And it wasn’t that I couldn’t think of anything to write about, it was more that by the time I finally got around to having time to write them, I didn’t think they were remarkable enough for anyone to want to read them.

Well, you know what? I’ve decided I don’t care. I’m just going to write them up anyway. It’s silly to waste all those experiences and observations and, frankly, material. So I won’t be doing that. Ignoring them, I mean. I’ll be pouring them all out of my head to order them and make room for everything else, and putting them on here as I do it. Whether it’s fun for anyone else or not. So ner.

I just thought I’d mention it here in case you wondered why I was suddenly being surprised at things a year after we landed.

We were sitting having beer in a pub garden.

“Fwar.” Said one of our table. “That bloke’s a bit of alright. I would eat off him”
“What?” I said.
“I said that bloke over there is mightily attractive. And I would eat off him.”
“What would you eat?”
“I don’t know. Food.”
“Yes, but wet food? Or dry food?”
“What? I don’t know. You know, like chocolate sauce or something.” said my friend.
“Oh. Which bit would you eat that off?”
“Any bit really. I’m not sure. The stomach?”
“But what if he was hairy?” I wondered, out loud. That didn’t seem to be a very pleasant idea.
“Eh?”
“Some people have a hairy stomach. If he was hairy, and you were eating something that was sort of claggy and sticky, then it might pull some of the hairs out. That wouldn’t be very nice, would it?”
“Oh, well, something else then. I’d eat something else off him. Anyway. As I was saying, we’ve been looking into the feasibility of …”

And he turned away to talk to someone more sensible.

I however, was not satisfied with this answer. The conversation, as far as everyone else was concerned, had finished.

In my head, it had not.

[And so, reader, we move from the pub garden table to the inside of my mind. Which, if you imagine it, is a lot like a pub garden table, but with a few more kittens and unicorns and flowery tablecloths and maps and lobes and sinews and bloody matter and things, because it is a brain. The inside of my brain had THIS conversation:]

Chocolate sauce, the more I thought about it, seemed like a bizarre thing to eat off another human being. On top of that, it seemed like it might be an unsatisfying way of ingesting chocolate syrup. Like licking caramel off a badger, it ran the risk of being an experience that would you feeling vaguely unsatisfied and still quite hungry, and the poor badger feel quite sticky and caramelish. No, that didn’t seem ideal at all.

If you were determined to have pudding off a person, then, it would seem sensible to have something that was slightly more slippery than sticky – so I would probably veer more toward rice pudding, say, than chocolate syrup. Not heated up, no, because it’s nicer cold. And not with jam, because that wouldn’t help the sticky problem. That would make it worse.

Chocolate mousse would probably be alright, but not ganache, and certainly not chocolate custard. Or any kind of custard, really. Maybe custard tart? Yes, well, anything with a crust would probably be alright, because it’s then basically just sitting on the TOP of the person and their hair, rather than mingling in amongst it. So any sort of pie, tart or flan would probably be fine.

Or biscuits. But then, with biscuits you get into the more woolly area of needing to place the food ON the person, then lift it off, and then eat it. If that’s the procedure then you have to admit that’s more ‘eating near somebody’ rather than eating off them, and while I don’t have a rich fantasy life, I’m pretty sure that’s not the point.

Also I’m not sure if it’s a dessert-only practice. Certainly the only things my friend mentioned had been sweet things, but then, I’m not actually that keen on sugary stuff – much more of a salt person, so I’m pretty sure that if I was to eat something off someone, it would be a savoury thing.

I like bacon, but I’m not naive enough to imagine that bacon would be a good thing to eat of anyone. Unless they were someone you didn’t like and were hoping to inflict unpleasant tiny oil burns all over – but again, I’m pretty sure that isn’t the point.
Sadly.

Lettuce is also a nice thing, as is most salad. But that very quickly, as an idea, resembled grazing, and I’m just not sure that that’s the feeling this activity seeks to promote. “Fwar, yes, that attractive gentleman from the pub garden the other night came around, and I didn’t half Graze off him for half an hour. I was really full by the time he left.” my friend would say and no, no, I’m pretty sure that wasn’t what he wanted at all. Salad in general, in fact, probably wouldn’t be the way forward, as cherry tomatoes and cucumber would keep rolling off, and cress would be too easily confused with pubic hair.

