Giant black poodles do not make the best guide dogs for the blind. That was what I learned this week as the world came to terms with the death of Michael Jackson. A strange combination of events, you have to admit, but life does get increasingly more strange here.
The Jackson news came when I was on the treadmill at the gym, where I had been watching it on NBC, Fox and CNN. When I managed to find a channel that wasn’t showing the event, I managed to tune in to a commercial that just so happened to have Jackson singing I’ll Be There on it. Well, not anymore he wasn’t.
That was my own private thought, shortly before jokes started clogging up my Blackberry. But this "humour" felt like something unreal taking place in a dreadful hole of incredible shock. Other jokes quickly followed. “And he looked so well” said one. “He’s re-releasing the Thriller video in six weeks’ time” said another. All inappropriate, but a reflex reaction.
I felt desperately sad. I grew up with Jackson at the centre of my pop world, and although Donny Osmond was my great love, no one can take away the huge impact Jackson's music, not to mention his influence regarding the recognition of black artists (or blacks in general, come to that), has had upon the world. Too young. Too soon.
I had moved to the stepper by the time the next bit of news arrived, again on a friend’s text: “And now Jeff Goldblum. Found him on his back with his legs in the air.”
I’m not a big fan of jokes about people who have only just touched down the wrong side of rigor mortis, but had let it pass with Jacko because when I was 14, my mother decided to give me an afro perm so that I would look like him.
His hairdo was, at the time (well, according to my mother), the height of fashion. I sat through double history in school (How could you, Mum? A schoolday, too?), with my duffle coat hood up, sobbing my heart out. At lunchtime I went home and made her take it out with the same level of peroxide that she had put the dastardly thing in with.
But Goldblum? What? Had he died? How? Had he been ill? And what was there to laugh about if he had? (I hadn’t ever seen him in The Fly, so didn’t get the joke anyway).
I met him a few months ago, when we both appeared on Richard and Judy, although not together, alas. He was on with Kevin Spacey to talk about Speed the Plow, in which they were starring at the Old Vic. I was on to talk about a highly destructive relationship I had once had with one of my school-teachers.
“So, you shagged a teacher!” the ever- sensitive Richard Madeley said, as I walked into the studio (Actually, I hadn't, and it was a lot more complicated than that, but heck, they who appear on daytime telly must die by its sword).
Jeff Goldblum putting his arm around me more than made up for it, and it was my knowing that he practised Transcendental Meditation that subsequently sent me back to it. I learned the technique years ago, but had let it lapse; the stress of trying to find 20 minutes to meditate at the end of each day nearly gave me a coronary; but now, in tandem with my new healthy lifestyle, I make sure I fit it in, and it has once more lowered my blood pressure to normal levels.
Of course, it rocketed to high heaven when I heard of Mr Goldblum’s “death”, so swings and roundabouts and all that.
On top of his being my inspiration to seek meditative calm, Mr Goldblum is the new face on Law and Order: Criminal Intent, and his comic timing and charisma have sent this series soaring to even greater heights.
In fact, I was in the process of writing him a fan letter, saying as such, last week. So news of his demise literally threw me off the stepper in tearful shock.
And yet no one could substantiate it. Google said that the New Zealand police had (at that point) confirmed the news (which they hadn’t); and every single US channel was still covering Jackson’s death.
In Britain, our broadcasters would have been among the crowd, just so happening to find the tallest, slimmest, blonde female mourner, to say what the star meant to her. They would instantly have started speculating about the amounts of medication that might have led to the death. In the US, they stuck to the facts – and it was boring as hell. Acres and acres of footage from concerts, and that Thriller video, over and over and over again.
When Britain woke up, my friends, who clearly have no conception of the size of Los Angeles, assumed I must be among the throng, if not already choosing my hat for the funeral. “It must be amazing there,” they texted. Er, pretty much like every day, actually, apart from not being able to find anything decent on the telly.
Others suggested it was a bit strange that since my arrival in LA, the showbiz world had lost Michael Jackson, Farah Fawcett and Jeff Goldblum.
They had not yet heard the confirmation that Mr Goldblum was very much alive and that the whole thing had been an internet hoax. Pretty damned sick, I call it. Also, Kevin Spacey had Twittered to put everyone straight and asked people to stop spreading rumours – the ultimate irony, on a site by its very nature designed to spread information as quickly as possible.
With my new best friend Jeff resurrected from the dead, I woke with a light heart on Friday, but that damned Thriller video was still on every channel. I tried to get away from it and went to the gym again, but it was still hogging the news channels on the equipment TVs, and it was also on the changing room telly, too. Yet it was still so hard to take it in.
At least you can always get a bit of peace in the pool, because they play classical music in there. But no sooner had I landed in the water than a blind lady arrived with her guide dog (a black poodle the size of a horse), plonked him by the side of the pool and left him there while she went in for some exercises.
Now, I have the utmost sympathy for anyone with any sort of disability getting some exercise; and I love dogs. But this damned poodle barked. And barked. And barked. And barked. I swam 50 lengths that took me 45 minutes, and still the creature was at it every time the water moved, which, with all eight lanes filled, you can imagine was pretty often.
I thought that after 24 hours of non-stop Thriller (and I really used to like it), the dying throes of a hyena would have been music to my ears, but a poodle is no golden labrador when it comes to guarding its blind.
Finally, I could stand it no more and ventured off to the steam room. After ten minutes, I thought I would rest for a bit in the Jacuzzi. No chance. The damned dog had moved to the Jacuzzi area and stood guarding it with Alcatraz-like enthusiasm. A naked woman started to go down the stops, but our curly friend was having none of it, barked wildly, and the breasts never even made it to the first bubble.
“They’ll be bringing in their tigers next,” moaned a woman in the dressing room, which just made me wonder what sort of company she kept of an evening.
Still, at least Jeff Goldblum was alive and well and living in Los Angeles, and, being awake while Britain slept, I was one of the first to be able to start telling everyone. I texted. I phoned. I e-mailed. It was the very opposite of that bizarre, secret pleasure one has, when breaking news of a death to people who are not yet in the know.
Jeff Goldblum is alive!
I could shout it from the rooftops. Best of all, nobody was singing about it.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
The Future's Not Bright Or Orange 6/23/09
What a lot of psychics there are in LA. You would think that they would have had the foresight to know that opening up three doors away from a rival isn’t going to be good business; but if you walk to West Hollywood or, as I did today, back from Melrose Avenue to Beverly Hills (think of the longest walk you have ever done and treble it), there are, literally, dozens.
No, I still don’t have a car, because I am trying to save money; hence my decision not to take a taxi, either. The one I took to Melrose cost me over $20, and I had to suffer yet another driver trying to get to grips with the fact that Wales is a country in its own right and not a city in England.
For some reason, this fascinates them; and today’s man also wanted to know which were the “friendly” people in the UK. That bit of the conversation was easy: everyone except the English.
The prospect of running out of money and having to return to the depressing British winter is already depressing me, so I thought I would drop in on a psychic to find out when my bumper pay cheque for the book I am writing was likely to arrive.
The Psychic Centre, on La Brea, promised much from the posters that lined the road on my way there; when I found it, a massive sign outside was promising a special $10 dollar reading which, at half the price of the taxi fare, seemed a good deal.
I went up the steps to find four women tucking into their Subway takeaway lunch around a crystal ball and a pile of Tarot cards with crumbs on them. Through a full mouth, the fattest one asked whether I was looking for a reading, and pretty much splattered me with the contents of said mouth when I said Yes.
They then could not decide who was going to do me, but called a scruffy girl of about 18 from the back, who looked pretty cheesed off at having her lunch break interrupted.
“What d’you want?”
“Well, what is there?”
“Tarot, palm, crystal ball, eye.”
I had had my eyeball read once before, when I was doing a health programme for Channel 4, and I hadn’t been very impressed. Did the eyeball of a junk food fanatic show spinning burgers in their depths?
Would my LA eyes now reveal the gallons of carrot juice I am drinking: and, just like the advert, would I be filled with optimism that my future was both bright and orange?
I wasn't really sure that my eyes were going to be the best predictors, as I was wearing some new mineral make-up that I bought at the weekend, and appeared to be suffering an allergic reaction to it; hence my eyes were very red with all the rubbing I had been doing to wipe away the constant torrent of water pouring from them.
“Have you had any of them before?”
“All of them,” I said.
A Tarot reader had once told me that I would have twins. Never happened. A crystal ball reader told me that I would marry someone whose name began with W. Never happened. The only W in my life was a William I once dated, who told me in a Paris café that I was the most intelligent, funny, fantastic woman he had ever met – he just didn’t fancy me. Stuff Paris as the City of Love.
Last year, passing through Turkey on a cruise, I had my Turkish coffee cup read, in the same way that people read tea-leaves. I was told that I spend money on big things (tell me about it – I spent 12,000 euros on a Chloe dress after one too many white wines a couple of years ago), that I would be very rich within three years (one down, two to go), and that a man whose name began with S was going to help my career big-time.
I tell you, if Simon Cowell doesn’t shift his backside quickly, I’m going to be on Skid Row.
My LA psychic was clearly having an off day and seemed highly irritated that I had even deigned to enter the room, let alone demand anything once inside.
“Is it all right if I tape it?” I asked, producing my Blackberry. That was a definite no-no. “Can I take notes?” “No. We don’t like that. It’s supposed to be private. Why would you want to tape it?”
Honestly, this was like pulling teeth. I could have finished this life, gone to an after one, AND returned as a sub-species in the time it was taking her to predict the next . . . Well, how many years? Heck, I only wanted to know as far as September. At this rate, I would be lucky to know what I was going to have for dinner.
“So what d’you want?”
“Okay, I’ll have the eye.”
“You want me to read your eyeball?”
“Yes, let’s go for that.”
“That’s $45.”
“But your sign outside says that you’re doing a special deal for $10.”
“Yeah, that’s a palm reading.”
“Okay, I’ll have one of those.”
“To be honest, it’s not very accurate.”
Oh, for heaven’s sake. I read my friends’ palms all the time and am deadly accurate. I have told them about things in their pasts that they have not even shared with their closest family and friends. I have made grown men cry with the accuracy of my palm-reading.
I can even read my own. I’m going to be very successful, but there is going to be a clean break of some sorts before I achieve that ultimate success (could that 6000 miles across the Atlantic be it, I have wondered?).
I’m going to live a long life and I won’t have any kids (my 50 year old body fills in the gaps that my palm has left out on that one).
Clearly, there was going to be no such insight in LA, so I walked out of the centre without having spent a dollar and muttering something about it all being a bit of a con.
In fact, given my own skills in this area – certainly, compared to the La Brea ghoul - I think I could open up a psychic centre in LA and do very well out of it.
The way the money is going, together with Mr Cowell’s ongoing silence, it looks as if it might be my only option. Dollar for your thoughts, everyone. You know where I am.
No, I still don’t have a car, because I am trying to save money; hence my decision not to take a taxi, either. The one I took to Melrose cost me over $20, and I had to suffer yet another driver trying to get to grips with the fact that Wales is a country in its own right and not a city in England.
For some reason, this fascinates them; and today’s man also wanted to know which were the “friendly” people in the UK. That bit of the conversation was easy: everyone except the English.
The prospect of running out of money and having to return to the depressing British winter is already depressing me, so I thought I would drop in on a psychic to find out when my bumper pay cheque for the book I am writing was likely to arrive.
The Psychic Centre, on La Brea, promised much from the posters that lined the road on my way there; when I found it, a massive sign outside was promising a special $10 dollar reading which, at half the price of the taxi fare, seemed a good deal.
I went up the steps to find four women tucking into their Subway takeaway lunch around a crystal ball and a pile of Tarot cards with crumbs on them. Through a full mouth, the fattest one asked whether I was looking for a reading, and pretty much splattered me with the contents of said mouth when I said Yes.
They then could not decide who was going to do me, but called a scruffy girl of about 18 from the back, who looked pretty cheesed off at having her lunch break interrupted.
“What d’you want?”
“Well, what is there?”
“Tarot, palm, crystal ball, eye.”
I had had my eyeball read once before, when I was doing a health programme for Channel 4, and I hadn’t been very impressed. Did the eyeball of a junk food fanatic show spinning burgers in their depths?
Would my LA eyes now reveal the gallons of carrot juice I am drinking: and, just like the advert, would I be filled with optimism that my future was both bright and orange?
I wasn't really sure that my eyes were going to be the best predictors, as I was wearing some new mineral make-up that I bought at the weekend, and appeared to be suffering an allergic reaction to it; hence my eyes were very red with all the rubbing I had been doing to wipe away the constant torrent of water pouring from them.
“Have you had any of them before?”
“All of them,” I said.
A Tarot reader had once told me that I would have twins. Never happened. A crystal ball reader told me that I would marry someone whose name began with W. Never happened. The only W in my life was a William I once dated, who told me in a Paris café that I was the most intelligent, funny, fantastic woman he had ever met – he just didn’t fancy me. Stuff Paris as the City of Love.
Last year, passing through Turkey on a cruise, I had my Turkish coffee cup read, in the same way that people read tea-leaves. I was told that I spend money on big things (tell me about it – I spent 12,000 euros on a Chloe dress after one too many white wines a couple of years ago), that I would be very rich within three years (one down, two to go), and that a man whose name began with S was going to help my career big-time.
I tell you, if Simon Cowell doesn’t shift his backside quickly, I’m going to be on Skid Row.
My LA psychic was clearly having an off day and seemed highly irritated that I had even deigned to enter the room, let alone demand anything once inside.
“Is it all right if I tape it?” I asked, producing my Blackberry. That was a definite no-no. “Can I take notes?” “No. We don’t like that. It’s supposed to be private. Why would you want to tape it?”
Honestly, this was like pulling teeth. I could have finished this life, gone to an after one, AND returned as a sub-species in the time it was taking her to predict the next . . . Well, how many years? Heck, I only wanted to know as far as September. At this rate, I would be lucky to know what I was going to have for dinner.
“So what d’you want?”
“Okay, I’ll have the eye.”
“You want me to read your eyeball?”
“Yes, let’s go for that.”
“That’s $45.”
“But your sign outside says that you’re doing a special deal for $10.”
“Yeah, that’s a palm reading.”
“Okay, I’ll have one of those.”
“To be honest, it’s not very accurate.”
Oh, for heaven’s sake. I read my friends’ palms all the time and am deadly accurate. I have told them about things in their pasts that they have not even shared with their closest family and friends. I have made grown men cry with the accuracy of my palm-reading.
I can even read my own. I’m going to be very successful, but there is going to be a clean break of some sorts before I achieve that ultimate success (could that 6000 miles across the Atlantic be it, I have wondered?).
I’m going to live a long life and I won’t have any kids (my 50 year old body fills in the gaps that my palm has left out on that one).
Clearly, there was going to be no such insight in LA, so I walked out of the centre without having spent a dollar and muttering something about it all being a bit of a con.
In fact, given my own skills in this area – certainly, compared to the La Brea ghoul - I think I could open up a psychic centre in LA and do very well out of it.
The way the money is going, together with Mr Cowell’s ongoing silence, it looks as if it might be my only option. Dollar for your thoughts, everyone. You know where I am.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Casting Pearls After Swine 6/14/09
Apparently, there are some women on the planet who will do anything to get the men in their life out of it. Given the amount of trouble I have getting them in there in the first place, not to mention acquiring enough chloroform, rope and chains to keep them there, I can’t see that it’s a problem I’m ever going to encounter.
So, I am completely mystified by a website called outofyourlife.com. As most things do these days, this came to my attention while exercising in the gym and watching the machines’ TVs, and I couldn’t wait to get home to find out more.
The TV commercial features a blonde woman handling various pieces of jewellery. They’re shiny, they’re chunky and, for the most part, fairly hideous. At one point, she examines a pair of un-matching ear-rings, as if trying to decide which she prefers, and we learn that each one relates to a man who, in real life, she was unable to decide between.
As she places each piece in jewellery in a special, lined box, the voiceover explains once you’re no longer with some man, the moment comes when: “It’s time to get his jewellery out of your life too.”
And how can you do this? You just let outofyourlife.com buy it all from you – and, yes, they even provide that special little box in which to place it all before you Fedex it off.
My first thought was that I would have dumped any guy who bought me such rotten jewellery to begin with; but then I remembered that apart from one brooch, no man has ever, ever bought me so much as a diamante hair-grip.
When I was 30, the man I was with bought me a china duck: a hideous, lime green and yellow, china duck vase whose only function I could foresee would be as something to smash over his head when the relationship ended (where were those websites supplying bubble wrap for packing up china ducks when I needed them, eh?).
In Wales, we have a custom of giving carved, wooden love spoons to the people we care for, not jewellery; but even in that respect I didn’t fare well. One Valentine’s Day, I opened up a gift that arrived in a love spoon box to find a pig’s trotter inside. Quite how that was supposed to woo me is another of life’s mysteries I have yet to fathom.
My last serious boyfriend gave me the single – not even the album, goddammit – of Mambo Number Five. You know the one – the guy who likes a bit of this woman here, a bit of that one on the side etc. etc. And I had to lend him the money to buy that.
Where on Earth are all these men who give jewellery in such abundance that it can be sent back in return for cash? I don’t have a lavish collection, but what I do have, I bought myself. Last year, for my 50th, I treated myself to a diamond tennis bracelet. It was something I had always wanted and, after a few drinks in Turkey, while covering a cruise for the Daily Mail, I saw a psychic in a hotel.
“You always spend money on big things,” she said. On the way back to the ship, after a few more drinks, I stopped off at a jeweller’s and bought the bracelet. I suspect that the minute I left the hotel, the psychic was on the phone to the shop, telling him: “There’s another one on her way.”
I really love diamonds, but if they are a girl’s best friend, where are all the men who know this and, more to the point, act upon it?
I have my eye on a rather exquisite, long chain of diamonds to match my tennis bracelet at the moment. I saw it while window-shopping on Rodeo Drive and went in to ask the price. “That would be $175,000, ma’am,” said the rather charming salesman. “It’s platinum.”
I kept a straight face. “Do you have it in white gold?”
“That would be $75,000, ma’am.”
Ever since the movie Pretty Woman, in which the assistants on Rodeo Drive treated Julia Roberts’ character Vivien with such contempt, all the stores are careful to behave towards everyone as if they have loads of money – even though, given my current financial circumstances, contempt would have been entirely justifiable.
But I didn’t see any man leaping out from behind a pillar, waving his cheque book, declaring: “No, no. Let me, Miss Stephen.” “Thank you, Mr Gere.”
In Spain and LA, I see women draped in jewels all the time; so what have they got that I haven’t? A lot of space between their ears, I suspect is the answer, and men with money (and the equivalent acreage in nothingness between their ears usually) appear to like that.
So, for all my being unable to fill that little satin box and receive my cheque in the post from outofyourlife.com, I’m grateful that I pretty much live by the intomylife.com premise, and that I don’t dislike anyone enough to hand back anything I’ve ever had from anyone.
And that includes the green and yellow china duck. At least it was given in love. The only exception is the pig’s trotter. I hope the guy who sent it caught swine flu.
So, I am completely mystified by a website called outofyourlife.com. As most things do these days, this came to my attention while exercising in the gym and watching the machines’ TVs, and I couldn’t wait to get home to find out more.
The TV commercial features a blonde woman handling various pieces of jewellery. They’re shiny, they’re chunky and, for the most part, fairly hideous. At one point, she examines a pair of un-matching ear-rings, as if trying to decide which she prefers, and we learn that each one relates to a man who, in real life, she was unable to decide between.
As she places each piece in jewellery in a special, lined box, the voiceover explains once you’re no longer with some man, the moment comes when: “It’s time to get his jewellery out of your life too.”
And how can you do this? You just let outofyourlife.com buy it all from you – and, yes, they even provide that special little box in which to place it all before you Fedex it off.
My first thought was that I would have dumped any guy who bought me such rotten jewellery to begin with; but then I remembered that apart from one brooch, no man has ever, ever bought me so much as a diamante hair-grip.
When I was 30, the man I was with bought me a china duck: a hideous, lime green and yellow, china duck vase whose only function I could foresee would be as something to smash over his head when the relationship ended (where were those websites supplying bubble wrap for packing up china ducks when I needed them, eh?).
In Wales, we have a custom of giving carved, wooden love spoons to the people we care for, not jewellery; but even in that respect I didn’t fare well. One Valentine’s Day, I opened up a gift that arrived in a love spoon box to find a pig’s trotter inside. Quite how that was supposed to woo me is another of life’s mysteries I have yet to fathom.
My last serious boyfriend gave me the single – not even the album, goddammit – of Mambo Number Five. You know the one – the guy who likes a bit of this woman here, a bit of that one on the side etc. etc. And I had to lend him the money to buy that.
Where on Earth are all these men who give jewellery in such abundance that it can be sent back in return for cash? I don’t have a lavish collection, but what I do have, I bought myself. Last year, for my 50th, I treated myself to a diamond tennis bracelet. It was something I had always wanted and, after a few drinks in Turkey, while covering a cruise for the Daily Mail, I saw a psychic in a hotel.
“You always spend money on big things,” she said. On the way back to the ship, after a few more drinks, I stopped off at a jeweller’s and bought the bracelet. I suspect that the minute I left the hotel, the psychic was on the phone to the shop, telling him: “There’s another one on her way.”
I really love diamonds, but if they are a girl’s best friend, where are all the men who know this and, more to the point, act upon it?
I have my eye on a rather exquisite, long chain of diamonds to match my tennis bracelet at the moment. I saw it while window-shopping on Rodeo Drive and went in to ask the price. “That would be $175,000, ma’am,” said the rather charming salesman. “It’s platinum.”
I kept a straight face. “Do you have it in white gold?”
“That would be $75,000, ma’am.”
Ever since the movie Pretty Woman, in which the assistants on Rodeo Drive treated Julia Roberts’ character Vivien with such contempt, all the stores are careful to behave towards everyone as if they have loads of money – even though, given my current financial circumstances, contempt would have been entirely justifiable.
But I didn’t see any man leaping out from behind a pillar, waving his cheque book, declaring: “No, no. Let me, Miss Stephen.” “Thank you, Mr Gere.”
In Spain and LA, I see women draped in jewels all the time; so what have they got that I haven’t? A lot of space between their ears, I suspect is the answer, and men with money (and the equivalent acreage in nothingness between their ears usually) appear to like that.
So, for all my being unable to fill that little satin box and receive my cheque in the post from outofyourlife.com, I’m grateful that I pretty much live by the intomylife.com premise, and that I don’t dislike anyone enough to hand back anything I’ve ever had from anyone.
And that includes the green and yellow china duck. At least it was given in love. The only exception is the pig’s trotter. I hope the guy who sent it caught swine flu.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Tarmac Orphan 6/10/09
Twelve inches is a long way in travel. The world may be getting smaller, but when you’re standing at A, desperate to get to B, and only twelve inches separates you from your destination, B might as well be on the moon.
The weird thing is: you wait all your life for a man in uniform with a powerful weapon to turn up, and then three come along together.
The details of my European trip have been eclipsed somewhat by the problems I had getting out of France and the subsequent problems I had getting back into the US. I feel as if I have lived most of the last 48 hours as a sort of Tarmac orphan, passport at the ready but unable to go anywhere.
My crime? A heavy suitcase packed with books and a couple of bags of loose change.
Nothing about me, I am sure, indicated that I was going to be Semtex catch of the week, as I arrived at the Eurostar Customs on Monday morning. I was loaded up because each time I return to the US, I ludicrously feel that I have to bring another section of my enormous library back home; I suppose it’s my comfort blanket.
I’ve been told by Eurostar in the past that women travelling alone are targeted because they tend to be the biggest drug traffickers, but apart from smuggling in a box of Oxo vegetarian stock cubes last time I returned to the US, my activities in this area are rather limited.
Personally, I blame the Alsation. I am quite at ease with small dogs, but when a very large one starts leaping around when your stuff is coming through on the conveyor belt, it can be a bit unnerving.
My terror was that it was going to eat my MacBook Air laptop, without my having had chance to back up the book and screenplay I am writing, so I was not really paying attention to the Customs man when he asked: “What’s in your case?”
As I had, in total, five bags, I couldn’t remember what was in the specific case to which he referred, so I said: “Things”. Wrong answer! “What things?” “Er, books, clothes . . . “ (and can’t you get that damned dog’s nose away from my computer).
Now, in my Linguaphone French language learning course, the Customs man – le douanier – is rather a nice chap. There is a family travelling together and he takes a shine to the daughter, Valerie. “Le douanier,” it says, “Il admire Valerie” (translation: he wouldn’t mind giving her one, there and then, over the conveyor belt).
I’ve always thought it was a bit sexist, but whatever it was that old Valerie had, I wished I now had it; but “Le douanier . . . Il deteste Jaci” was clearer much nearer the mark.
He told me to lift my case and put it on a table that seemed like double my body height. Not only was it too heavy to lift, I have a longstanding shoulder injury that would have made it impossible to do so anyway, and I told him so.
“You don’t lift it, you don’t travel.” I asked for help. “I’m not going to do it,” he said, and would not budge on the matter. I started to cry. “There is no point in crying, you are not going anywhere.” So, we were stuck: me, case, man with gun.
Eventually, a tiny female member of staff, even smaller than me, came over to lift the case, and I was almost on my way. The officer opened it, took out Dr Raj Persaud’s book, The Motivated Mind, threw it back, and told me I could go.
Maybe he thought that I was so motivated, it was not beyond the realms of possibility that I could grab his gun, shoot the lot of them, and still have time to eat the entire supply of croissants in the Frequent Traveller lounge.
I thought that would be an end to my day of Customs hell, but there was more to come when I reached the US some hours later. Although I have an I Visa that allows me to come and go freely, man number two with gun was having none of it.
They always ask you why you are entering the US, and they do so with such an air of “You so much as sniff our air without asking permission” that I am trembling so much, the paramedics almost have to be called in.
I was sent to another line, where man number three with gun awaited me. He wanted to see everything – and I mean everything – in both cases. Why were my cases so heavy? (There’s a dead Alsation in one of them; why do you think?). Why was I carrying so much loose change?
Was I carrying any food? Er, no. There were a couple of boxes of herbal tea for various digestive conditions that I thought best to keep to myself. Not that I would need them, as my bowels were now well and truly working without recourse to outside assistance.
But it was the books that really interested him. He too alighted upon The Motivated Mind, with Dr Raj Persaud’s picture on the cover. Now, Raj is a very handsome man, and someone I used to work with in TV, but suddenly he had the look of an accomplice about him. He is also of a non-white persuasion, which was something that had not even occurred to me before. Clearly, very dodgy indeed.
The official moved on to Save the Cat, Blake Snyder’s screenwriting book that is my Bible and that I carry everywhere while I am writing my movie. There is a very good picture of a cat clinging to a rope on the cover, the premise being that early in a movie, your hero should do something – such as saving a cat – that endears him or her to the audience.
But suddenly the cat didn’t look so clingy. In fact, it looked rather pained, as if someone had been trying to string it up two minutes before and it was in its last dying throes.
“If you want to write a movie it’s the best book,” I ventured. “It really is and most people do want to write one here don’t they and that’s why I came here and . . . “ Breathless, hopeless . . . If you’re in a hole, stop digging, but as if my spade were not doing an efficient enough job, I had brought in a JCB to help dig myself in still deeper.
Now, not only did I have a motivated mind, I tortured small animals. Quite clearly, it was going to be a small step from thereon in before I exercised my newly acquired killing skills on humans.
“Passport,” said my interrogator, and went off to a computer. All I could think of was the Little Britain sketch Computer Says No, as I awaited my fate. Had I done or said anything in the States that might warrant my not being allowed back in? I really didn’t think so. Apart from being born small and Welsh, of course, but it was only the English who ever had a problem with that.
Richard Curtis, the brilliant brain behind Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, had been on my flight, and he sailed through Customs. We had spent a brief time chatting on the plane, when I recalled a course he tutored many years ago, when he told me that all his movies were about the same thing: How do you find the right person to love?
Luckily for him, we had to return to our seats at the point where I had started to tell him that life wasn’t like the movies, that men suck, life sucks, Customs officials suck.
The last words he said to me as he left the plane were: “I’m sure you’ll find love eventually” (though you have to be honest: Love, Eventually as a movie title, as opposed to the movie he made - Love, Actually - doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
So, when I descended from the plane, I was dreaming of happy ever afters and Hugh Grant meeting me at the airport with a bunch of roses. Then the men with guns captured me. Like I said, Richard: life ain’t like the movies.
I am now safely back in the US, and at the moment can remember very little of my trip. I do, however, recall visiting a friend’s house in Paris and walking up the Champs Elysees, where I saw an old man holding a very small penis, urinating beside a tree. I confess to knowing the size because I stopped briefly, just to remind myself what a penis looked like (we’re talking a couple of years here, give or take a magazine or two).
It didn’t do much for me, I’m afraid. Twelve inches may be a long way in travel, but even a man with a gun couldn’t get me to hang around for two.
The weird thing is: you wait all your life for a man in uniform with a powerful weapon to turn up, and then three come along together.
The details of my European trip have been eclipsed somewhat by the problems I had getting out of France and the subsequent problems I had getting back into the US. I feel as if I have lived most of the last 48 hours as a sort of Tarmac orphan, passport at the ready but unable to go anywhere.
My crime? A heavy suitcase packed with books and a couple of bags of loose change.
Nothing about me, I am sure, indicated that I was going to be Semtex catch of the week, as I arrived at the Eurostar Customs on Monday morning. I was loaded up because each time I return to the US, I ludicrously feel that I have to bring another section of my enormous library back home; I suppose it’s my comfort blanket.
I’ve been told by Eurostar in the past that women travelling alone are targeted because they tend to be the biggest drug traffickers, but apart from smuggling in a box of Oxo vegetarian stock cubes last time I returned to the US, my activities in this area are rather limited.
Personally, I blame the Alsation. I am quite at ease with small dogs, but when a very large one starts leaping around when your stuff is coming through on the conveyor belt, it can be a bit unnerving.
My terror was that it was going to eat my MacBook Air laptop, without my having had chance to back up the book and screenplay I am writing, so I was not really paying attention to the Customs man when he asked: “What’s in your case?”
As I had, in total, five bags, I couldn’t remember what was in the specific case to which he referred, so I said: “Things”. Wrong answer! “What things?” “Er, books, clothes . . . “ (and can’t you get that damned dog’s nose away from my computer).
Now, in my Linguaphone French language learning course, the Customs man – le douanier – is rather a nice chap. There is a family travelling together and he takes a shine to the daughter, Valerie. “Le douanier,” it says, “Il admire Valerie” (translation: he wouldn’t mind giving her one, there and then, over the conveyor belt).
I’ve always thought it was a bit sexist, but whatever it was that old Valerie had, I wished I now had it; but “Le douanier . . . Il deteste Jaci” was clearer much nearer the mark.
He told me to lift my case and put it on a table that seemed like double my body height. Not only was it too heavy to lift, I have a longstanding shoulder injury that would have made it impossible to do so anyway, and I told him so.
“You don’t lift it, you don’t travel.” I asked for help. “I’m not going to do it,” he said, and would not budge on the matter. I started to cry. “There is no point in crying, you are not going anywhere.” So, we were stuck: me, case, man with gun.
Eventually, a tiny female member of staff, even smaller than me, came over to lift the case, and I was almost on my way. The officer opened it, took out Dr Raj Persaud’s book, The Motivated Mind, threw it back, and told me I could go.
Maybe he thought that I was so motivated, it was not beyond the realms of possibility that I could grab his gun, shoot the lot of them, and still have time to eat the entire supply of croissants in the Frequent Traveller lounge.
I thought that would be an end to my day of Customs hell, but there was more to come when I reached the US some hours later. Although I have an I Visa that allows me to come and go freely, man number two with gun was having none of it.
They always ask you why you are entering the US, and they do so with such an air of “You so much as sniff our air without asking permission” that I am trembling so much, the paramedics almost have to be called in.
I was sent to another line, where man number three with gun awaited me. He wanted to see everything – and I mean everything – in both cases. Why were my cases so heavy? (There’s a dead Alsation in one of them; why do you think?). Why was I carrying so much loose change?
Was I carrying any food? Er, no. There were a couple of boxes of herbal tea for various digestive conditions that I thought best to keep to myself. Not that I would need them, as my bowels were now well and truly working without recourse to outside assistance.
But it was the books that really interested him. He too alighted upon The Motivated Mind, with Dr Raj Persaud’s picture on the cover. Now, Raj is a very handsome man, and someone I used to work with in TV, but suddenly he had the look of an accomplice about him. He is also of a non-white persuasion, which was something that had not even occurred to me before. Clearly, very dodgy indeed.
The official moved on to Save the Cat, Blake Snyder’s screenwriting book that is my Bible and that I carry everywhere while I am writing my movie. There is a very good picture of a cat clinging to a rope on the cover, the premise being that early in a movie, your hero should do something – such as saving a cat – that endears him or her to the audience.
But suddenly the cat didn’t look so clingy. In fact, it looked rather pained, as if someone had been trying to string it up two minutes before and it was in its last dying throes.
“If you want to write a movie it’s the best book,” I ventured. “It really is and most people do want to write one here don’t they and that’s why I came here and . . . “ Breathless, hopeless . . . If you’re in a hole, stop digging, but as if my spade were not doing an efficient enough job, I had brought in a JCB to help dig myself in still deeper.
Now, not only did I have a motivated mind, I tortured small animals. Quite clearly, it was going to be a small step from thereon in before I exercised my newly acquired killing skills on humans.
“Passport,” said my interrogator, and went off to a computer. All I could think of was the Little Britain sketch Computer Says No, as I awaited my fate. Had I done or said anything in the States that might warrant my not being allowed back in? I really didn’t think so. Apart from being born small and Welsh, of course, but it was only the English who ever had a problem with that.
Richard Curtis, the brilliant brain behind Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, had been on my flight, and he sailed through Customs. We had spent a brief time chatting on the plane, when I recalled a course he tutored many years ago, when he told me that all his movies were about the same thing: How do you find the right person to love?
Luckily for him, we had to return to our seats at the point where I had started to tell him that life wasn’t like the movies, that men suck, life sucks, Customs officials suck.
The last words he said to me as he left the plane were: “I’m sure you’ll find love eventually” (though you have to be honest: Love, Eventually as a movie title, as opposed to the movie he made - Love, Actually - doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
So, when I descended from the plane, I was dreaming of happy ever afters and Hugh Grant meeting me at the airport with a bunch of roses. Then the men with guns captured me. Like I said, Richard: life ain’t like the movies.
I am now safely back in the US, and at the moment can remember very little of my trip. I do, however, recall visiting a friend’s house in Paris and walking up the Champs Elysees, where I saw an old man holding a very small penis, urinating beside a tree. I confess to knowing the size because I stopped briefly, just to remind myself what a penis looked like (we’re talking a couple of years here, give or take a magazine or two).
It didn’t do much for me, I’m afraid. Twelve inches may be a long way in travel, but even a man with a gun couldn’t get me to hang around for two.
Friday, June 5, 2009
California Dreamin' 6/5/09
If I’m honest, there was always that little bit of Californian in me. When I was 14, I spent my pocket money on Here’s Health magazine and books about various kinds of spiritual awakening.
Religious, occult, astrological – I was always interested in the different means by which people found their way in the world and tried to make sense of it all. And I have always loathed smoking with a passion.
At university, I spent the money set aside for food buying all the different kinds of lentils from the only delicatessen in town (heck, I grew up in a village where nobody even knew what a delicatessen was, let alone know how to spell it, so finding a use for lentils was always going to be way left of field for most people).
Now that I am in LA, that little corner of a foreign field that was forever California has been unleashed in me with a vengeance.
Apart from my minimum two hour workout every day, I eat more healthily than I have done since my lentil and sandal university days, and my bookshelves are once more filled with titles beginning with the likes of How to, When to, and Give Up Now, You’re Doomed.
Returning back to the UK briefly, I felt more Californian than British. “When did everyone get so fat?” I screamed, as I squashed myself in between restaurant tables in Cardiff and looked down the menu, declaring that there was absolutely nothing on it that I could eat.
Just as well, really, because I wouldn’t have had the time. I spent the entire evening doing furniture removals around the enormous foursome at the next table, and had to re-arrange my own seating every time I wanted to move an elbow to grab a glass of water.
“Don’t lose any more,” people kept saying to me, noting how much weight I had lost. “Go on, have a real drink,” friends said in Spain.
When I was not being encouraged to eat and drink more, I found myself defending America as if I were the First Lady. It was easy, given the political mess that has been dominating the UK headlines over the past week.
If you had told me even a year ago that I would ever have had anything positive to say about America, let along feel a surge of pride every time I pass the stars and stripes flag (I kid you not: I think perhaps I have been abducted and that the real me is living on planet Zog somewhere), I would have said I was more likely to commit hara-kiri.
Like most Brits, my experience of the country and its citizens was of loud-mouthed travellers being rude to waiters in restaurants; I am sure that those Americans do still exist, but in my little bubble that is Beverly Hills, I am being treated to a different breed, and for the moment I am happy to enjoy it.
I even found myself getting a bit gobby when I didn’t get the service I have so quickly become used to. But really, listen to this.
Yesterday, I went into my local delicatessen (these days, you can’t move for them in Cardiff), where I tried to buy a pot of yoghurt for me and a pot of double cream for my mother (she thinks I should definitely not lose any more weight). When I took them to the counter to pay, I was greeted with: “I got naw change” (Welsh accent, for my new American friends).
Me: Why do you have no change?
Girl: Well, I just come on see an’ I dawn’t knaw why, but there’s no change in the till.
Me: So what are we going to do then?
Girl: Well, we’ll just 'ave to see 'ow much it is an’ you’ll 'ave to pay me the right money.
Me: Please could you ring them up then, and we’ll see.
Girl: (examining yoghurt pot). There’s naw price on this. (Calls to other girl, mesmerised at the cheese counter). Can you see 'ow much this is?
(Girl 2 takes yoghurt, goes to fridge, potters around for about a week, discovers that there is no other like it and disappears into back store-room for another week. Emerges, looking blank. Walks to till).
Girl 2: I dunno the price of it. I can’t find another one.
(Both girls stare: one, at the priceless yoghurt pot, the other at the changeless till).
Me: D’you know? I’ll leave it. Your loss.
(Storms out, amid much huffing and puffing and praising America’s gun licence laws).
Well, those are the words that came out inside the shop; outside, it was something more along the lines of: Bloody Welsh bloody Brits can’t get any service anymore and could you ever it wouldn’t happen in Beverly Hills what does a girl have to do to get a sodding pot of yoghurt around here . . . That kind of thing, with a few more expletives thrown in.