General antipasti is certainly my favouite kind of thing to eat, but the idea of giving a human body a thin coating of sliced meats and then nibbling it off seems basically cannibalistic, and you’d have to pick your cheeses very carefully to make sure they wouldn’t sweat too badly if left out on someone’s tummy for too long, and the brie wasn’t going to melt into anywhere it couldn’t be easily removed from.

The idea of using the belly button for vessel for dips occurred to me at this point, but was quite quickly rejected due to the fact it made me want to be sick a bit.

Pizza presented the ‘lift and eat near rather than off’ conundrum, and steak – or, in fact, anything that would need a sharp and serrated edged knife to eat – was dismissed on health and safety grounds. No, it seemed to me that there were very few food groups that would work well with the concept.

“What do you think, Anna?” asked my friend, about something eminently sensible like social media applications, or weekend plans or where we might all go camping next or something.

“I think sushi might work alright not I’m not fixed on where one might keep the soy sauce yet and I’m not sure if wasabi paste would run skin allergy risks. Also several types of pasta would work, but almost certainly not lasagna. And pizza is a very bad idea but I really quite fancy one, so I’m not sure where that leaves me. Are there napkins?”

“Um”

“Sorry, yes. I don’t think we have anything planned for the weekend, no.”

On reflection, and taking all the insanitary/icky/messy/unpalatable/unsatisfying things into contention, I think probably, if you need a list, I would say:

Foods that I consider probably the most sensible to eat off someone
1) Broccoli
b) Sliced cucumber - possibly in sandwiches, if that’s not a little too ‘high tea’.
then) Pasta - almost certainly penne with basil, asparagus, lemon (no butter)
iv) Or Fettuccine with arrabiata sauce. Easier on the garlic than I would like.
5) Thin ginger biscuits.
c) Rice pudding. With no accompaniments, and possibly cold. Straight from the can, if that’s how you roll. That’s how I roll. Although usually I’d roll with it from a bowl. I Bowlroll.
8) Cereal: Maybe chocolate flavoured or sugar crusted, but with NO MILK.
7) Mashed potato.

But frankly I’m struggling to see why any of those would be something you would want to do. I mean, if people eat dry cereal near me I usually want to punch them in the face. Why would I want to enter that situation willingly?

Weird.
My friends are weird.

I still like them though.

Every time I tell people in the city where I’ve moved to - friends, removal guys, people in random storage container shops (it’s weirdly friendly, this place) - I have to immediately follow it with “No, I”m not pregnant. No, we don’t have any children, no. No honestly, I’m not pregnant. I’m just chubby. “ And I never *quite* understood why until Saturday morning.

Because I knew that the area - Noe Valley - was otherwise known as Nappy Valley. But then, that was also the nickname of the last area we lived in in London. And the last place we lived in Brighton would sit quite easily with the nickname too. But then, we work at home, we are generally quiet and cookish people. I need quiet and cafes and grocery shops more than I need good bars and a buzzing ’scene’ of any kind. What do I need bars next to my house for? Apart from to pretend that I’m REALLY cool and can go out any time I want? It’s not actually going to make that happen.

So no, I decided that whether everyone was going to call it nappy valley and brand me as a pseudoyuppie, I didn’t care.

Because the first time I came to this area I said I was going to live here. I was doing a volunteery thing at a school up the road, and when I walked out of it, the sun was shining brightly on all the quiet houses, and you could see down to the bay and up to the mountains in the middle of the city. And I decided we would live here. I went back on the bus planning what our lives would be like once we’d moved there. And, once I arrived home, announced that I’d found where we were going to move to, if we needed to move at some point, so that was that sorted out.

Coincidentally, we ended up living here. On the very street I had that thought on. Or maybe if you know me well, you’d say not-coincidentally. What’s the opposite of coincidentally? Dentally? No, that’s about teeth. Ohabsolutlydentally, really.
Or just “really quite predictably”. Whatever.

But it really was all very fortuitous. When you have a laundry list of requirements that we did (low budget, two cats, separate kitchen, light, and - most crucially for here - a six month lease in case a miracle doesn’t happen and we have to go back to the UK)(honestly, miracles are still very welcome, if anyone has any, send them on over) then it is a bit of a coincidence. Kind of. And some home-search skills and negotiating charm that we could probably rent out, if we ever needed to.

Anyway, so on the day we moved in, I left my beloved panting on one of the seating objects that had been unpacked, and walked to find some food.

At the corner of the road I could hear children playing: in our last flat, the corner of the road would have been a six-lane offramp from a very busy motorway, a bus stop, a donut shop and several people on their way to the shelter under the freeway. I have no problem with any of these things in concept, or in isolation. Just gets a bit much, you know?