For once, I found myself bemoaning the fact that I was not paying $3.99 for a stock cube in my local Wholefoods in Beverly Hills and declaring that you do, in fact, get what you pay for in life (or are not able to pay for, in the case of the Cardiff delicatessen).
However, the weather has been great (for once, it wasn’t raining in Cardiff), it was good to see family and friends, and weird to watch all the episodes of my favourite TV series that I have already seen in the US.
But heck, I miss the gym and my plates of berries. I miss the gallons of fresh carrot juice I can buy as easily as getting water from the tap. I miss being able to buy anything at all, when faced with the problem of there being no change in the till.
I am returning to LA via Paris, which is my favourite city on Earth. It will be interesting to see whether it still is, on my first visit since decamping to LA.
I already hear myself moaning about the smoking: although it is banned indoors, it is allowed outside on café terraces, which have now been turned into giant ashtrays.
I hear myself whining about not being able to get any vegetarian food. And I specially hear myself giving the French a hard time about their inherent dislike of Americans, which has only intensified in the aftermath of the Iraq war.
On the other hand, I might just think, sod it: order a beef bourguignon, a pint of wine, pick up a Frenchman, have unprotected sex, smoke a Gitane afterwards and curse all Americans for being loud-mouthed, bigoted, war-mongerers.
It could go either way. Two continents await.
Religious, occult, astrological – I was always interested in the different means by which people found their way in the world and tried to make sense of it all. And I have always loathed smoking with a passion.
At university, I spent the money set aside for food buying all the different kinds of lentils from the only delicatessen in town (heck, I grew up in a village where nobody even knew what a delicatessen was, let alone know how to spell it, so finding a use for lentils was always going to be way left of field for most people).
Now that I am in LA, that little corner of a foreign field that was forever California has been unleashed in me with a vengeance.
Apart from my minimum two hour workout every day, I eat more healthily than I have done since my lentil and sandal university days, and my bookshelves are once more filled with titles beginning with the likes of How to, When to, and Give Up Now, You’re Doomed.
Returning back to the UK briefly, I felt more Californian than British. “When did everyone get so fat?” I screamed, as I squashed myself in between restaurant tables in Cardiff and looked down the menu, declaring that there was absolutely nothing on it that I could eat.
Just as well, really, because I wouldn’t have had the time. I spent the entire evening doing furniture removals around the enormous foursome at the next table, and had to re-arrange my own seating every time I wanted to move an elbow to grab a glass of water.
“Don’t lose any more,” people kept saying to me, noting how much weight I had lost. “Go on, have a real drink,” friends said in Spain.
When I was not being encouraged to eat and drink more, I found myself defending America as if I were the First Lady. It was easy, given the political mess that has been dominating the UK headlines over the past week.
If you had told me even a year ago that I would ever have had anything positive to say about America, let along feel a surge of pride every time I pass the stars and stripes flag (I kid you not: I think perhaps I have been abducted and that the real me is living on planet Zog somewhere), I would have said I was more likely to commit hara-kiri.
Like most Brits, my experience of the country and its citizens was of loud-mouthed travellers being rude to waiters in restaurants; I am sure that those Americans do still exist, but in my little bubble that is Beverly Hills, I am being treated to a different breed, and for the moment I am happy to enjoy it.
I even found myself getting a bit gobby when I didn’t get the service I have so quickly become used to. But really, listen to this.
Yesterday, I went into my local delicatessen (these days, you can’t move for them in Cardiff), where I tried to buy a pot of yoghurt for me and a pot of double cream for my mother (she thinks I should definitely not lose any more weight). When I took them to the counter to pay, I was greeted with: “I got naw change” (Welsh accent, for my new American friends).
Me: Why do you have no change?
Girl: Well, I just come on see an’ I dawn’t knaw why, but there’s no change in the till.
Me: So what are we going to do then?
Girl: Well, we’ll just 'ave to see 'ow much it is an’ you’ll 'ave to pay me the right money.
Me: Please could you ring them up then, and we’ll see.
Girl: (examining yoghurt pot). There’s naw price on this. (Calls to other girl, mesmerised at the cheese counter). Can you see 'ow much this is?
(Girl 2 takes yoghurt, goes to fridge, potters around for about a week, discovers that there is no other like it and disappears into back store-room for another week. Emerges, looking blank. Walks to till).
Girl 2: I dunno the price of it. I can’t find another one.
(Both girls stare: one, at the priceless yoghurt pot, the other at the changeless till).
Me: D’you know? I’ll leave it. Your loss.
(Storms out, amid much huffing and puffing and praising America’s gun licence laws).
Well, those are the words that came out inside the shop; outside, it was something more along the lines of: Bloody Welsh bloody Brits can’t get any service anymore and could you ever it wouldn’t happen in Beverly Hills what does a girl have to do to get a sodding pot of yoghurt around here . . . That kind of thing, with a few more expletives thrown in.
For once, I found myself bemoaning the fact that I was not paying $3.99 for a stock cube in my local Wholefoods in Beverly Hills and declaring that you do, in fact, get what you pay for in life (or are not able to pay for, in the case of the Cardiff delicatessen).
However, the weather has been great (for once, it wasn’t raining in Cardiff), it was good to see family and friends, and weird to watch all the episodes of my favourite TV series that I have already seen in the US.
But heck, I miss the gym and my plates of berries. I miss the gallons of fresh carrot juice I can buy as easily as getting water from the tap. I miss being able to buy anything at all, when faced with the problem of there being no change in the till.
I am returning to LA via Paris, which is my favourite city on Earth. It will be interesting to see whether it still is, on my first visit since decamping to LA.
I already hear myself moaning about the smoking: although it is banned indoors, it is allowed outside on café terraces, which have now been turned into giant ashtrays.
I hear myself whining about not being able to get any vegetarian food. And I specially hear myself giving the French a hard time about their inherent dislike of Americans, which has only intensified in the aftermath of the Iraq war.
On the other hand, I might just think, sod it: order a beef bourguignon, a pint of wine, pick up a Frenchman, have unprotected sex, smoke a Gitane afterwards and curse all Americans for being loud-mouthed, bigoted, war-mongerers.
It could go either way. Two continents await.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Buddhism on Trial 5/28/09
It’s a thin line between being a Buddhist and being a serial killer: that’s what I’ve learned this week, in my quest for that LA spiritual enlightenment that everyone is seeking here.
If in doubt, buy the book: that’s always been my motto. I’m not someone who buys the book, puts it on a shelf and forgets about the messages therein. I buy them, devour them, and put them into practice within the hour. Hence, I bought Alan Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Drinking, and stopped drinking. I bought Blake Snyder’s book Save the Cat! which is about screenwriting, and came to Hollywood to put the tools into practice.
Okay, so I don’t do things by halves, but please keep me away from that section of the bookstore titled Bonsai for Beginners, as I really don’t want to spend the next 10 years fiddling about with small trees in my kitchen sink.
A mini personal crisis led me to believe that I needed to live a calmer life, so off I went to my local Borders bookstore this week in search of things that might help me. I drank my “Calming” Yogi tea beforehand, which stressed me out a bit, because no sooner had I set out on my walk than I needed a bathroom.
I had also taken my calming herbal Kava Kava pills, which have replaced two bottles of wine as a means of soothing my nerves, and although I could feel them regurgitating in my chest, thought about the good they were doing me and just breathed deeply: calm, calm.
Then I arrived at the store and wanted to knock the head off the small child who was screaming for sweets. Why do parents take small kids shopping when it is clear to anyone with half a brain (not to mention no kids) that they absolutely hate it and are always going to kick up a fuss about something?
But calm, calm, I said, as I headed towards the spiritual/new age religion section and chose about 20 books that were to be the foundation of creating the new me. I stocked up on some more movie books, too, and a few novels and travel books. I was feeling very good in my new skin.
Two hours later, I took them to the cash register, deposited them and told the assistant I was headed for the restroom (you see how American I have become? I no longer “go to the loo”; I am now “headed for the restroom”). He assured me that my books would be fine and that I could pay for them upon my return.
So, ablutions completed, I went back downstairs, only to discover that my two hours’ worth of research had all been put back on the shelves. “Where are my books?” I squealed. No, if I’m honest, I screamed. Louder than the child. “Oh for goodness sake you turn your back for one minute and your life’s ruined and if I wanted this kind of shit I’d have stayed in Britain and whatever happened to customer service and look at the time . . . “ Calm, calm.
Two hours more again, I had pretty much recouped my selection and re-grouped emotionally. I returned to my apartment, sweaty, with, I am sure, high blood pressure, and set about reading Buddhism for Dummies.
The little I knew about Buddhism, I had always liked, although, with my new 7 stone 7 lb frame (yes, more loss – and please stop e-mailing checking on whether I have anorexia; no, I don’t), the weight thing might be an issue. You know: did I have to turn into an overweight, squat person in order to practise Buddhism? I have always suspected that the reason the obese Buddha sat down, cross-legged, to meditate, was because he was too fat to stand, and I’d been down that path enough in life to know that it wasn’t where I wanted to return.
Some years ago, I learned Transcendental Meditation and adhered quite strictly to Ayurvedic principles (an Indian philosophy that really does reap physical, emotional and spiritual benefits in day to day life). I read books by Deepak Chopra, a well known proponent of Ayurveda, and it was through re-reading him that I had become interested in Buddhism again. I also bought Chopra’s novel, Buddha, but thought that Buddhism for Dummies might be an easier way in.
It was. As I made my way through Chapter 1, I instantly took to my new philosophical path. I liked the non-dogmatism and the easily applicable principles: creating the right kind of mental attitude in order to bring about a better quality of life. I was on the floor and crossing my legs before you could sing Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Chameleon (I wonder if Boy George got the idea for that song by reading Buddhism for Dummies?).
By lunchtime, I had Buddhism sorted. So much so, that I booked Judaism for Dummies to consume with the next day’s breakfast. Off I went to the bank on Wilshire Boulevard, singing along to Mika, the happiest I had been in some weeks.
Now, despite the efficient service I have found everywhere in LA, the one thing my bank has difficulty with is the transfer of money in and out of Europe. The idea that Europe would be in anyone’s minds in the LA climate is something of an anathema to them here, and this transmutes into the bank staff’s lack of enthusiasm for dealing with another ontinent.
Had I asked my guy to pilot the next space shuttle, he could not have looked more terrified, nor been slower at working out what went where. Already late for an appointment, I wasn’t so much tapping my fingers as putting them through my pockets in search of a handy weapon that might speed things along a bit.
One of the fundamentals of Buddhism is that pain and suffering are caused through our attachment to permanence, which is, in reality, only an illusion; and that when we let go of that pursuit of permanence, we will be happier. Try telling that to a would-be convert when a bank clerk is permanently stuck on the $ to £ conversion key on his computer.
No longer able to stand it, I did what any self-respecting citizen would do and took action. By now, I am sure the LAPD will have got there to untie everyone in time for the weekend. Me, I’ll be reading The Krays' biography.
If in doubt, buy the book: that’s always been my motto. I’m not someone who buys the book, puts it on a shelf and forgets about the messages therein. I buy them, devour them, and put them into practice within the hour. Hence, I bought Alan Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Drinking, and stopped drinking. I bought Blake Snyder’s book Save the Cat! which is about screenwriting, and came to Hollywood to put the tools into practice.
Okay, so I don’t do things by halves, but please keep me away from that section of the bookstore titled Bonsai for Beginners, as I really don’t want to spend the next 10 years fiddling about with small trees in my kitchen sink.
A mini personal crisis led me to believe that I needed to live a calmer life, so off I went to my local Borders bookstore this week in search of things that might help me. I drank my “Calming” Yogi tea beforehand, which stressed me out a bit, because no sooner had I set out on my walk than I needed a bathroom.
I had also taken my calming herbal Kava Kava pills, which have replaced two bottles of wine as a means of soothing my nerves, and although I could feel them regurgitating in my chest, thought about the good they were doing me and just breathed deeply: calm, calm.
Then I arrived at the store and wanted to knock the head off the small child who was screaming for sweets. Why do parents take small kids shopping when it is clear to anyone with half a brain (not to mention no kids) that they absolutely hate it and are always going to kick up a fuss about something?
But calm, calm, I said, as I headed towards the spiritual/new age religion section and chose about 20 books that were to be the foundation of creating the new me. I stocked up on some more movie books, too, and a few novels and travel books. I was feeling very good in my new skin.
Two hours later, I took them to the cash register, deposited them and told the assistant I was headed for the restroom (you see how American I have become? I no longer “go to the loo”; I am now “headed for the restroom”). He assured me that my books would be fine and that I could pay for them upon my return.
So, ablutions completed, I went back downstairs, only to discover that my two hours’ worth of research had all been put back on the shelves. “Where are my books?” I squealed. No, if I’m honest, I screamed. Louder than the child. “Oh for goodness sake you turn your back for one minute and your life’s ruined and if I wanted this kind of shit I’d have stayed in Britain and whatever happened to customer service and look at the time . . . “ Calm, calm.
Two hours more again, I had pretty much recouped my selection and re-grouped emotionally. I returned to my apartment, sweaty, with, I am sure, high blood pressure, and set about reading Buddhism for Dummies.
The little I knew about Buddhism, I had always liked, although, with my new 7 stone 7 lb frame (yes, more loss – and please stop e-mailing checking on whether I have anorexia; no, I don’t), the weight thing might be an issue. You know: did I have to turn into an overweight, squat person in order to practise Buddhism? I have always suspected that the reason the obese Buddha sat down, cross-legged, to meditate, was because he was too fat to stand, and I’d been down that path enough in life to know that it wasn’t where I wanted to return.
Some years ago, I learned Transcendental Meditation and adhered quite strictly to Ayurvedic principles (an Indian philosophy that really does reap physical, emotional and spiritual benefits in day to day life). I read books by Deepak Chopra, a well known proponent of Ayurveda, and it was through re-reading him that I had become interested in Buddhism again. I also bought Chopra’s novel, Buddha, but thought that Buddhism for Dummies might be an easier way in.
It was. As I made my way through Chapter 1, I instantly took to my new philosophical path. I liked the non-dogmatism and the easily applicable principles: creating the right kind of mental attitude in order to bring about a better quality of life. I was on the floor and crossing my legs before you could sing Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Chameleon (I wonder if Boy George got the idea for that song by reading Buddhism for Dummies?).
By lunchtime, I had Buddhism sorted. So much so, that I booked Judaism for Dummies to consume with the next day’s breakfast. Off I went to the bank on Wilshire Boulevard, singing along to Mika, the happiest I had been in some weeks.
Now, despite the efficient service I have found everywhere in LA, the one thing my bank has difficulty with is the transfer of money in and out of Europe. The idea that Europe would be in anyone’s minds in the LA climate is something of an anathema to them here, and this transmutes into the bank staff’s lack of enthusiasm for dealing with another ontinent.
Had I asked my guy to pilot the next space shuttle, he could not have looked more terrified, nor been slower at working out what went where. Already late for an appointment, I wasn’t so much tapping my fingers as putting them through my pockets in search of a handy weapon that might speed things along a bit.
One of the fundamentals of Buddhism is that pain and suffering are caused through our attachment to permanence, which is, in reality, only an illusion; and that when we let go of that pursuit of permanence, we will be happier. Try telling that to a would-be convert when a bank clerk is permanently stuck on the $ to £ conversion key on his computer.
No longer able to stand it, I did what any self-respecting citizen would do and took action. By now, I am sure the LAPD will have got there to untie everyone in time for the weekend. Me, I’ll be reading The Krays' biography.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Eva Longoria Parker, My Body Double 5/21/09
Would Eva Longoria Parker eat it? That is the question I ask when confronted with every snack or meal in the size zero city that is LA’s Beverly Hills.
When I arrived here on April 1st, I was eight stone eight pounds (or 120 pounds, as they say here), which is not gross, but still too heavy for my five foot frame. Despite my having lost over a stone a year ago, largely by firstly cutting out and then drinking just a little alcohol, the pounds had started to pile back on, and I found my cheekbones once more starting to compete with my second chin.
So, coming to the supremely health-conscious LA seemed a good place to begin again, and, at an exquisite size four (UK size) and the same height as me, the American size zero (or double zero, I suspected) Desperate Housewives star was the woman I looked to for inspiration.
To date, I have lost another 14 pounds by following my plan (no food, no drinks, no leaving the treadmill) – a whole stone! – and now weigh 7 st 8 lbs (106 lbs! Sorry, but it really excites me).
A plate of crisps arrives at my table in the five star Beverly Wilshire Hotel (still my favourite place and where I stayed before I found an apartment) and I look at them longingly before asking: Would Eva Longoria eat them? Well, no. You don’t get to be and maintain a size zero, not to mention acquire a perfect mouth that looks as if it has just had a lipstick manicure, by ramming a plate of deep fried potatoes down your throat.
So, it’s farewell to the crisps. When they bring my English breakfast tea, it arrives with a long dish of Italian sweetmeats and biscuits. Would Eva Longoria eat them? Only if you chloroformed her first and force-fed them.
I apply the same rule to all bars and restaurants. This week, I went for lunch in Il Fornaio: a lovely, friendly Italian establishment on Canon Drive, and looked longingly down their list of pastas. Spaghetti Calamari and Broccoli, Fusilliani alla Trentina, Tarte Con Argosta – all unusual dishes that I had never seen on Italian menus in the UK. And, as I went down the list, I asked over and over: Would Eva Longoria eat it? No, no, no. Just a black espresso for me, please.
Asking the question is a guaranteed way to lose weight, and I believe that I have inadvertently stumbled upon the perfect diet: because the answer to the question “Would Eva Longoria eat it?” is always going to be No.
I suspect that Eva, like every other thin woman in LA, enjoys playing with the occasional leaf – without dressing (are you crazy?) – and, to this end, I am now perfecting the art of steering a leaf around my plate, without ever consuming it, while giving the impression that I am stuffing my face. Over the radish, under the yellow pepper, slalom over the red onion – I can make a leaf’s journey around my plate last longer than a Grand Prix. And, by the end of its course, it really does look half consumed.
Another technique sure to bring about this apparition of greed is to place the weight of a cherry tomato in the middle of, say, a mound of rocket: it flattens the centre of the display to such an extent, your dining companion might be tempted to tell you to slow down, for fear of your developing indigestion through over-eating.
Or, you can achieve the weighing down technique by moving all your rocket to the side of your plate, taking a piece of bread (obviously, without eating a crumb), ripping it in two and squashing it down at each end of your rocket pile, thereby giving the appearance of real over-indulgence – carbs, heaven forbid: the woman’s a pig – yet leaving the restaurant thinner, albeit starving.
Beverly Hills restaurants are very tolerant of the non-eating diner. My lunch in Il Fornaio lasted three hours, during which both my guest and I ate not a morsel and consumed just two bottles of water. One of my British friends, also new to LA but still keen on her food (how quaint – she’ll learn) bemoans this aspect of the culture. She says she gets invited to breakfast meetings where there is no breakfast, and spends the whole time wondering when the bacon and eggs are coming.
Of course, I knew before I came here that drinking in public was pretty much a no-no, but especially so during the day. If the answer to Would Eva Longoria eat it? is No, the answer to Would Eva Longoria drink it? is: You must be insane. Glass of champagne? 150 calories. Dry white wine? 120. You don’t shrink to the kind of shape that gets blown away in an LA earthquake by consuming empty calories.
So, with my new Eva Longoria eating and drinking plan, my weight is once more heading in the right direction, and this week I bought my first (of many, I hope) size zero jeans.
Eva Longoria, eat your heart out.
Oh, I forgot: you can’t. Too many calories.
When I arrived here on April 1st, I was eight stone eight pounds (or 120 pounds, as they say here), which is not gross, but still too heavy for my five foot frame. Despite my having lost over a stone a year ago, largely by firstly cutting out and then drinking just a little alcohol, the pounds had started to pile back on, and I found my cheekbones once more starting to compete with my second chin.
So, coming to the supremely health-conscious LA seemed a good place to begin again, and, at an exquisite size four (UK size) and the same height as me, the American size zero (or double zero, I suspected) Desperate Housewives star was the woman I looked to for inspiration.
To date, I have lost another 14 pounds by following my plan (no food, no drinks, no leaving the treadmill) – a whole stone! – and now weigh 7 st 8 lbs (106 lbs! Sorry, but it really excites me).
A plate of crisps arrives at my table in the five star Beverly Wilshire Hotel (still my favourite place and where I stayed before I found an apartment) and I look at them longingly before asking: Would Eva Longoria eat them? Well, no. You don’t get to be and maintain a size zero, not to mention acquire a perfect mouth that looks as if it has just had a lipstick manicure, by ramming a plate of deep fried potatoes down your throat.
So, it’s farewell to the crisps. When they bring my English breakfast tea, it arrives with a long dish of Italian sweetmeats and biscuits. Would Eva Longoria eat them? Only if you chloroformed her first and force-fed them.
I apply the same rule to all bars and restaurants. This week, I went for lunch in Il Fornaio: a lovely, friendly Italian establishment on Canon Drive, and looked longingly down their list of pastas. Spaghetti Calamari and Broccoli, Fusilliani alla Trentina, Tarte Con Argosta – all unusual dishes that I had never seen on Italian menus in the UK. And, as I went down the list, I asked over and over: Would Eva Longoria eat it? No, no, no. Just a black espresso for me, please.
Asking the question is a guaranteed way to lose weight, and I believe that I have inadvertently stumbled upon the perfect diet: because the answer to the question “Would Eva Longoria eat it?” is always going to be No.
I suspect that Eva, like every other thin woman in LA, enjoys playing with the occasional leaf – without dressing (are you crazy?) – and, to this end, I am now perfecting the art of steering a leaf around my plate, without ever consuming it, while giving the impression that I am stuffing my face. Over the radish, under the yellow pepper, slalom over the red onion – I can make a leaf’s journey around my plate last longer than a Grand Prix. And, by the end of its course, it really does look half consumed.
Another technique sure to bring about this apparition of greed is to place the weight of a cherry tomato in the middle of, say, a mound of rocket: it flattens the centre of the display to such an extent, your dining companion might be tempted to tell you to slow down, for fear of your developing indigestion through over-eating.
Or, you can achieve the weighing down technique by moving all your rocket to the side of your plate, taking a piece of bread (obviously, without eating a crumb), ripping it in two and squashing it down at each end of your rocket pile, thereby giving the appearance of real over-indulgence – carbs, heaven forbid: the woman’s a pig – yet leaving the restaurant thinner, albeit starving.
Beverly Hills restaurants are very tolerant of the non-eating diner. My lunch in Il Fornaio lasted three hours, during which both my guest and I ate not a morsel and consumed just two bottles of water. One of my British friends, also new to LA but still keen on her food (how quaint – she’ll learn) bemoans this aspect of the culture. She says she gets invited to breakfast meetings where there is no breakfast, and spends the whole time wondering when the bacon and eggs are coming.
Of course, I knew before I came here that drinking in public was pretty much a no-no, but especially so during the day. If the answer to Would Eva Longoria eat it? is No, the answer to Would Eva Longoria drink it? is: You must be insane. Glass of champagne? 150 calories. Dry white wine? 120. You don’t shrink to the kind of shape that gets blown away in an LA earthquake by consuming empty calories.
So, with my new Eva Longoria eating and drinking plan, my weight is once more heading in the right direction, and this week I bought my first (of many, I hope) size zero jeans.
Eva Longoria, eat your heart out.
Oh, I forgot: you can’t. Too many calories.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
It's a Bloke Thing 5/17/09
Did I really need to travel 6000 miles across the Atlantic to learn that being a complete dickhead is not confined to men in the UK?
I’ve now had the opportunity to observe the male species operating in England, Wales, France and Spain, and now the US – all places where I have lived and, in the latter’s case, am living – and I now feel the same about men as I do about snow flakes: yes, every one is, as they say, different. But let’s be honest: an awful lot of them are pretty damned alike.
I really like men. I have great male friends, some of whom are exes, some of whom are future exes because I haven’t got my claws into them yet. Others are exes I never want to see again, and others are on hit lists (including mine).
But really: despite the number of men in my life, I am no closer to understanding a damned thing about them. In each of the countries listed above, I have, however, investigated the men who offer themselves up on internet dating sites and been able to draw some generalisations.
In Britain, for example, if you are a woman over the age of 30, it is pointless putting your real age on a site, as most men think that 28 is really pushing it – irrespective of whether they are 20 or 60. Large breasts are much in demand, as is blonde hair and no baggage. The men invariably have more baggage than a Louis Vuitton warehouse, but as a woman you won’t be considered unless you can fit yours into an overhead locker and still have room for a multi-storey car-park.
French men set more store by brains than breasts, and dating sites offer far more esoteric social activities than those on offer by their British counterparts. In Paris, I attended an evening where the subject was “So you think you know about love”, and for three hours everyone joined in the conversation without making a hit on anyone else. When the evening finished, it was not to the most obviously physically attractive women that the men flocked, but to the ones who had made the most intelligent contribution to the debate.
If there is a singles scene in LA, it has so far eluded me, hence my signing up to yet another internet dating site. I thought I would narrow my search to LA and, had I been able, would have narrowed it further to the distance between my apartment and the Jimmy Choo shop on Rodeo Drive, such is my reluctance to purchase the car everyone assures me I will need.
Television commercials informed me that 20,000 people a day join the site I signed up to (whose privacy I will protect, pending any lawsuit I might bring for the “guaranteed” matchmaking part of their pitch that I suspect will not happen); and, after filling in my details and adding some pictures, I waited for the computer to go into meltdown.
Now, what I’ve never understood about internet dating, is that when you specify you want a non-smoking, slim, health-conscious, funny, creative guy over 6 feet tall, every chain-smoking, overweight, alcoholic, humourless construction worker straight out of midget school, thinks that he is just the man for you. Oh, yes, and although you have narrowed your search to LA, they don’t think that their living in Texas will be a problem.
When they are keen, they are very, very keen. One man had recently moved to Washington but was all set to come to LA, if I just gave him the nod. Another contacted me from the UK, saying that he had decided to cast his net further afield (and then targeted the only single, British, LA-based woman on the site – weird, that. Big net. Fear of fish.).
Having also said, in my profile, that I did not want any heavy religion in the life of my soul-mate, I appear to have attracted the attention of every Catholic in America and, suddenly, “saved” men, who all but ask if it’s okay if the Lord comes along on our dates. I already feel a line about there being three people in our relationship.
This being health-conscious LA, there are dozens of men stressing their love of the outdoors. To be honest, I don’t like any place where I can’t see a Marriott sign just by standing on a small box, so I have pretty much ruled out what seems like 90% of the city.
Also on the health front, I foolishly ticked a box, indicating that I lifted the occasional weight. This has somehow become translated into something much more impressive than it actually is, and many men appear in my “Interested” box with the headline “Like you, he enjoys weight-lifting”, which isn’t quite the same thing as taking a couple of baked bean cans off the supermarket shelf a couple of times a week.
Compared to the UK, there is generally less emphasis on female physical attributes on the US site, and also the men seem more open to meeting women who fall within a much wider age bracket. But then some of them can’t be choosers, I imagine. Where, for example, is the man whose profile bangs on about “North Pole region warming” going to find a woman – well, apart from in the North Pole, obviously?
Only one man I contacted, and, afterI directed him to this blog, should he require more information about me, he declared it to be “WAYYYYYYYYY” too much; he also recommended that I “rethink” suggesting the link. I had “almost” had him, he wrote, adding: “Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.”
Hilarious! One, that he thought he was so great a catch that he stood a snowball’s chance of getting me that easily (no one else has managed in five decades; I’m no pushover). And two, that he was criticising me even before the first date! Even British men wait a couple of weeks before doing that.
The great thing about the internet, though, is that you can find such things out about people very quickly; now, I won’t even have to go through the bother of dressing up and leaving my apartment to establish that the guy’s a nobhead.
Instead, I can stay in, watch more wall-to-wall House, and keep singing that jolly song that won Saturday's Eurovision Song Contest: I’m in Love with a Fairy Tale.
Unfortunately, it’s true.
I’ve now had the opportunity to observe the male species operating in England, Wales, France and Spain, and now the US – all places where I have lived and, in the latter’s case, am living – and I now feel the same about men as I do about snow flakes: yes, every one is, as they say, different. But let’s be honest: an awful lot of them are pretty damned alike.
I really like men. I have great male friends, some of whom are exes, some of whom are future exes because I haven’t got my claws into them yet. Others are exes I never want to see again, and others are on hit lists (including mine).
But really: despite the number of men in my life, I am no closer to understanding a damned thing about them. In each of the countries listed above, I have, however, investigated the men who offer themselves up on internet dating sites and been able to draw some generalisations.
In Britain, for example, if you are a woman over the age of 30, it is pointless putting your real age on a site, as most men think that 28 is really pushing it – irrespective of whether they are 20 or 60. Large breasts are much in demand, as is blonde hair and no baggage. The men invariably have more baggage than a Louis Vuitton warehouse, but as a woman you won’t be considered unless you can fit yours into an overhead locker and still have room for a multi-storey car-park.
French men set more store by brains than breasts, and dating sites offer far more esoteric social activities than those on offer by their British counterparts. In Paris, I attended an evening where the subject was “So you think you know about love”, and for three hours everyone joined in the conversation without making a hit on anyone else. When the evening finished, it was not to the most obviously physically attractive women that the men flocked, but to the ones who had made the most intelligent contribution to the debate.
If there is a singles scene in LA, it has so far eluded me, hence my signing up to yet another internet dating site. I thought I would narrow my search to LA and, had I been able, would have narrowed it further to the distance between my apartment and the Jimmy Choo shop on Rodeo Drive, such is my reluctance to purchase the car everyone assures me I will need.
Television commercials informed me that 20,000 people a day join the site I signed up to (whose privacy I will protect, pending any lawsuit I might bring for the “guaranteed” matchmaking part of their pitch that I suspect will not happen); and, after filling in my details and adding some pictures, I waited for the computer to go into meltdown.
Now, what I’ve never understood about internet dating, is that when you specify you want a non-smoking, slim, health-conscious, funny, creative guy over 6 feet tall, every chain-smoking, overweight, alcoholic, humourless construction worker straight out of midget school, thinks that he is just the man for you. Oh, yes, and although you have narrowed your search to LA, they don’t think that their living in Texas will be a problem.
When they are keen, they are very, very keen. One man had recently moved to Washington but was all set to come to LA, if I just gave him the nod. Another contacted me from the UK, saying that he had decided to cast his net further afield (and then targeted the only single, British, LA-based woman on the site – weird, that. Big net. Fear of fish.).
Having also said, in my profile, that I did not want any heavy religion in the life of my soul-mate, I appear to have attracted the attention of every Catholic in America and, suddenly, “saved” men, who all but ask if it’s okay if the Lord comes along on our dates. I already feel a line about there being three people in our relationship.
This being health-conscious LA, there are dozens of men stressing their love of the outdoors. To be honest, I don’t like any place where I can’t see a Marriott sign just by standing on a small box, so I have pretty much ruled out what seems like 90% of the city.
Also on the health front, I foolishly ticked a box, indicating that I lifted the occasional weight. This has somehow become translated into something much more impressive than it actually is, and many men appear in my “Interested” box with the headline “Like you, he enjoys weight-lifting”, which isn’t quite the same thing as taking a couple of baked bean cans off the supermarket shelf a couple of times a week.
Compared to the UK, there is generally less emphasis on female physical attributes on the US site, and also the men seem more open to meeting women who fall within a much wider age bracket. But then some of them can’t be choosers, I imagine. Where, for example, is the man whose profile bangs on about “North Pole region warming” going to find a woman – well, apart from in the North Pole, obviously?
Only one man I contacted, and, afterI directed him to this blog, should he require more information about me, he declared it to be “WAYYYYYYYYY” too much; he also recommended that I “rethink” suggesting the link. I had “almost” had him, he wrote, adding: “Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.”
Hilarious! One, that he thought he was so great a catch that he stood a snowball’s chance of getting me that easily (no one else has managed in five decades; I’m no pushover). And two, that he was criticising me even before the first date! Even British men wait a couple of weeks before doing that.
The great thing about the internet, though, is that you can find such things out about people very quickly; now, I won’t even have to go through the bother of dressing up and leaving my apartment to establish that the guy’s a nobhead.
Instead, I can stay in, watch more wall-to-wall House, and keep singing that jolly song that won Saturday's Eurovision Song Contest: I’m in Love with a Fairy Tale.
Unfortunately, it’s true.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
To Shave or Not to Shave, That is the Question 5/13/09
Do men like women with beards? I’ve been looking in the magnifying mirror this week and have noticed some dark hairs below my bottom lip, and it has me seriously worried.
We’re not yet talking Brian Blessed here, but I’m more than a little worried by the hint of Cyrano de Bergerac. At least he had the nose to distract from any unwelcome attention onlookers might give to his face, but for me it’s the hairs that seem to stand out.
I think it must be my age. I’ve always had an excess of upper lip hair, which nobody has ever seen, owing to the fact that I whip it off roughly every three hours. Friends have told me that I could get it cosmetically removed and, in Beverly Hills, I am in the best place to get both it, and everything else done, but it would mean growing the hair first. And if there’s one thing that a 90210 postcode definitely doesn’t need, it’s a moustachioed woman in the street, frightening the horses.
But I’m not quite sure how to deal with the chin issue. I’ve been busy plucking away for the last half hour, and when I turn my 7x magnifying mirror round the other way, you can’t see one hair, let alone the forest it has become in my mind.
So, if I can’t see it, it is unlikely that any man will, which is my real worry. It’s not the kind of thing men inspect on a first date (unlike women: I’ve been known not to stay past the hors d’oeuvres if I notice a man hasn’t even been bothered to squeeze the blackheads in his nose before the date); but, still, I don’t want to take the risk.
Not that men are exactly queuing at the door. Honestly, you have to be really quick to nab one between the office and the gym. Once they’re on that treadmill or lifting those weights, women are the last thing on their minds – well, short Welsh birds, anyway; they seem to manage to take a breather when a blonde, 6 foot streak of sinew walks past, so it’s just like being back in the UK in that respect.
Beard aside, there are other imperfections I’ve been looking to correct, and they, too, seem to magnify when I view them alongside the perfect figures and faces of the women I see around me.
I’ve been considering a breast enlargement for some time, but am now worried that with all the exercise I am doing, they might get in the way; I’m going to take two melons with me next time I go and try to negotiate them along with the controls for the machine, TV and my Apple headphones, and see how it goes.
I recently considered a tummy tuck, too, but now that I’ve lost weight might not need one. Maybe I’ll just eat a bit more to justify one.
The weight loss is great in one respect, in that I am healthier and fitter, but it has given me a whole new set of problems. When I was well over nine stone, I had a really great backside: firm, rounded and, though I say it myself, rather appealing. Now it’s tiny, with lots of folds of skin where it meets the top of my legs, like rows of worm hills on the beach, all queuing up to be washed away – by, in this case, liposuction, I think.
My eyelids could do with a tiny lift, but I don’t want to look Korean, as people tend to do after this procedure; and I’m saying no to Botox, too. I’ve seen too many post-Botox, expressionless people to go down that path. I swear that you could go up to all of them, tell them your entire family had been wiped out in a plane crash, and they would not be able to wipe the stunned look of smiling joy from their faces.
I might consider getting the floppy skin removed from my upper arms, although it seems to be tightening up with the weights work I am doing. My teeth, which I started having done in the UK, are nearing completion and have been bleached and partly veneered. I say partly, because I’m having only the front two re-done, and they each came back a different colour, the one now revealing the black behind it that was the whole reason for covering it up in the first place. With my black tooth and beard, I fear mothers will be rushing to shield their small children from me in the park.
I’ve also been reading about an operation in which you can have your legs broken and bits inserted to make yourself taller; that one may be a bit further down the line, too, and I’m going to wait to see how much I shrink in the LA summer sun before resorting to such drastic measures.
But for the moment, I’m just concentrating on my beard and taking lots of natural hormonal supplements to keep it in check. There’s a saying that a man with a beard is a man with a secret (Ha! Show me a bloke who isn’t hiding SOMETHING!), and the antithesis has to be that a woman with a beard is a woman without a razor.
I’m not sure how much longer this plucking can go on, so it might have to be a Gillette job after all. My only comfort is that if and when I finally get to date a bloke, he’ll be so busy trying to unfold my arse, he won’t notice the audition for Captain Hook taking place on my chin.
We’re not yet talking Brian Blessed here, but I’m more than a little worried by the hint of Cyrano de Bergerac. At least he had the nose to distract from any unwelcome attention onlookers might give to his face, but for me it’s the hairs that seem to stand out.
I think it must be my age. I’ve always had an excess of upper lip hair, which nobody has ever seen, owing to the fact that I whip it off roughly every three hours. Friends have told me that I could get it cosmetically removed and, in Beverly Hills, I am in the best place to get both it, and everything else done, but it would mean growing the hair first. And if there’s one thing that a 90210 postcode definitely doesn’t need, it’s a moustachioed woman in the street, frightening the horses.
But I’m not quite sure how to deal with the chin issue. I’ve been busy plucking away for the last half hour, and when I turn my 7x magnifying mirror round the other way, you can’t see one hair, let alone the forest it has become in my mind.
So, if I can’t see it, it is unlikely that any man will, which is my real worry. It’s not the kind of thing men inspect on a first date (unlike women: I’ve been known not to stay past the hors d’oeuvres if I notice a man hasn’t even been bothered to squeeze the blackheads in his nose before the date); but, still, I don’t want to take the risk.
Not that men are exactly queuing at the door. Honestly, you have to be really quick to nab one between the office and the gym. Once they’re on that treadmill or lifting those weights, women are the last thing on their minds – well, short Welsh birds, anyway; they seem to manage to take a breather when a blonde, 6 foot streak of sinew walks past, so it’s just like being back in the UK in that respect.
Beard aside, there are other imperfections I’ve been looking to correct, and they, too, seem to magnify when I view them alongside the perfect figures and faces of the women I see around me.
I’ve been considering a breast enlargement for some time, but am now worried that with all the exercise I am doing, they might get in the way; I’m going to take two melons with me next time I go and try to negotiate them along with the controls for the machine, TV and my Apple headphones, and see how it goes.
I recently considered a tummy tuck, too, but now that I’ve lost weight might not need one. Maybe I’ll just eat a bit more to justify one.
The weight loss is great in one respect, in that I am healthier and fitter, but it has given me a whole new set of problems. When I was well over nine stone, I had a really great backside: firm, rounded and, though I say it myself, rather appealing. Now it’s tiny, with lots of folds of skin where it meets the top of my legs, like rows of worm hills on the beach, all queuing up to be washed away – by, in this case, liposuction, I think.