Walking the couple of blocks to the high street, the air smelled like tea roses, a bunch of which were hanging over a painted fence. This was somewhat cliched, I allowed myself to think - but also better than the smell of fresh urine. Or other fresh things. Let’s not go into that. Except to say that My Beloved and I did have a debate as to whether we’d actually miss our regular window-friend Captain Vomitous or not.

I bought some food, and went home. And was happy. And there are many things, of course, not ideal about the new flat: least of all the fact we might have to pack up again sooner than I’d like. But in every other way, it is perfect. It is light, and the cats have stopped hiding in the wardrobe. The kitchen is separate enough to listen to the radio and relax cooking while people do other things in other bits of the house.

And on Saturday, we discovered, there is a farmer’s market on the high street.

Which would really make for a wonderful image, but for the fact that what this seems to represent, in reality, is some kind of recreation of Gulliver’s Travels: The Chapter Where He’s Just Trying To Buy Some Sodding Vegetables And Is Hampered By Eleventy Million Tiny Tiny People, Screaming And Getting In His Way.

By heck, they like their children around here.

I’ve mentioned before that San Francisco - perhaps in common with many other American cities, I know I’ve experienced it in a couple - is so new as a city that it’s still very clear where one ethnic or economic community starts and another begins. It’s that magic of one minute being in Chinatown and the next feeling like you could be in Rome.

I just didn’t realise there was a similar thing going on with person-spawn. There are midgetvilles. One moment you’re just walking along happily, unhindered, the next minute, you’re up to your knees in other people’s children. Literally: because that’s where they come up to. Your knees.

Which is, unfortunately for them, usually the same approximate level as your shopping bag. It’s not pretty.

So you clutch your bag to your chest, and try not to take too big or too sharp steps into the in front of you you now can’t see (because of that pesky bag in front of you), and you buy some nice vegetables which they manage to sell at five times above the supermarket price because someone’s left the dirt ON them (but they’re so good! and local, so washing them is the price you pay. Oh no wait, you already paid it. A few times over) and then you go home and make something yummy.

And so that’s good to know. That if you want tea-roses and complete quiet; you can wander about our new ‘hood on weekday mornings. If you want to be punched in the minge with a plastic toy by some tiny person that you’re actively not allowed to admonish for it: Saturday is your day.

But in every aspect apart from the “REALLY?! They meant THIS many children live here?!” one (NB: I do like children, honest I do. Only mainly the ones I am related to or know well. The rest are kind of aliens to me) - I am in complete and utter love with my new neighbourhood. I could wax lyrical for hours about the weatherpatterns and the walks, the bizarre shopping choices and the coffee.

And trust me, I will. Because starting tomorrow, I have a new regime in place.
You can imagine this like me looking at an area and saying “That’s where we’ll live”. I’m just casually looking at a place I want to be in six months, in terms of confidence, direction, and fitness and saying: “I have decided where I want to live. That’s where I want to be”.

And maybe, by some wild coincidence, we’ll get there.

It’s very weird how those things happen, right?

PS: sorry this post isn’t very good, I just needed to live up to a promise to myself to post something today in advance of the beginning of the plan, tomorrow. Please stick with me, I promise I will be getting a lot better. Or at least more frequent. And a lot less desperate to put so much information into every post. I’m having to drill out the journalism stuff and rewind back to the no-one-reads-me blogger stuff, you see. Ignore me: it’s all part of the plan. The Miracle Plan.

I just went back to a post I’d been writing on and off for the last week and decided that while it might have been Very Deep Indeed on the subject of moving, it was frankly not worth posting. It was deep and meaningful and revealing, feeling-stuffed, personal and completely and utterly pointless. It was soul-searching of the kind that reminds me why, when trying to find procrastination activities during what is, after all, a highly stressful and emotional time, one should probably choose ‘going out for a nice walk’ or ‘playing some kind of game’ above tipping the innermost bits of your brain onto a screen and then rubbing it in a bit.

To sum up:

1) We were living somewhere. Now we’re not living there anymore.