My eyelids could do with a tiny lift, but I don’t want to look Korean, as people tend to do after this procedure; and I’m saying no to Botox, too. I’ve seen too many post-Botox, expressionless people to go down that path. I swear that you could go up to all of them, tell them your entire family had been wiped out in a plane crash, and they would not be able to wipe the stunned look of smiling joy from their faces.
I might consider getting the floppy skin removed from my upper arms, although it seems to be tightening up with the weights work I am doing. My teeth, which I started having done in the UK, are nearing completion and have been bleached and partly veneered. I say partly, because I’m having only the front two re-done, and they each came back a different colour, the one now revealing the black behind it that was the whole reason for covering it up in the first place. With my black tooth and beard, I fear mothers will be rushing to shield their small children from me in the park.
I’ve also been reading about an operation in which you can have your legs broken and bits inserted to make yourself taller; that one may be a bit further down the line, too, and I’m going to wait to see how much I shrink in the LA summer sun before resorting to such drastic measures.
But for the moment, I’m just concentrating on my beard and taking lots of natural hormonal supplements to keep it in check. There’s a saying that a man with a beard is a man with a secret (Ha! Show me a bloke who isn’t hiding SOMETHING!), and the antithesis has to be that a woman with a beard is a woman without a razor.
I’m not sure how much longer this plucking can go on, so it might have to be a Gillette job after all. My only comfort is that if and when I finally get to date a bloke, he’ll be so busy trying to unfold my arse, he won’t notice the audition for Captain Hook taking place on my chin.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Anyone for Tennis? No, Thanks 5/9/09
“Do you have lots of friends?” people back home keep asking. “What’s the social life like?” “Where do you go in the evenings?”
I must sound incredibly dull to my UK friends, whose idea of LA is party, party, party, hanging out with the beautiful people and devouring burgers as big as your head.
But the truth is, since my arrival a month ago, I’ve lived a fairly quiet life. I came here to write, and that, apart from daily trips to the gym, is pretty much all I’ve been doing. I’m never in bed beyond 6 am (in fact, 4 or 5 am is generally closer to my rising time) and I usually fall asleep on the sofa in front of another episode of Law and Order (can there be any that I haven’t yet seen? I seriously doubt it) mid-evening, before surrendering to bed at around half 10.
Back home, I was never in bed before midnight, but then I never drank carrot juice by the bucket-load in Cardiff, either, so I am embracing all kinds of new experiences.
Since you ask, yes (I can hear the laughter even from here), I really like carrot juice. I tried to drink it in the UK and bought a top of the range juicer to make my own, but soon lost interest when I quickly discovered that you need to buy four sacks of carrots to extract just one tablespoon of juice. Even as someone who has rearranging my cooking spices in alphabetical order on my list of work-avoidance tasks, this was extreme.
Los Angeles, though, is like one vast convenience store, and I can buy my fresh carrot juice just half a dozen doors away in Wholefoods, even if it doesn’t come with the virtue of burning off 18000 calories a throw in the effort and time it takes to squeeze it.
But there is more to life than work and carrot juice, as everyone keeps reminding me, and so this week I started exploring the possibilities of widening my social circle.
There is, for example, a language school in Canon Drive, the next block along from where I live, and I spent several days drawing up rotas for the various classes I intended to take: furthering my French that I spent seven years in Paris never learning; continuing the Spanish that, in four years half-living in Spain, has given me a vocabulary of “Hola!” and “Agua sin gaz”; and even starting Russian, a language that I love and in which I have acquired the ability to introduce myself and say one four letter word beginning with C in English and P in Russian.
Don’t ask me how I learned it . . . Oh, all right: it was in Spain, chatting to some Russians over lunch. They had no English, Spanish or French; I had all three, in limited quantity; but we found common ground in the C/P word and, incredibly, spent a very enjoyable three hours on the strength of our shared knowledge. I love languages.
However, I spent so long planning my LA lessons, I missed the start of the new term and didn’t see any point in wasting money for something that wasn’t going to be the full whack. I also remembered the last time I attended a language course with Americans, in the Berlitz School in Paris. There were only three of us in the class, and the Americans took two days to understand that the teacher was referring to the past tense.
“Je suis . . . “ they kept saying, the present first person that they insisted on using in response to every single question about what they had done the previous day. “Non, no, non, HIER,” the teacher kept repeating, attempting to engage them in the activities of yesterday. In the end, I screamed: “SHE’S TALKING IN THE PAST TENSE, FOR GOD’S SAKE!” which endeared me to no one.
Neither did my own attempts to explain how many bottles of wine I had drunk the previous night: “J’ai bu trois bouteilles Saint Emilion.” The teacher simply thought I did not know the word for glass. “Non, non,” she smiled. “Trois VERRES.”
“Uh, non. Trois bouteilles.”
“Non! C’est impossible!”
Now that I don’t drink, it sounds fairly impossible to moi, too, but the unhappy memories of language classes was clearly the unconscious motive behind my missing the opening week of classes in LA.
Friends back home suggested I try out the private clubs, and so I went to the website of the most famous and one of the closest to me, the LA Country Club.
There is very little information about the Club’s activities on the website, but the hefty section devoted to dress code soon reveals why: by the time you work through what you can and can’t wear, you’d be too exhausted to do anything else.
Let’s take the men’s attire, for starters. Shirts, for example, must have sleeves and collars and be “worn inside one’s trousers” (Eh? The whole shirt? Sleeves and collars, too? Perhaps “tucked in” might have explained things better, or maybe I am missing some very “in” LA fashion statement about stuffing your lunch-box to the seams).
Their slacks must be of “a tailored nature” (they would be, given the way they pack those lunch-boxes) and any caps (although none are allowed indoors) must be worn “with the bill forward”. As I have no desire to meet any man who wears a cap of any sorts, the idea that they might even be hanging around is enough to put me off.
But not as much as the women’s rules regarding attire do. I swear that fighting for my country in Afghanistan would not require so long a list of rules and regulations. The one that immediately put me off was the one about no tops that “expose the midriff” being allowed. Well, that’s it then. I can presume from this that I wouldn’t be allowed to get my tits out for the lads. Cardiff Blues Rugby Club it clearly ain’t.
However, “Formal or evening strapless attire is permitted.” This seems a bit hypocritical to me: no tummies, so no going UP your top for the multitude of groping men that are always a feature of private clubs, but it’s totally acceptable to go DOWN your top, minus the inconvenience of straps, provided it’s after 6pm.
Skirts must be “no shorter than 4 inches above the knee”, which rules out my entire wardrobe going back over 30 years; and slacks “must be tailored and within 6 inches of the ankle.” What on earth does that mean? Six inches in circumference, length, or 6 inches when lying beside you, after you’ve taken not only your top of for the lads, but your trousers, too?
Now, here’s the killer: “Ladies’ (sic) may wear brimmed hats coordinating with their outfits." Well, for starters, I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that doesn’t know where to place its apostrophes; and two, where the hell are you going to find a hat to go with the kind of outfit that takes ankle distance into account?
As a general rule, slogans or printed materials unrelated to the manufacturer are not permitted. That’s another killer for me, as it instantly rules out the “Jaci’s Box” T-shirts I had made when I purchased my hospitality box at Cardiff Blues Rugby Club, complete with slogan “I’ve been in Jaci’s Box” emblazoned across the front.
I’ve now turned my attentions to the Beverly Hills Country Club instead. They have invited me for lunch to take a look around, and I also see from their website that they hold Singles evenings. I am shortening my hemlines even as I write.
I must sound incredibly dull to my UK friends, whose idea of LA is party, party, party, hanging out with the beautiful people and devouring burgers as big as your head.
But the truth is, since my arrival a month ago, I’ve lived a fairly quiet life. I came here to write, and that, apart from daily trips to the gym, is pretty much all I’ve been doing. I’m never in bed beyond 6 am (in fact, 4 or 5 am is generally closer to my rising time) and I usually fall asleep on the sofa in front of another episode of Law and Order (can there be any that I haven’t yet seen? I seriously doubt it) mid-evening, before surrendering to bed at around half 10.
Back home, I was never in bed before midnight, but then I never drank carrot juice by the bucket-load in Cardiff, either, so I am embracing all kinds of new experiences.
Since you ask, yes (I can hear the laughter even from here), I really like carrot juice. I tried to drink it in the UK and bought a top of the range juicer to make my own, but soon lost interest when I quickly discovered that you need to buy four sacks of carrots to extract just one tablespoon of juice. Even as someone who has rearranging my cooking spices in alphabetical order on my list of work-avoidance tasks, this was extreme.
Los Angeles, though, is like one vast convenience store, and I can buy my fresh carrot juice just half a dozen doors away in Wholefoods, even if it doesn’t come with the virtue of burning off 18000 calories a throw in the effort and time it takes to squeeze it.
But there is more to life than work and carrot juice, as everyone keeps reminding me, and so this week I started exploring the possibilities of widening my social circle.
There is, for example, a language school in Canon Drive, the next block along from where I live, and I spent several days drawing up rotas for the various classes I intended to take: furthering my French that I spent seven years in Paris never learning; continuing the Spanish that, in four years half-living in Spain, has given me a vocabulary of “Hola!” and “Agua sin gaz”; and even starting Russian, a language that I love and in which I have acquired the ability to introduce myself and say one four letter word beginning with C in English and P in Russian.
Don’t ask me how I learned it . . . Oh, all right: it was in Spain, chatting to some Russians over lunch. They had no English, Spanish or French; I had all three, in limited quantity; but we found common ground in the C/P word and, incredibly, spent a very enjoyable three hours on the strength of our shared knowledge. I love languages.
However, I spent so long planning my LA lessons, I missed the start of the new term and didn’t see any point in wasting money for something that wasn’t going to be the full whack. I also remembered the last time I attended a language course with Americans, in the Berlitz School in Paris. There were only three of us in the class, and the Americans took two days to understand that the teacher was referring to the past tense.
“Je suis . . . “ they kept saying, the present first person that they insisted on using in response to every single question about what they had done the previous day. “Non, no, non, HIER,” the teacher kept repeating, attempting to engage them in the activities of yesterday. In the end, I screamed: “SHE’S TALKING IN THE PAST TENSE, FOR GOD’S SAKE!” which endeared me to no one.
Neither did my own attempts to explain how many bottles of wine I had drunk the previous night: “J’ai bu trois bouteilles Saint Emilion.” The teacher simply thought I did not know the word for glass. “Non, non,” she smiled. “Trois VERRES.”
“Uh, non. Trois bouteilles.”
“Non! C’est impossible!”
Now that I don’t drink, it sounds fairly impossible to moi, too, but the unhappy memories of language classes was clearly the unconscious motive behind my missing the opening week of classes in LA.
Friends back home suggested I try out the private clubs, and so I went to the website of the most famous and one of the closest to me, the LA Country Club.
There is very little information about the Club’s activities on the website, but the hefty section devoted to dress code soon reveals why: by the time you work through what you can and can’t wear, you’d be too exhausted to do anything else.
Let’s take the men’s attire, for starters. Shirts, for example, must have sleeves and collars and be “worn inside one’s trousers” (Eh? The whole shirt? Sleeves and collars, too? Perhaps “tucked in” might have explained things better, or maybe I am missing some very “in” LA fashion statement about stuffing your lunch-box to the seams).
Their slacks must be of “a tailored nature” (they would be, given the way they pack those lunch-boxes) and any caps (although none are allowed indoors) must be worn “with the bill forward”. As I have no desire to meet any man who wears a cap of any sorts, the idea that they might even be hanging around is enough to put me off.
But not as much as the women’s rules regarding attire do. I swear that fighting for my country in Afghanistan would not require so long a list of rules and regulations. The one that immediately put me off was the one about no tops that “expose the midriff” being allowed. Well, that’s it then. I can presume from this that I wouldn’t be allowed to get my tits out for the lads. Cardiff Blues Rugby Club it clearly ain’t.
However, “Formal or evening strapless attire is permitted.” This seems a bit hypocritical to me: no tummies, so no going UP your top for the multitude of groping men that are always a feature of private clubs, but it’s totally acceptable to go DOWN your top, minus the inconvenience of straps, provided it’s after 6pm.
Skirts must be “no shorter than 4 inches above the knee”, which rules out my entire wardrobe going back over 30 years; and slacks “must be tailored and within 6 inches of the ankle.” What on earth does that mean? Six inches in circumference, length, or 6 inches when lying beside you, after you’ve taken not only your top of for the lads, but your trousers, too?
Now, here’s the killer: “Ladies’ (sic) may wear brimmed hats coordinating with their outfits." Well, for starters, I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that doesn’t know where to place its apostrophes; and two, where the hell are you going to find a hat to go with the kind of outfit that takes ankle distance into account?
As a general rule, slogans or printed materials unrelated to the manufacturer are not permitted. That’s another killer for me, as it instantly rules out the “Jaci’s Box” T-shirts I had made when I purchased my hospitality box at Cardiff Blues Rugby Club, complete with slogan “I’ve been in Jaci’s Box” emblazoned across the front.
I’ve now turned my attentions to the Beverly Hills Country Club instead. They have invited me for lunch to take a look around, and I also see from their website that they hold Singles evenings. I am shortening my hemlines even as I write.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Home Alone 5/5/09
I’ve just returned from the UK after my first visit there since de-camping to LA at the beginning of April. I get very emotional when I fly. For nine years, fear of terrorist attack stopped me from going near a plane, and then, ironically, along came September 11th 2001 and I thought: what the hell.
Now, I love flying, especially long haul between the UK and LA, where I am guaranteed 11 hours without my phone ringing and where, yesterday, I managed to get 5000 words written of my new book that I am convinced will make me very rich indeed.
I had the idea on the treadmill at the Marriott Hotel in Swiss Cottage (or the Regent’s Park Marriott, as they cleverly call it – trust me, there’s a difference). Most of my good ideas come on the treadmill these days, in pretty much the same way that they used to come to me in bars, when I was drinking. The difference is that when I leave the treadmill, I can remember them.
I was in London for Blake Snyder’s fantastic Beats course (any budding screenwriter should take it – you will leave a different person from the one who went in, I guarantee it), which I had taken in LA, albeit in a different form. In LA, a group of 12 worked on their individual projects; in London we worked in groups and, by the end of the two days, had five workable screenplays between us.
It’s a long time since I worked in any sort of group, and they are fascinating: a place where everyone exposes their strengths and weaknesses in unison; and what usually happens is that you see that people’s weaknesses are their strengths pushed to the extreme. My strength, for instance, is that I have loads of ideas; my weakness is my passion for them and, as a result, my reluctance to let them go (or, heaven forbid, allow other people to develop them and try to claim half the credit).
I loved meeting Kim, a fiction editor with Mills and Boon, who, I think, will be a lifelong friend. As I am 20 years older than her, “life” won’t be quite as long in her case, but at least it’s someone else who can say nice things about me at my funeral. I was revealing my innermost secrets to her by the end of Sunday afternoon and, as happens among women, we were soon laughing hysterically about rather painful issues of the heart.
Of course, I don’t want my funeral to take place for a long time and, God willing, it won’t. I don’t think much about dying these days, whereas when I was drinking it was on my mind pretty much every minute of every day. I suspect that was because I knew, deep down, that every drop of alcohol propels you two steps towards the grave, and one is already too quick in my book.
It may be a tiny drop you imbibe (and I am not critical of anyone who chooses to drink – it’s your funeral, as they say); it may be a lot; and, of course, many people are able to drink in moderation. But it’s still a poison and, while life is often undoubtedly more difficult without it, it’s better – or, if not always better, different, and exciting for being so.
But I’ve been thinking about drinking a lot the past few days: not because I want to revert to it, but because of all the places you expect to be able to avoid it – ie on a plane, over the Atlantic – this proved to the place where I was most exposed to it.
On the way to the UK, I flew Air New Zealand Business Class, where if I had been given a pound for every time I was offered a glass of wine, I could have paid for another return flight. It was the same on Virgin on the way back. Luckily, I detest New Zealand wines, and Mr Branson’s selection, as I learned last year, is no better, so temptation was never an option. But even had they had a Petrus, I would still have been able to say no.
I have gone from someone who says “I’m not drinking at the moment” to someone who says “I don’t drink”, and I genuinely don’t think about it – most of the time. But when someone is waving a bottle of champagne in your face and saying “Are you sure you don’t want a glass”, it’s hard to avoid the subject.
What not drinking does is leave you more time: thinking time, and because exercise has replaced the time I used to spend chatting in bars, I do a lot more thinking these days. The Marriott pool at Swiss Cottage has to be the most stupidly designed of any in the world. At its deepest, it is one metre; the shallow end is 0.5 metres. What they don’t tell you is how dangerous this can be when you’re swimming a length and suddenly your arm goes over in a crawl in the deep end, only to crash down on the bottom of the pool in the shallow end.
Luckily, I am a bad swimmer and keep my head above water, so I always know what’s coming, be it a shark or the shallow end; my friend was not so lucky and, with head below the surface, first knew of the change when he cracked his skull.
There is nothing quite like running or swimming to give you thinking time (squash, for example, doesn’t work on this front), and on Sunday morning, I sat in the shallow end of the pool (it was good for some things) and just cried and cried. Tears like I haven’t shed in years (although had I been in Cardiff on Saturday and watched my team the Blues lose out in the semi-final of the Heineken Cup on the first ever penalty kick-off against Leicester, I think I would have cried then).
The intensity of the creative process on a writing weekend inevitably brings things to the surface (a bit like the Marriott pool, really) – good and bad – and resurrects old wounds, alongside the formation of new friendships and ties. And, flying across continents, I think I was crying not for home, but because I’m not sure where home is anymore.
Having spent the last few years between the UK, Paris and Spain, and now being based in the States, there is nothing like sitting alone in the middle of an empty pool to reinforce the metaphor of aloneness.
Feeling a bit vulnerable, before boarding I became terrified again that I would never land and started texting my friends. Now, one of the pieces of advice everyone gives you when you’re pissed is: Don’t drink and text. I think that one of the biggest surprises to me when I gave up is that being sober doesn’t stop you. It’s not alcohol that drives you to bare your soul on your mobile; it’s just you!
It’s another reason why I, and my friends, are happy when I embark on another 11 hour flight. In space, nobody can hear me text.
Now, I love flying, especially long haul between the UK and LA, where I am guaranteed 11 hours without my phone ringing and where, yesterday, I managed to get 5000 words written of my new book that I am convinced will make me very rich indeed.
I had the idea on the treadmill at the Marriott Hotel in Swiss Cottage (or the Regent’s Park Marriott, as they cleverly call it – trust me, there’s a difference). Most of my good ideas come on the treadmill these days, in pretty much the same way that they used to come to me in bars, when I was drinking. The difference is that when I leave the treadmill, I can remember them.
I was in London for Blake Snyder’s fantastic Beats course (any budding screenwriter should take it – you will leave a different person from the one who went in, I guarantee it), which I had taken in LA, albeit in a different form. In LA, a group of 12 worked on their individual projects; in London we worked in groups and, by the end of the two days, had five workable screenplays between us.
It’s a long time since I worked in any sort of group, and they are fascinating: a place where everyone exposes their strengths and weaknesses in unison; and what usually happens is that you see that people’s weaknesses are their strengths pushed to the extreme. My strength, for instance, is that I have loads of ideas; my weakness is my passion for them and, as a result, my reluctance to let them go (or, heaven forbid, allow other people to develop them and try to claim half the credit).
I loved meeting Kim, a fiction editor with Mills and Boon, who, I think, will be a lifelong friend. As I am 20 years older than her, “life” won’t be quite as long in her case, but at least it’s someone else who can say nice things about me at my funeral. I was revealing my innermost secrets to her by the end of Sunday afternoon and, as happens among women, we were soon laughing hysterically about rather painful issues of the heart.
Of course, I don’t want my funeral to take place for a long time and, God willing, it won’t. I don’t think much about dying these days, whereas when I was drinking it was on my mind pretty much every minute of every day. I suspect that was because I knew, deep down, that every drop of alcohol propels you two steps towards the grave, and one is already too quick in my book.
It may be a tiny drop you imbibe (and I am not critical of anyone who chooses to drink – it’s your funeral, as they say); it may be a lot; and, of course, many people are able to drink in moderation. But it’s still a poison and, while life is often undoubtedly more difficult without it, it’s better – or, if not always better, different, and exciting for being so.
But I’ve been thinking about drinking a lot the past few days: not because I want to revert to it, but because of all the places you expect to be able to avoid it – ie on a plane, over the Atlantic – this proved to the place where I was most exposed to it.
On the way to the UK, I flew Air New Zealand Business Class, where if I had been given a pound for every time I was offered a glass of wine, I could have paid for another return flight. It was the same on Virgin on the way back. Luckily, I detest New Zealand wines, and Mr Branson’s selection, as I learned last year, is no better, so temptation was never an option. But even had they had a Petrus, I would still have been able to say no.
I have gone from someone who says “I’m not drinking at the moment” to someone who says “I don’t drink”, and I genuinely don’t think about it – most of the time. But when someone is waving a bottle of champagne in your face and saying “Are you sure you don’t want a glass”, it’s hard to avoid the subject.
What not drinking does is leave you more time: thinking time, and because exercise has replaced the time I used to spend chatting in bars, I do a lot more thinking these days. The Marriott pool at Swiss Cottage has to be the most stupidly designed of any in the world. At its deepest, it is one metre; the shallow end is 0.5 metres. What they don’t tell you is how dangerous this can be when you’re swimming a length and suddenly your arm goes over in a crawl in the deep end, only to crash down on the bottom of the pool in the shallow end.
Luckily, I am a bad swimmer and keep my head above water, so I always know what’s coming, be it a shark or the shallow end; my friend was not so lucky and, with head below the surface, first knew of the change when he cracked his skull.
There is nothing quite like running or swimming to give you thinking time (squash, for example, doesn’t work on this front), and on Sunday morning, I sat in the shallow end of the pool (it was good for some things) and just cried and cried. Tears like I haven’t shed in years (although had I been in Cardiff on Saturday and watched my team the Blues lose out in the semi-final of the Heineken Cup on the first ever penalty kick-off against Leicester, I think I would have cried then).
The intensity of the creative process on a writing weekend inevitably brings things to the surface (a bit like the Marriott pool, really) – good and bad – and resurrects old wounds, alongside the formation of new friendships and ties. And, flying across continents, I think I was crying not for home, but because I’m not sure where home is anymore.
Having spent the last few years between the UK, Paris and Spain, and now being based in the States, there is nothing like sitting alone in the middle of an empty pool to reinforce the metaphor of aloneness.
Feeling a bit vulnerable, before boarding I became terrified again that I would never land and started texting my friends. Now, one of the pieces of advice everyone gives you when you’re pissed is: Don’t drink and text. I think that one of the biggest surprises to me when I gave up is that being sober doesn’t stop you. It’s not alcohol that drives you to bare your soul on your mobile; it’s just you!
It’s another reason why I, and my friends, are happy when I embark on another 11 hour flight. In space, nobody can hear me text.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Wake Me When the Earth Moves 4/25/09
One of the many things they don't tell you when you start dating is that if you are hoping for the earth to move, your best chance is to move over 5000 miles east across the Atlantic.
It looks as if this much awaited experience might finally happen for me, as I get my act together for what the posters in Beverly Hills call "Earthquake Preparedness Month." I am slightly panicky, as EPM is billed as April and, although I arrived on the 1st of the month, my earthquake cupboard is somewhat bare.
Although the earthquake is not a dead cert, everyone assures me that after last year's 25 second quake in central LA, and the promise of a monster one in 2010, I can expect something over the coming months and should Be Prepared.
My local hardware store, Pioneer, offers computer repairs (including Apple), handymen, knife sharpening and, I noticed, "earthquake kits". When I went in to see one, I was told that I could put together my own, although I was in such a state at having to have one at all, I didn't really listen to what I might need and came away with a Le Creuset casserole dish.
One friend, who grew up with the threat of earthquakes since he was a child, has been instructing me as to where I should head, if the seemingly inevitable happens. He says it is good that I live just one floor from the top of my building, so that the other floors will not come crashing down on me, and that in an emergency I should on no account leave the building, where I will undoubtedly be hit by low-flying rooftops.
My best bet, he says, is to head for the door-frame; failing that, I should take refuge under a table. I have a better idea: as he is well over six foot, how about HE stands under the door frame or goes under the table, and I take refuge under HIM? I have yet to put this idea to him.
I have become mildly obsessed with the earthquake problem and today, when I checked out the sister gym of the one I go to in Beverly Hills, the floor was shaking so badly in the Ladies, I thought my big moment had come. When I went to reception, she explained that the trembling was as a result of the various cardio-vascular machines operating on the floor above; I just pray that I am not in the gym when the earthquake strikes and be subjected to a double whammy of terror.
It was a bit of a nerve-racking day all round at the new gym. Shortly after the non-earthquake in the Ladies, there was the most almighty roar of an alarm that sent me reeling from the treadmill. Thinking that it must be an earthquake warning (I told you I was obsessed), I ran to the other side of the building, only to find three lots of men playing basketball in the Magic Johnson gym.
The hooter was sounding for reasons I have yet to work out, and related to timings that flashed on a board above the court; it all meant nothing to me. But if you want to die among fit men (in both senses of the word) when the earthquake strikes, then the Magic Johnson basketball court is your place; well, it'll be my place.
As if the hooter was not terrifying enough, a man on the step machine next to my treadmill made me think that all my earthquakes had come at once. "AAAAAAGGGHHHH NOOOOOOOOOOOO! PLEASE NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! WHAT'S HAPPENING . . . !" He wasn't just sweating, he was a geyser of open pores, all of them spraying in my direction. "What is it? What is it?" I squealed, frantically looking for the nearest door-frame. "Baseball," he panted. "Sport. It's important."
The television screen above his machine was showing a baseball match (at the moment it appears to be both basketball and baseball season - as well as earthquake season! Aren't I the lucky one), and someone on the team he was supporting had apparently just done something incredibly stupid.
He told me he was rooting for the Boston Stranglers (or some such ridiculous name - I could hardly hear through the downpour), and that their opponents the Yankees were evil. Half an hour later, he was still on the machine, but a lot calmer. "I was getting worried for you," I said. "Hey!" he replied. "You should see my marm." Blimey. What does he do to her when his team is losing? Knife her?
On my way back to Beverly Hills in the bus (just $1.25 to go just about anywhere, incredible), a man opposite smiled and said "How ya doin'?" He was in conversation with a young man who had just moved to LA, but really wanted to be in New York. "Yeah," said my new friend. "You can't fault the weather here; just the people."
He didn't want to be in LA either, he said, but was on "high risk parole", so he had to stay. Something told me he wasn't talking about the department he worked for in CSI on the telly. "I have to get me a woman to sort myself out," he continued. Oh, no. Why me. I averted his eyes and kept them fixed on Wilshire Boulevard, where the earthquake posters en route had suddenly developed an enormous fascination for me.
Yes, I still dream of the earth one day moving; I just don't want it to be with someone booking our honeymoon on Death Row.
It looks as if this much awaited experience might finally happen for me, as I get my act together for what the posters in Beverly Hills call "Earthquake Preparedness Month." I am slightly panicky, as EPM is billed as April and, although I arrived on the 1st of the month, my earthquake cupboard is somewhat bare.
Although the earthquake is not a dead cert, everyone assures me that after last year's 25 second quake in central LA, and the promise of a monster one in 2010, I can expect something over the coming months and should Be Prepared.
My local hardware store, Pioneer, offers computer repairs (including Apple), handymen, knife sharpening and, I noticed, "earthquake kits". When I went in to see one, I was told that I could put together my own, although I was in such a state at having to have one at all, I didn't really listen to what I might need and came away with a Le Creuset casserole dish.
One friend, who grew up with the threat of earthquakes since he was a child, has been instructing me as to where I should head, if the seemingly inevitable happens. He says it is good that I live just one floor from the top of my building, so that the other floors will not come crashing down on me, and that in an emergency I should on no account leave the building, where I will undoubtedly be hit by low-flying rooftops.
My best bet, he says, is to head for the door-frame; failing that, I should take refuge under a table. I have a better idea: as he is well over six foot, how about HE stands under the door frame or goes under the table, and I take refuge under HIM? I have yet to put this idea to him.
I have become mildly obsessed with the earthquake problem and today, when I checked out the sister gym of the one I go to in Beverly Hills, the floor was shaking so badly in the Ladies, I thought my big moment had come. When I went to reception, she explained that the trembling was as a result of the various cardio-vascular machines operating on the floor above; I just pray that I am not in the gym when the earthquake strikes and be subjected to a double whammy of terror.
It was a bit of a nerve-racking day all round at the new gym. Shortly after the non-earthquake in the Ladies, there was the most almighty roar of an alarm that sent me reeling from the treadmill. Thinking that it must be an earthquake warning (I told you I was obsessed), I ran to the other side of the building, only to find three lots of men playing basketball in the Magic Johnson gym.
The hooter was sounding for reasons I have yet to work out, and related to timings that flashed on a board above the court; it all meant nothing to me. But if you want to die among fit men (in both senses of the word) when the earthquake strikes, then the Magic Johnson basketball court is your place; well, it'll be my place.
As if the hooter was not terrifying enough, a man on the step machine next to my treadmill made me think that all my earthquakes had come at once. "AAAAAAGGGHHHH NOOOOOOOOOOOO! PLEASE NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! WHAT'S HAPPENING . . . !" He wasn't just sweating, he was a geyser of open pores, all of them spraying in my direction. "What is it? What is it?" I squealed, frantically looking for the nearest door-frame. "Baseball," he panted. "Sport. It's important."
The television screen above his machine was showing a baseball match (at the moment it appears to be both basketball and baseball season - as well as earthquake season! Aren't I the lucky one), and someone on the team he was supporting had apparently just done something incredibly stupid.
He told me he was rooting for the Boston Stranglers (or some such ridiculous name - I could hardly hear through the downpour), and that their opponents the Yankees were evil. Half an hour later, he was still on the machine, but a lot calmer. "I was getting worried for you," I said. "Hey!" he replied. "You should see my marm." Blimey. What does he do to her when his team is losing? Knife her?
On my way back to Beverly Hills in the bus (just $1.25 to go just about anywhere, incredible), a man opposite smiled and said "How ya doin'?" He was in conversation with a young man who had just moved to LA, but really wanted to be in New York. "Yeah," said my new friend. "You can't fault the weather here; just the people."
He didn't want to be in LA either, he said, but was on "high risk parole", so he had to stay. Something told me he wasn't talking about the department he worked for in CSI on the telly. "I have to get me a woman to sort myself out," he continued. Oh, no. Why me. I averted his eyes and kept them fixed on Wilshire Boulevard, where the earthquake posters en route had suddenly developed an enormous fascination for me.
Yes, I still dream of the earth one day moving; I just don't want it to be with someone booking our honeymoon on Death Row.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
US vs UK 4/24/09
Having been here for just over three weeks now, I feel safe to start comparing life here compared with life back in the UK. It's a time when the honeymoon period is pretty much over, life has settled into some semblance of normality, and I can read UK newspapers online and watch UK TV on Slingbox on my computer without feeling as if I have left another planet.
They certainly have better mayors here - well, if the LA Mayor is anything to go by. I met Antonio Villaraigosa at the opening of Britweek (a celebration of the Brits' contribution to southern California) on Tuesday night and thought he was a bit special. Not only did he speak eloquently and with passion (it's his Latino nature, I suspect), he looked like a film idol. In the UK, our mayors tend to be at least three stone overweight and waddle around like those sweaty women who make it to the final of the annual Crufts dog show, trying to keep up with their Chihuahuas.
Antonio is rumoured to be running for governor of California in 2010, and I will be right there behind him (oh, okay: hanging on to his coat tails for grim death, but you get the general idea). I have started re-watching all of Brothers and Sisters, just to see exactly what Kittie did in her support of Jack in his race to be governor and finally pull him. It certainly wasn't down to her family, and although I suspect Antonio has much bigger female fish to fry, I will be happy to be a minnow in my new pond.
Tony Blair was also speaking at the dinner, although it was hard to listen to his declaration of the humanitarianism we need to express in relation to the world's malaria problem, given his history on Iraq. Tony received not just one, but two ovations: they went wild, and I mean really, really wild, for him. There was a queue to shake his hand and be photographed with him. I resisted, having met him on a number of occasions, when he was perfectly charming and very enthusiastic about my keeping in touch (I didn't; you know where I live, Tony). He spoke well, though not as well as my new best friend the Mayor, and he is nowhere near as good looking (his suit wasn't as nice, either, but now I'm being picky).
If the Mayor is streets ahead of our own specimens in terms of high public office (sorry, Boris, but Antonio beats you hands down), the post office workers are right down there with our own levels of slowness. I swear I had three birthdays standing in a queue to buy one stamp this week. Just when you think you are getting to the front, a sign goes up saying "CLOSED", just like it does in the UK. Always, there is someone in front of me (do they get them from Central Casting, I wonder, just to annoy me?), packing a parcel with the kind of precision needed when constructing a very complex bomb.
Throughout the whole laborious procedure, they have to chat. Endlessly. I live near what we unceremoniously in the UK call an old people's home (I think they call it something like Very Nice But Very Slow People in the 5 Star Last Chance Saloon here), and everyone, everywhere, likes to make the residents feel as if they are very special to the community. Which they are, of course. Except when I want to buy just one bloody stamp to send a letter to the UK.
Outside of post office hours, it is refreshing to be in a place where the service industry is so revered and which places so much emphasis on customer care. Initially, it took some getting used to, as I thought everyone was joking when they approached me in the store to see if there was anything they could help me with. The first time an assistant loomed up behind me when I was pondering the vitamin shelves in Wholefoods, I screamed.
In addition to great service, there is so much that I love here: the clean streets, the choice of food, the fact that restaurant meals arrive hot at the table (something that Europeans did away with sometime back in 1983), the airmail that arrives more punctually than any of my post in Cardiff (although heaven knows how, given the rigor mortis in the post office), the choice of teas, so much great telly (and so many amazing drama series, all fantastically well written and produced).
But there are things I don't like, too: the cost of stock cubes, the lack of Heinz baked beans, the time it takes for the white illuminated man to appear on the roadside, telling you it's safe to cross, the red numbers that count down too quickly when you are halfway across the damned road.
Then there are the men. British women keep asking me whether American men are any different from those in the UK. Well, no. They are nuts here, too. All except the lovely Antonio, naturally.
They certainly have better mayors here - well, if the LA Mayor is anything to go by. I met Antonio Villaraigosa at the opening of Britweek (a celebration of the Brits' contribution to southern California) on Tuesday night and thought he was a bit special. Not only did he speak eloquently and with passion (it's his Latino nature, I suspect), he looked like a film idol. In the UK, our mayors tend to be at least three stone overweight and waddle around like those sweaty women who make it to the final of the annual Crufts dog show, trying to keep up with their Chihuahuas.
Antonio is rumoured to be running for governor of California in 2010, and I will be right there behind him (oh, okay: hanging on to his coat tails for grim death, but you get the general idea). I have started re-watching all of Brothers and Sisters, just to see exactly what Kittie did in her support of Jack in his race to be governor and finally pull him. It certainly wasn't down to her family, and although I suspect Antonio has much bigger female fish to fry, I will be happy to be a minnow in my new pond.
Tony Blair was also speaking at the dinner, although it was hard to listen to his declaration of the humanitarianism we need to express in relation to the world's malaria problem, given his history on Iraq. Tony received not just one, but two ovations: they went wild, and I mean really, really wild, for him. There was a queue to shake his hand and be photographed with him. I resisted, having met him on a number of occasions, when he was perfectly charming and very enthusiastic about my keeping in touch (I didn't; you know where I live, Tony). He spoke well, though not as well as my new best friend the Mayor, and he is nowhere near as good looking (his suit wasn't as nice, either, but now I'm being picky).
If the Mayor is streets ahead of our own specimens in terms of high public office (sorry, Boris, but Antonio beats you hands down), the post office workers are right down there with our own levels of slowness. I swear I had three birthdays standing in a queue to buy one stamp this week. Just when you think you are getting to the front, a sign goes up saying "CLOSED", just like it does in the UK. Always, there is someone in front of me (do they get them from Central Casting, I wonder, just to annoy me?), packing a parcel with the kind of precision needed when constructing a very complex bomb.
Throughout the whole laborious procedure, they have to chat. Endlessly. I live near what we unceremoniously in the UK call an old people's home (I think they call it something like Very Nice But Very Slow People in the 5 Star Last Chance Saloon here), and everyone, everywhere, likes to make the residents feel as if they are very special to the community. Which they are, of course. Except when I want to buy just one bloody stamp to send a letter to the UK.
Outside of post office hours, it is refreshing to be in a place where the service industry is so revered and which places so much emphasis on customer care. Initially, it took some getting used to, as I thought everyone was joking when they approached me in the store to see if there was anything they could help me with. The first time an assistant loomed up behind me when I was pondering the vitamin shelves in Wholefoods, I screamed.
In addition to great service, there is so much that I love here: the clean streets, the choice of food, the fact that restaurant meals arrive hot at the table (something that Europeans did away with sometime back in 1983), the airmail that arrives more punctually than any of my post in Cardiff (although heaven knows how, given the rigor mortis in the post office), the choice of teas, so much great telly (and so many amazing drama series, all fantastically well written and produced).
But there are things I don't like, too: the cost of stock cubes, the lack of Heinz baked beans, the time it takes for the white illuminated man to appear on the roadside, telling you it's safe to cross, the red numbers that count down too quickly when you are halfway across the damned road.
Then there are the men. British women keep asking me whether American men are any different from those in the UK. Well, no. They are nuts here, too. All except the lovely Antonio, naturally.
The American (Wet) Dream 4/20/09
Of all the things I was expecting upon arriving in what I have traditionally come to believe is the Land of Plenty - steaks the size of three Welsh cows, saturated fat by the pint - the American obsession with BWH (Below the Waist Hygiene) was not among them. Already, my writing about furnishing my small vaginal house from the pharmacist Rite-Aid, has attracted a lot of attention from women in the UK, whose complaints about their shortcomings in the downstairs flora and fauna department have been met with dumbfounded astonishment by the UK's National Health Service.
If you don't have an infection and all your tests come back negative, the NHS basically doesn't know what to do with you, short of offering you a peg to place on your nose every time you go to the bathroom. Now, thanks to Rite-Aid, I am receiving e-mails from my friends in the UK, asking for advice, and I have become a sort of one-woman show for feminine hygiene.