2) We are now living somewhere else which is very little and quiet and in a lovely lovely area with lots of cafes where I am going to go and sit and write until my fingers fall off.
2b) not literally. That last bit not literally. I’m just going to write a lot.
2c) If your fingers fell off it would be dreadful, wouldn’t it? I might try that tomorrow. Just be all fisty and see how I get on.
2d) I’m sure you’d find ways round it. The human body and mind is a wonderfully adaptable machine.
2e) You know, we had to design a tin opener for Design and Communication when I was about 13. It had to be something that that was easy to use, not easily broken and, most importantly, it had to be designed with a one armed user in mind. I was really pleased with my simple wooden handle/metal opening device concept until I realised I’d discovered the axe.
Well, it would have opened tin cans. It just wouldn’t have been a very tidy process. I’ve got led off, haven’t I? Sorry.

3) Moving’s fine. I’ve done it, I worked out the other day, at least 10 times since this blog began, and at least once a year for the last 15 years, or thereabouts. Longest I’ve stayed anywhere was 18 months, and that was in the house we lived in in Brighton just before coming here. This means:
3a) That we’re pretty much a well-oiled machine when it comes to the logistics and mechanics of packing, moving and unpacking.
3b) That it’s getting a bit boring. Just because I keep moving, and love new places and experiences etc, doesn’t mean I don’t keep accumulating nice things representing the places I’ve been or the things I’ve done or things I love. It would be completely lovely to be somewhere where I knew everything could come out of a box, for a while.

4) The cats are fine.
5) Though having said that, one of them (the big one, Squirrel - full name Sir Ian McKellen, have I ever mentioned that? We never call her it, or call Widget “Dame Judi Dench” for that matter, but it doens’t stop them having full, formal names, even if they do kind of belong to other people) - sorry, I went off on another tangent. Basically
5) Though having said that, Squirrel, who would otherwise have you believe that she’s tough and hard and alphakitty, spent all of the first day hiding in the wardrobe, tucked so far behind some blankets and camping stuff that we spent thirty minutes searching before we found her, and this place is small enough to make that a ridiculous idea. But then, last time we moved we managed to lose her in a completely empty loft apartment, so shouldn’t underestimate her (she’d got behind the fitted kitchen units and was hanging out behind the fridge that time). But beyond that
4) They’re both fine, although having to put them in a box and lug them up the stairs out of the way of every open house in our flat was certainly wearing on someone’s nerves.
4) They’re fine. That’s all I meant to say.

6) Small things change, but many things about moving are the same the world over. Mainly mealy-mouthed letting agents. Oh, the lies they will tell you. Oh, the things they will say. Oh, the inescapable feeling of being covered in slime that follows you for hours after any encounter with one.

7) There have been NO trips to Ikea this time. That’s a fucking triumph for any move, I say.
7b) Though we do need a new washing up bowl, so let’s not speak too soon.

8) Around San Francisco, there remain only a couple of shell mounds not destroyed by spreading urbanness and the need to BUILD NEW STUFF. See, there were a tribe of ancient peoples native to the Bay Area who, were mainly nomadic, and the only thing left of them to mark where they were and where they lived on their journeys through the world were shell mounds.

It occurred to me while cleaning up yet another old flat, the spaces between the stairs, down the backs of things and under where furniture used to sit that if my beloved and I were wiped off the face of the earth tomorrow, and all the people who knew us forgot we ever were, scientists would still be able to write whole books about this very small nomadic tribe who travelled around leaving nothing in their wake but tiny piles of loose change (that’d be him) and a thousand dark brown hairpins (me) - (obv) - wherever they had settled temporarily.

9) We may be models of efficiency, and virtual moving machines: but I’m knackered. Physically. And otherwise, knackered.

10) This post, trust me, this post is not necessarily shorter than the one I abandoned, and no less movinggy. But it’s a lot less sodding “Meh meh meh I am the only person in the WORLD who has ever rented and had to move house quite often and oh NO ONE can understand it but ME.”. If nothing else, you can be thankful for that.

11) My grand plans of cafe writing may have to wait a couple of days, though. I am more concerned with important sleeping business at hand first. And unpacking. Oh! And…

12) Tomorrow (today now) being our San Franniversary. yay. I’m planning on doing something very San Franciscoish to celebrate. Not sure what, though. Will let you know. That will be good reason for finally doing that ‘Things I recommend in San Francisco’ post someone asked for.

13) I don’t seem to be actually going to bed, even though I keep saying I am, and I’m knackered, and clearly rambling, and should, and right, fuck it, I’m just going to close the computer and go.

14) But not without doing this, in case 13 is an unlucky number for anyone.

You can wish me a happy San Franniversary if you like. It’s a thing, honest it is.