But it's not just women who can benefit from the BWH obsession. This morning, in my gym, there I was happily watching Las Vegas on the TV as I hit my fourth mile (Tom Selleck has taken over the casino, by the way; he smokes fat cigars and has yet to get his kit off), when a commercial caught my attention and instantly threatened to usurp problems of the female kind for one of a more general nature and which I might also be able to share with men.
Overactivebladder.com was really the wrong ad for me, as I generally have to leave the treadmill every half mile to relieve myself of the three cups of tea I have before leaving for the gym in the morning. Having always claimed to suffer from a "weak bladder" and constantly been told that, no, I just have a small one, maybe this problem (Over-Active Bladder - it sounds so much better in American), like so many others, was also about to be miraculously solved by my moving continents (or incontinents, whichever way you like to look at it).
I learned from the website that people with OAB rush to the bathroom a lot (yes, that's me), and get up to go to the bathroom in the night. When I was drinking, I never used to get up in the night, as I was generally comatose ten minutes after arriving home; if I did get up, it was only to check out the other side of the bed to assess the kind of monstrosity I might have brought home with me. These days, though, I do get up, but that is generally because for every glass of wine I used to drink, I now have three mugs of tea before going to bed.
I took the test on overactivebladder.com (something tells me that title is never going to make a movie), and, apart from my having to leave the treadmill and Tom Selleck every ten minutes, don't think I have the condition. Something that did interest me, though, was the news that, in terms of discomfort, men scored 6 and women scored 8, meaning that men have a higher threshold for bother.
Really? Go to a rugby international, stand behind the beer tents and see how high their bother threshold is there.
But at least I am assured that there are some products I don't have to buy from Rite-Aid, and that, in my continued pursuit of the American Dream, it doesn't necessarily have to be a wet one.
If you don't have an infection and all your tests come back negative, the NHS basically doesn't know what to do with you, short of offering you a peg to place on your nose every time you go to the bathroom. Now, thanks to Rite-Aid, I am receiving e-mails from my friends in the UK, asking for advice, and I have become a sort of one-woman show for feminine hygiene.
But it's not just women who can benefit from the BWH obsession. This morning, in my gym, there I was happily watching Las Vegas on the TV as I hit my fourth mile (Tom Selleck has taken over the casino, by the way; he smokes fat cigars and has yet to get his kit off), when a commercial caught my attention and instantly threatened to usurp problems of the female kind for one of a more general nature and which I might also be able to share with men.
Overactivebladder.com was really the wrong ad for me, as I generally have to leave the treadmill every half mile to relieve myself of the three cups of tea I have before leaving for the gym in the morning. Having always claimed to suffer from a "weak bladder" and constantly been told that, no, I just have a small one, maybe this problem (Over-Active Bladder - it sounds so much better in American), like so many others, was also about to be miraculously solved by my moving continents (or incontinents, whichever way you like to look at it).
I learned from the website that people with OAB rush to the bathroom a lot (yes, that's me), and get up to go to the bathroom in the night. When I was drinking, I never used to get up in the night, as I was generally comatose ten minutes after arriving home; if I did get up, it was only to check out the other side of the bed to assess the kind of monstrosity I might have brought home with me. These days, though, I do get up, but that is generally because for every glass of wine I used to drink, I now have three mugs of tea before going to bed.
I took the test on overactivebladder.com (something tells me that title is never going to make a movie), and, apart from my having to leave the treadmill and Tom Selleck every ten minutes, don't think I have the condition. Something that did interest me, though, was the news that, in terms of discomfort, men scored 6 and women scored 8, meaning that men have a higher threshold for bother.
Really? Go to a rugby international, stand behind the beer tents and see how high their bother threshold is there.
But at least I am assured that there are some products I don't have to buy from Rite-Aid, and that, in my continued pursuit of the American Dream, it doesn't necessarily have to be a wet one.
Groundhog Sunday 4/19/09
Today was the hottest April 19th in Downtown LA since 1914. In all other local areas, bar one, it was the hottest April 19th for over 50 years. The Americans are just as obsessed with the weather as the Brits, and apparently there is more heat to come tomorrow, but rain on Tuesday, and cooler weather mid-week. You see? You can take the girl out of the UK, but . . .
The weather didn't stop Sunday from being the usual kind of day that it has always been back home: waking late (after a dream about Ian Lavender, who played Pauline Fowler's lodger in EastEnders - where on earth did that one come from?), drinking four mugs of tea, reading (Alice Munro at the moment - she really is wonderful), doing the washing, and debating whether to go to the gym or eat a plate of spaghetti (the pasta won, at least for a few hours).
At home, I would normally trek down to the Cameo Club in Pontcanna at this point and have a couple of glasses of Rose with friends, but as I am not drinking, I tend to avoid bars. Instead, I downloaded some software to sync my i-Phone's contacts with my Blackberry and then decided to do some work on my screenplay.
Well, I say work: I unwrapped a lot of cards (some lined, some plain, and three different sizes) I bought in Staples, laid them out in piles and rows, rearranged them, decided which colour pens to use for different characters' stories, changed my mind, decided that Post-Its are hopeless, ripped them up, positioned my storyboard on a chair, stuck in four rows of coloured pins in preparation for the 40 scenes Blake Snyder's Save the Cat recommends, rearranged the four rows of coloured pins . . . It was the most productive writing afternoon I have had in years. I was so exhausted, I had to have a carrot juice.
I finally got to writing some things on the cards and, by early evening, had turned the board into a sort of mobile Staples store. I decided that I really didn't like one character, and on page 85 she is therefore gone. Terminee. Exterminated. Banished, Falstaff-like, from the lead character's life. What was it Henry IV said when he decided that it was time to put away such foolish things as his friendship with old Fatso. "I can; I will", I think it was, as Falstaff begged him, bewildered, not to let him go. I haven't quite decided how Miss Green Ink (for it is she) will meet her end, although in the library, with the lead piping, seems as good a place as any.
Finally, I made it to the gym, only to find that it was closed (funny, that) and so went to the Beverly Wilshire for a "regular water" (cheap). The music was too loud, so I checked out the new Thompson Hotel at the bottom of my road. Dark? You need a miner's lamp just to find the staircase. You can use the bar at the top of the hotel only if you are a resident, but that may be because no one coming in from street level would be able to adjust their eyesight sufficiently in order to find it.
I suspect that should you be so lucky as to find the bar in the first place, the only way you could successfully orchestrate your way out would be to abseil down the side of the building - certainly it would be safer than trying to navigate yourself back to the foyer in an environment that has clearly been designed with bat conventions in mind.
I always feel a bit sorry for myself when conducting the repetitiveness of Sunday life, but at least it's only one day a week, and at least in the US there is great telly on all day, every day. Today, I tried to resist watching any House or Law and Order: Criminal Intent, but the gym was open in my apartment block when I returned from the hotel, and so I watched a couple of episodes then, feeling less guilty about my TV addiction as I was burning calories at the same time. I also learned that the gym is open 24 hours a day, so envisage my new size zero jeans hanging off me by Friday.
Incredibly, I also managed a whole day without going to Wholefoods and spending about 80$ on little more than a pint of milk and a packet of beansprouts (my supper for the next month).
Gradually, I am getting the hang of things, albeit slowly, in my new life, although I feel like a child starting school: trying to stick to a routine, feeling proud of every new achievement, getting a bit weepy when it all seems a bit overwhelming, finding out who the real friends are, and, of course, playing with coloured pens and sticking pins into bits of paper, all in the name of creativity.
The weather didn't stop Sunday from being the usual kind of day that it has always been back home: waking late (after a dream about Ian Lavender, who played Pauline Fowler's lodger in EastEnders - where on earth did that one come from?), drinking four mugs of tea, reading (Alice Munro at the moment - she really is wonderful), doing the washing, and debating whether to go to the gym or eat a plate of spaghetti (the pasta won, at least for a few hours).
At home, I would normally trek down to the Cameo Club in Pontcanna at this point and have a couple of glasses of Rose with friends, but as I am not drinking, I tend to avoid bars. Instead, I downloaded some software to sync my i-Phone's contacts with my Blackberry and then decided to do some work on my screenplay.
Well, I say work: I unwrapped a lot of cards (some lined, some plain, and three different sizes) I bought in Staples, laid them out in piles and rows, rearranged them, decided which colour pens to use for different characters' stories, changed my mind, decided that Post-Its are hopeless, ripped them up, positioned my storyboard on a chair, stuck in four rows of coloured pins in preparation for the 40 scenes Blake Snyder's Save the Cat recommends, rearranged the four rows of coloured pins . . . It was the most productive writing afternoon I have had in years. I was so exhausted, I had to have a carrot juice.
I finally got to writing some things on the cards and, by early evening, had turned the board into a sort of mobile Staples store. I decided that I really didn't like one character, and on page 85 she is therefore gone. Terminee. Exterminated. Banished, Falstaff-like, from the lead character's life. What was it Henry IV said when he decided that it was time to put away such foolish things as his friendship with old Fatso. "I can; I will", I think it was, as Falstaff begged him, bewildered, not to let him go. I haven't quite decided how Miss Green Ink (for it is she) will meet her end, although in the library, with the lead piping, seems as good a place as any.
Finally, I made it to the gym, only to find that it was closed (funny, that) and so went to the Beverly Wilshire for a "regular water" (cheap). The music was too loud, so I checked out the new Thompson Hotel at the bottom of my road. Dark? You need a miner's lamp just to find the staircase. You can use the bar at the top of the hotel only if you are a resident, but that may be because no one coming in from street level would be able to adjust their eyesight sufficiently in order to find it.
I suspect that should you be so lucky as to find the bar in the first place, the only way you could successfully orchestrate your way out would be to abseil down the side of the building - certainly it would be safer than trying to navigate yourself back to the foyer in an environment that has clearly been designed with bat conventions in mind.
I always feel a bit sorry for myself when conducting the repetitiveness of Sunday life, but at least it's only one day a week, and at least in the US there is great telly on all day, every day. Today, I tried to resist watching any House or Law and Order: Criminal Intent, but the gym was open in my apartment block when I returned from the hotel, and so I watched a couple of episodes then, feeling less guilty about my TV addiction as I was burning calories at the same time. I also learned that the gym is open 24 hours a day, so envisage my new size zero jeans hanging off me by Friday.
Incredibly, I also managed a whole day without going to Wholefoods and spending about 80$ on little more than a pint of milk and a packet of beansprouts (my supper for the next month).
Gradually, I am getting the hang of things, albeit slowly, in my new life, although I feel like a child starting school: trying to stick to a routine, feeling proud of every new achievement, getting a bit weepy when it all seems a bit overwhelming, finding out who the real friends are, and, of course, playing with coloured pens and sticking pins into bits of paper, all in the name of creativity.
90210: Location, location, location 4/1/09
In London, I lived in NW3 (Hampstead), W1 (the West End) and SE1 (the South Bank). In Paris, it was 75006 (St Germain des Pres). So there was no way, when I came to Los Angeles, that I was going to stick myself in some suburb where I could only see the HOLLYWOOD sign on the hill on Google Earth. It had to be the right postcode, instantly recognisable to people in the know, and, only knowing one, it had to be 90210, after the TV series created by Sex and the City's Darren Star, Beverly Hills 90210 (recently re-branded 90210).
It was where I stayed when I first came to LA about 18 years ago, when the now defunct newspaper Today put me up in the Holiday Inn in Burbank. Warner Brothers, bless them, were so horrified, they moved me to the Beverly Wilshire at the bottom of Rodeo Drive, and it was there I returned when I re-visited the city in November 2008.
The aim had been to do a screen-writing course run by Hollywood scriptwriter Blake Snyder, whose book, Save the Cat, I had read, and whom I contacted regarding what was going to be my Hollywood blockbuster (he suggests, on page 19, that you get in touch if you have a great idea, and my bag was packed quicker than you could say, well, save the cat). I booked my Virgin Upper Class flight, but owing to my not knowing that OR meant Oregon, I arrived in the wrong city altogether, with no Blake, no course to go to, and two whacking great bills to pay to Virgin and the Beverly Wilshire.
But I still had a ball (you can read about my exploits in the blog titled LA November 2008) and returned in March, when I finally did the screen-writing course (which was brilliant) and decided that I wanted to spend more time here. That, then, is now where you find me: still writing for the Daily Mail, working on two books and a screenplay, and living in an apartment in Beverly Hills 90210.
For some reason, they love the English here (I am Welsh, but this gets you nowhere, so to all intents and purposes I am from Wales, a town in England), not least for our humour; well, one comic, to be precise. John Cleese. They love him. They loved Monty Python (you would think it only came on screen last week, the way they talk) and also Fawlty Towers. Robert, who runs my local hardware store, Pioneer, calls John the God of comedy, and when I tell him that I have met his hero a couple of times, I get four light bulbs thrown in for free with my order. He tells me that John lives not far away in Santa Barbara, and I feel him angling for an invitation to his house for tea, should I decide to further my acquaintance with the great man.
The hardware store is a great asset to my area, which also includes a Wholefoods, where I can buy one stock cube for $3.99 . I have joined Sports Club LA, where my exercise regime has already meant that I can squeeze into a pair of size zero jeans from Gap (I can't get out of them again, but you can't have everything), and when I am not burning fat off, I am acquiring it sitting in front of the telly watching back to back Law and Order and House. I swear they make another five of each in the time it takes me to watch one.
It's very different from Europe here: everything runs so smoothly - apartments, bank accounts, paperwork of any kind - and after France, where they are still dotting the Is and crossing the Ts in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, it is a blessed relief.
Talking of blessed relief: I have never seen so many remedies for cleaning out one's innards. Online, in pharmacies, TV commercials - you could lose a stone every half hour if you so chose. And as for feminine hygiene products, ye gods! They take up a whole aisle in my local Rite Aid store. I was in there for at least three hours on my first visit: it was like furnishing a small house. A small house in 90210, let's not forget!
It was where I stayed when I first came to LA about 18 years ago, when the now defunct newspaper Today put me up in the Holiday Inn in Burbank. Warner Brothers, bless them, were so horrified, they moved me to the Beverly Wilshire at the bottom of Rodeo Drive, and it was there I returned when I re-visited the city in November 2008.
The aim had been to do a screen-writing course run by Hollywood scriptwriter Blake Snyder, whose book, Save the Cat, I had read, and whom I contacted regarding what was going to be my Hollywood blockbuster (he suggests, on page 19, that you get in touch if you have a great idea, and my bag was packed quicker than you could say, well, save the cat). I booked my Virgin Upper Class flight, but owing to my not knowing that OR meant Oregon, I arrived in the wrong city altogether, with no Blake, no course to go to, and two whacking great bills to pay to Virgin and the Beverly Wilshire.
But I still had a ball (you can read about my exploits in the blog titled LA November 2008) and returned in March, when I finally did the screen-writing course (which was brilliant) and decided that I wanted to spend more time here. That, then, is now where you find me: still writing for the Daily Mail, working on two books and a screenplay, and living in an apartment in Beverly Hills 90210.
For some reason, they love the English here (I am Welsh, but this gets you nowhere, so to all intents and purposes I am from Wales, a town in England), not least for our humour; well, one comic, to be precise. John Cleese. They love him. They loved Monty Python (you would think it only came on screen last week, the way they talk) and also Fawlty Towers. Robert, who runs my local hardware store, Pioneer, calls John the God of comedy, and when I tell him that I have met his hero a couple of times, I get four light bulbs thrown in for free with my order. He tells me that John lives not far away in Santa Barbara, and I feel him angling for an invitation to his house for tea, should I decide to further my acquaintance with the great man.
The hardware store is a great asset to my area, which also includes a Wholefoods, where I can buy one stock cube for $3.99 . I have joined Sports Club LA, where my exercise regime has already meant that I can squeeze into a pair of size zero jeans from Gap (I can't get out of them again, but you can't have everything), and when I am not burning fat off, I am acquiring it sitting in front of the telly watching back to back Law and Order and House. I swear they make another five of each in the time it takes me to watch one.
It's very different from Europe here: everything runs so smoothly - apartments, bank accounts, paperwork of any kind - and after France, where they are still dotting the Is and crossing the Ts in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, it is a blessed relief.
Talking of blessed relief: I have never seen so many remedies for cleaning out one's innards. Online, in pharmacies, TV commercials - you could lose a stone every half hour if you so chose. And as for feminine hygiene products, ye gods! They take up a whole aisle in my local Rite Aid store. I was in there for at least three hours on my first visit: it was like furnishing a small house. A small house in 90210, let's not forget!
LA: To Go Or Not to Go, November 2008
To Begin at the Beginning . . . The plan was simple. I would go to LA, do a scriptwriting course, sell my movie, make my fortune, buy a pair of binoculars and rent a house right next to my idol Simon Cowell in the Hollywood Hills. “Blimey, you don’t waste any time,” said my friend Phillippa. “He’s only just broken up with Terri.”
When I spotted the course I wanted, I booked my hotel and flight before you could say Oscar Here I Come. Alas, the course turned out not to be not in LA at all, but Portland, Oregon, but by then it was too late. The credit card damage was done, and I had also used every air mile in my collection to get some money off what was my big reward to myself – flying Virgin Upper Class and staying in a 5 star hotel in Beverly Hills. Ah, well. It would be some comfort for my travelling to LA for what was now no reason whatsoever. Little did I know that what my trip failed to provide me in scriptwriting classes, it would more than make up for in writing material.
DAY ONE
I check in at the hotel where everyone thinks Pretty Woman was filmed: the Beverly Wilshire, at the bottom of Rodeo Drive, which houses all the best designer shops. In fact, the interior scenes in the movie were done on set; only the outside of the hotel appeared on camera. I discover this only when I ask to see the room where Richard Gere shows Julia Roberts that fantastic necklace. But never mind: at least I can see Rodeo and the Jimmy Choo shop from my window. My credit card begins to burn a hole in my pocket.
DAY TWO
I have recovered sufficiently from the time difference to go to my hotel’s Side Bar. Tina, a tall blonde straight out of every American series you have ever seen, sidles up to the first men she sees and talks to them like long lost cousins. Freezing cold in the air conditioning of the hotel, I pull up my roll neck sweater as the women around me parade a silicon valley of cleavage that I defy even the most professional crampons to venture into.
I join Tina, who turns out not to know “these guys” at all; they just so happened to be the first ones she came across (anyway, she is married to Brad, who is, according to local sources, very, very rich). I learn my first lesson. “So, what’s your name?” I ask, lurching towards a rather handsome blonde called Ken. Several drinks later, he pays my bill. Thank you, Tina.
DAY THREE
I decide to shop. The streets are lined not with glamour models, as I had expected on Rodeo Drive, but rather casually dressed men and women in “sneakers” (ie trainers – I was learning the language fast). So, my first stop is NIKE.
“Gee, we lurrrrrrv your accent,” they tell me. “You’re from England?” “No, Wales.” “Aw, gee, thasso cude. Is thad in England?” Look, just give me my flamin’ trainers and let me pay the bill. But no. Every request takes ten minutes, as they call down to the store-room, checking on availability and quizzing me on another aspect of my heritage. “You hairve a nice day now,” three people call as I leave – only the thousandth time I have heard that, and it’s only day three.
Armed with my new trainers and air of casual chic, I venture into jeweller’s David Orgell, a few doors down, to try to match a tennis bracelet I bought in Turkey with a necklace. “How much is that one?” I ask, pointing to a long string. “175,000$,” says the salesman. “It’s platinum.” “Do you have it in white gold?” I ask, not moving a facial muscle. “Yes, Madam. That would be just $75,000.” Blimey. That would be at least three villages in Wales in the current climate. But I keep my nerve. “I like diamonds,” I quiver. “Then you’ve come to the right place,” he replies, clearly having learned from Pretty Woman that you should never judge a book by its cover (although in this case, he should have).
DAY FOUR
I am back at the Side Bar in the evening, alone, listening to some very welcome English accents (already the American ones are really getting on my nerves). A man walks up to me and says: “Hello, I’m Liam. You’re that woman off breakfast TV.” “Yes, I am,” I say, glad of the company. We talk about the time I spent on This Morning and he says that he agreed with so much of what I said. I ask what he is doing in LA and he says: “A bit of radio, a bit of TV. I’m here with the band.” “Oh, who’s that?” I ask. He tells me he is with a band called The Races and, totally ignorant of them, I nevertheless feign knowledge. “Yeah, I think I’ve heard of them,” I say.
At this point, an English woman walks up, barely able to contain her excitement, and says: “You’re Liam, aren’t you!” Pe-n-ny be-gins t-o dr-op. It’s only Liam Gallagher from Oasis! Ohyegods! I genuinely don’t recognise him, so flattered am I that someone recognises me. I am already travelling first class on the LA ego trip.
We talk about TV, music and our terrific mothers. I adore him. His seriousness; his intensity; his humour. I meet his mates, who tell me that on their flight over, they drank the onboard Virgin Upper Class bar dry. I tell you, I am so excited and rocked up, I go back to my suite and nearly throw my TV out of the window.
DAY FIVE
Every American man I meet asks “You from England?” and I quickly find that “Yes” makes them pick up my tab far more quickly than a response of: “No, we are the put upon race that had our language stolen from us and continues to be oppressed . . . “ Yep, what the hell. I’m English and I’ll have another Margerita, thank you very much (in my hotel, it’s about 1,000 air miles a glass, so I accept everything on offer).
I meet up with my friend Paul, who moved to LA two years ago, and he talks the place up so much, I decide that I have to live here, and go back to my room to start looking up rental properties on the net.
DAY SIX
Off to the Warner Brothers tour at the studios, where some of America’s most popular TV shows and films are made. There is some wood standing up against a wall. I see where The Perfect Storm was filmed. It is a large, empty warehouse. More wood. I decide that the movies are not very glamorous, although I see one man in a doctor’s uniform come off the ER set, where the last series is being filmed.
I move on to the Universal theme park nearby, which is great fun, even though the three rides are very disappointing and not a patch on those at Barry Island funfair in South Wales.
DAY SEVEN
I make an enemy of a local hooker, who asks me at the hotel bar how old I think she looks. I think 55, but say 45. “I look 29,” she says. “Trust me,” I have to say, “you don’t.” “All my friends say I look 29.” “Well they’re lying to you.”
Her breasts compete for attention with the very fine place settings in the bar and I ask where she had them done. She tells me they are real. Yeah, right.
She is furious with me, but I am more furious with her, because there is a Jimmy Choo glass tree in the hotel foyer and, if you guess the value of everything in it, you win a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes and two nights’ stay in the hotel. As a guest, I am allowed one entry; she sits there, filling in one form for every room in which her various gentlemen friends reside. I complain to the management and promise them that, if she wins, there will be war.
DAY EIGHT
After lunch on a rare couple of glasses of wine, I find myself in a potential rental flat – sorry, I mean apartment - just off Sunset Boulevard: so much so, that I give them a $200 deposit to reserve it. Saleswoman Misty (think Dynasty’s Alexis Carrington with bells on) snatches my cash like a hungry squirrel storing nuts for a bad winter; the property market is as unstable in the US as it is in the UK.
I am thrilled to be moving to Hollywood. I go straight back to my hotel to phone my friends. Julia, who has known me since we were toddlers, is in shock. I can hear her hyperventilating. When she suggests that I might be rushing things a tad, I declare that if I don’t do it now, I never will. Paul tentatively suggests that I should make a couple more trips before deciding. I am adamant. I e-mail the Daily Mail, suggesting that I become their Hollywood correspondent. I e-mail the University of California to try to get on their two-year writing course. I phone my mother to tell her that I am moving over 6000 miles away from Bristol, where she lives.
DAY NINE
The effects of the wine wear off. I remember why I stopped drinking completely in April and why I thereafter drank just the occasional glass. That “Oh my God, what have I done!” moment I remember so well from my heavier drinking days hits again. What was I thinking? I can’t move to Hollywood. My life is in the UK, where I have my family, friends and work. My house. I have my rugby there. Sky Plus. Quick trips over to Paris on the Eurostar.
I have to get to the Real Estate agent to get my money back in the 72 hours they give you to change your mind. I start telephoning Misty. It goes to answer-phone. Ten times. The hours tick by. Still, the answer-phone. I finally reach Misty and tell her I am on my way over. When I get to the office, she counts out my dollar bills with quick efficiency and all but kicks me down the stairs.
DAY TEN
I am in the hotel restaurant having lunch, when I spot Sidney Poitier on a nearby table. Sidney flamin’ Poitier: star of To Sir with Love; the man to whom Lulu sang the song of the same title. I don’t know how introductions are made in LA, so I leap over: “Mr Poitier I am such a fan and you were great in To Sir with Love and I really love you and you still look so great and how important was that film now with Obama and all that and you must be so pleased and do you ever see Lulu and sorry to disturb you but I had to come over . . . “
I don’t stop. Not only do I not stop; I re-visit the table another three times to do more non-stop talking. The man is gracious, polite, sweet. “Which was your favourite film?” I ask. He starts a gentle speech about not being able to say, because there have been so many actors, producers, directors, blah blah blah. Yeah, whatever, Sidney. “To be honest, I don’t give a damn,” I tell him. “I’m only going to be writing about you and me.”
DAY ELEVEN
I go to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Greg, the waiter, tells me I am doing the right thing ordering tap water because it has more fluoride in it than bottled. “It’s what the dentists never tell ya,” he booms, moving from table to table, even less subtly than the incredible Hulk might do, auditioning in a loud voice and being a fount of information on everything. “Soooooo good ter see yer. Really hope ter see yer again soon,” he says, to every departing guest. No, you don’t, Greg. I know about life. Real life. And you’re lying.
I assume Greg is a writer, producer or director, not least because everyone I meet is, but he claims to be “just a waiter”. I am impressed – except when he forgets to bring me my water. If he can’t remember what I asked him for two minutes ago, how is he going to remember those guests?
Sitting at the next table is Jennifer Angel, astrologer for the New York Post, the editor of which I used to work for in London. She is sitting with Lana, one of the LA in-crowd, and they are the two most glamorous women I have met all trip.
“So,” says Lana, to me and Tatiana, one of the many new best friends I have acquired. “Whadderyerthink o’ the Urrrrrrban?” I’m sorry? “Obaaaaaaaama. Urrrrrrban.” I decide to put political correctness aside and ask what Lana does. “Nothin’.” She turns to Tatiana. “Whadder you do?” “Me?” says Tatiana. “I do nothing, too.” I can’t ever remember a time when I have been in a room with two women in competition about the nothingness in their lives.
Unnerved, I turn to Jennifer, who tells me that there are changes ahead for Scorpios (dear God, please not an LA apartment), but I don’t hear much more because I feel shallowness overwhelm me when I star-spot Jean Michel Jarre across the room. Oh, give me some oxygene. I leap over to get his autograph and tell him I am a huge fan etc. etc., even though I’m not.
By now, I am so aversed to Hollywood bull, I can do it in my sleep. Talk, talk, talk. Apart from the Brits, who all seem gainfully employed, that’s all anyone seems to do.
DAY TWELVE
Great drama at the hotel. The local hooker throws a drink over a resident who calls her a hooker. On his way out, she throws a dish of wasabi nuts at his back. The next thing I know, the LAPD are there, handcuffing her and whisking her away. The hotel assures me she can say goodbye to the Jimmy Choo prize, and my shoes are as good as in the box.
DAY THIRTEEN
It’s all over and I must leave my star-studded, celebrity lifestyle to return to a cold autumn in the UK. I have had a ball and I return with many happy memories, but realise that, at heart, I am very much a European. I remind myself that not every holiday has to end with my returning with a lease in my suitcase, and when I get home I sit down to watch Sky Plus with a joyous heart: Desperate Housewives, CSI, Law and Order – all great American shows. But at the end of the day, just planks of wood standing against a wall.
When I spotted the course I wanted, I booked my hotel and flight before you could say Oscar Here I Come. Alas, the course turned out not to be not in LA at all, but Portland, Oregon, but by then it was too late. The credit card damage was done, and I had also used every air mile in my collection to get some money off what was my big reward to myself – flying Virgin Upper Class and staying in a 5 star hotel in Beverly Hills. Ah, well. It would be some comfort for my travelling to LA for what was now no reason whatsoever. Little did I know that what my trip failed to provide me in scriptwriting classes, it would more than make up for in writing material.
DAY ONE
I check in at the hotel where everyone thinks Pretty Woman was filmed: the Beverly Wilshire, at the bottom of Rodeo Drive, which houses all the best designer shops. In fact, the interior scenes in the movie were done on set; only the outside of the hotel appeared on camera. I discover this only when I ask to see the room where Richard Gere shows Julia Roberts that fantastic necklace. But never mind: at least I can see Rodeo and the Jimmy Choo shop from my window. My credit card begins to burn a hole in my pocket.
DAY TWO
I have recovered sufficiently from the time difference to go to my hotel’s Side Bar. Tina, a tall blonde straight out of every American series you have ever seen, sidles up to the first men she sees and talks to them like long lost cousins. Freezing cold in the air conditioning of the hotel, I pull up my roll neck sweater as the women around me parade a silicon valley of cleavage that I defy even the most professional crampons to venture into.
I join Tina, who turns out not to know “these guys” at all; they just so happened to be the first ones she came across (anyway, she is married to Brad, who is, according to local sources, very, very rich). I learn my first lesson. “So, what’s your name?” I ask, lurching towards a rather handsome blonde called Ken. Several drinks later, he pays my bill. Thank you, Tina.
DAY THREE
I decide to shop. The streets are lined not with glamour models, as I had expected on Rodeo Drive, but rather casually dressed men and women in “sneakers” (ie trainers – I was learning the language fast). So, my first stop is NIKE.
“Gee, we lurrrrrrv your accent,” they tell me. “You’re from England?” “No, Wales.” “Aw, gee, thasso cude. Is thad in England?” Look, just give me my flamin’ trainers and let me pay the bill. But no. Every request takes ten minutes, as they call down to the store-room, checking on availability and quizzing me on another aspect of my heritage. “You hairve a nice day now,” three people call as I leave – only the thousandth time I have heard that, and it’s only day three.
Armed with my new trainers and air of casual chic, I venture into jeweller’s David Orgell, a few doors down, to try to match a tennis bracelet I bought in Turkey with a necklace. “How much is that one?” I ask, pointing to a long string. “175,000$,” says the salesman. “It’s platinum.” “Do you have it in white gold?” I ask, not moving a facial muscle. “Yes, Madam. That would be just $75,000.” Blimey. That would be at least three villages in Wales in the current climate. But I keep my nerve. “I like diamonds,” I quiver. “Then you’ve come to the right place,” he replies, clearly having learned from Pretty Woman that you should never judge a book by its cover (although in this case, he should have).
DAY FOUR
I am back at the Side Bar in the evening, alone, listening to some very welcome English accents (already the American ones are really getting on my nerves). A man walks up to me and says: “Hello, I’m Liam. You’re that woman off breakfast TV.” “Yes, I am,” I say, glad of the company. We talk about the time I spent on This Morning and he says that he agreed with so much of what I said. I ask what he is doing in LA and he says: “A bit of radio, a bit of TV. I’m here with the band.” “Oh, who’s that?” I ask. He tells me he is with a band called The Races and, totally ignorant of them, I nevertheless feign knowledge. “Yeah, I think I’ve heard of them,” I say.
At this point, an English woman walks up, barely able to contain her excitement, and says: “You’re Liam, aren’t you!” Pe-n-ny be-gins t-o dr-op. It’s only Liam Gallagher from Oasis! Ohyegods! I genuinely don’t recognise him, so flattered am I that someone recognises me. I am already travelling first class on the LA ego trip.
We talk about TV, music and our terrific mothers. I adore him. His seriousness; his intensity; his humour. I meet his mates, who tell me that on their flight over, they drank the onboard Virgin Upper Class bar dry. I tell you, I am so excited and rocked up, I go back to my suite and nearly throw my TV out of the window.
DAY FIVE
Every American man I meet asks “You from England?” and I quickly find that “Yes” makes them pick up my tab far more quickly than a response of: “No, we are the put upon race that had our language stolen from us and continues to be oppressed . . . “ Yep, what the hell. I’m English and I’ll have another Margerita, thank you very much (in my hotel, it’s about 1,000 air miles a glass, so I accept everything on offer).
I meet up with my friend Paul, who moved to LA two years ago, and he talks the place up so much, I decide that I have to live here, and go back to my room to start looking up rental properties on the net.
DAY SIX
Off to the Warner Brothers tour at the studios, where some of America’s most popular TV shows and films are made. There is some wood standing up against a wall. I see where The Perfect Storm was filmed. It is a large, empty warehouse. More wood. I decide that the movies are not very glamorous, although I see one man in a doctor’s uniform come off the ER set, where the last series is being filmed.
I move on to the Universal theme park nearby, which is great fun, even though the three rides are very disappointing and not a patch on those at Barry Island funfair in South Wales.
DAY SEVEN
I make an enemy of a local hooker, who asks me at the hotel bar how old I think she looks. I think 55, but say 45. “I look 29,” she says. “Trust me,” I have to say, “you don’t.” “All my friends say I look 29.” “Well they’re lying to you.”
Her breasts compete for attention with the very fine place settings in the bar and I ask where she had them done. She tells me they are real. Yeah, right.
She is furious with me, but I am more furious with her, because there is a Jimmy Choo glass tree in the hotel foyer and, if you guess the value of everything in it, you win a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes and two nights’ stay in the hotel. As a guest, I am allowed one entry; she sits there, filling in one form for every room in which her various gentlemen friends reside. I complain to the management and promise them that, if she wins, there will be war.
DAY EIGHT
After lunch on a rare couple of glasses of wine, I find myself in a potential rental flat – sorry, I mean apartment - just off Sunset Boulevard: so much so, that I give them a $200 deposit to reserve it. Saleswoman Misty (think Dynasty’s Alexis Carrington with bells on) snatches my cash like a hungry squirrel storing nuts for a bad winter; the property market is as unstable in the US as it is in the UK.
I am thrilled to be moving to Hollywood. I go straight back to my hotel to phone my friends. Julia, who has known me since we were toddlers, is in shock. I can hear her hyperventilating. When she suggests that I might be rushing things a tad, I declare that if I don’t do it now, I never will. Paul tentatively suggests that I should make a couple more trips before deciding. I am adamant. I e-mail the Daily Mail, suggesting that I become their Hollywood correspondent. I e-mail the University of California to try to get on their two-year writing course. I phone my mother to tell her that I am moving over 6000 miles away from Bristol, where she lives.
DAY NINE
The effects of the wine wear off. I remember why I stopped drinking completely in April and why I thereafter drank just the occasional glass. That “Oh my God, what have I done!” moment I remember so well from my heavier drinking days hits again. What was I thinking? I can’t move to Hollywood. My life is in the UK, where I have my family, friends and work. My house. I have my rugby there. Sky Plus. Quick trips over to Paris on the Eurostar.
I have to get to the Real Estate agent to get my money back in the 72 hours they give you to change your mind. I start telephoning Misty. It goes to answer-phone. Ten times. The hours tick by. Still, the answer-phone. I finally reach Misty and tell her I am on my way over. When I get to the office, she counts out my dollar bills with quick efficiency and all but kicks me down the stairs.
DAY TEN
I am in the hotel restaurant having lunch, when I spot Sidney Poitier on a nearby table. Sidney flamin’ Poitier: star of To Sir with Love; the man to whom Lulu sang the song of the same title. I don’t know how introductions are made in LA, so I leap over: “Mr Poitier I am such a fan and you were great in To Sir with Love and I really love you and you still look so great and how important was that film now with Obama and all that and you must be so pleased and do you ever see Lulu and sorry to disturb you but I had to come over . . . “
I don’t stop. Not only do I not stop; I re-visit the table another three times to do more non-stop talking. The man is gracious, polite, sweet. “Which was your favourite film?” I ask. He starts a gentle speech about not being able to say, because there have been so many actors, producers, directors, blah blah blah. Yeah, whatever, Sidney. “To be honest, I don’t give a damn,” I tell him. “I’m only going to be writing about you and me.”
DAY ELEVEN
I go to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Greg, the waiter, tells me I am doing the right thing ordering tap water because it has more fluoride in it than bottled. “It’s what the dentists never tell ya,” he booms, moving from table to table, even less subtly than the incredible Hulk might do, auditioning in a loud voice and being a fount of information on everything. “Soooooo good ter see yer. Really hope ter see yer again soon,” he says, to every departing guest. No, you don’t, Greg. I know about life. Real life. And you’re lying.
I assume Greg is a writer, producer or director, not least because everyone I meet is, but he claims to be “just a waiter”. I am impressed – except when he forgets to bring me my water. If he can’t remember what I asked him for two minutes ago, how is he going to remember those guests?
Sitting at the next table is Jennifer Angel, astrologer for the New York Post, the editor of which I used to work for in London. She is sitting with Lana, one of the LA in-crowd, and they are the two most glamorous women I have met all trip.
“So,” says Lana, to me and Tatiana, one of the many new best friends I have acquired. “Whadderyerthink o’ the Urrrrrrban?” I’m sorry? “Obaaaaaaaama. Urrrrrrban.” I decide to put political correctness aside and ask what Lana does. “Nothin’.” She turns to Tatiana. “Whadder you do?” “Me?” says Tatiana. “I do nothing, too.” I can’t ever remember a time when I have been in a room with two women in competition about the nothingness in their lives.
Unnerved, I turn to Jennifer, who tells me that there are changes ahead for Scorpios (dear God, please not an LA apartment), but I don’t hear much more because I feel shallowness overwhelm me when I star-spot Jean Michel Jarre across the room. Oh, give me some oxygene. I leap over to get his autograph and tell him I am a huge fan etc. etc., even though I’m not.
By now, I am so aversed to Hollywood bull, I can do it in my sleep. Talk, talk, talk. Apart from the Brits, who all seem gainfully employed, that’s all anyone seems to do.
DAY TWELVE
Great drama at the hotel. The local hooker throws a drink over a resident who calls her a hooker. On his way out, she throws a dish of wasabi nuts at his back. The next thing I know, the LAPD are there, handcuffing her and whisking her away. The hotel assures me she can say goodbye to the Jimmy Choo prize, and my shoes are as good as in the box.
DAY THIRTEEN
It’s all over and I must leave my star-studded, celebrity lifestyle to return to a cold autumn in the UK. I have had a ball and I return with many happy memories, but realise that, at heart, I am very much a European. I remind myself that not every holiday has to end with my returning with a lease in my suitcase, and when I get home I sit down to watch Sky Plus with a joyous heart: Desperate Housewives, CSI, Law and Order – all great American shows. But at the end of the day, just planks of wood standing against a wall.
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