Saturday, August 10, 2013

Take a Hike? No, Thanks - My Canyon Adventure, Part 2


Reader, I managed him.
  
Yes, two and half hours after planning to take my first LA hike up Runyon Canyon, I have returned home and am enjoying a well-deserved cold beer.
  
Thanks to Google Maps, I was led up some very dangerous, bendy roads with no pavements – all uphill. I may even have been in Canada for all the time it took me to reach the summit.
  
I stopped to ask two women – the only people I saw en route – if I was anywhere close, and they shook their heads with sorrow, informing me that I had at least another hour to go. Or was it a day? Or a week?
  
Anyway, on I trundled and knew I was heading in the right direction when a sign warned me to beware of oncoming reindeer. I knew I had arrived when another told me to beware of rattlesnakes.
  
I saw none, but then I saw no celebrities, either, which had been the point of my going in the first place. No Gerard Butler, no Colin Farrell; not even any celebrity lookalikes.
  
The place was like an overheated Fraggle Rock. Fat people, mad people, loud people, hideous people . . . all humankind was there. And every dogkind, too.
  
It was the dogs I felt most sorry for. All of them were dragging their bodies along, panting, and looking, for all the world, a wag away from rigor mortis. One woman was insistent that she and her companion stop to give their dog some water. “She doesn’t need water!” he yelled. “She’s just being lazy.”
  
All the fears I expressed in my earlier blog were realised. I have two barbecued arms. My bladder nearly burst with the strain of carrying this morning’s tea over seven miles. Yet I am dehydrated.
  
Don’t get me wrong. I love exercise and I can walk up to 15 miles a day, and regularly do. But not in the sun and along a dirt track with no refreshment truck and no public conveniences.

It’s not often that I look longingly towards Downtown LA in the smog, but each time it materialised into view on my trail, I sobbed with relief.
  
Having done five miles uphill, the last two were all down, and when I hit Hollywood Boulevard and spotted the sign for the 217 bus that takes me almost to my door, I wept with relief.
  
I like the buses here. They are not overheated. They don’t give you pains in your back and legs. And you are never more than a couple of stops away from a toilet. Or a beer.

Thanks a bunch to those people who told me to take a hike; after today, I’m telling you to do one, too. Because yes, my hiking days are over, before they have barely begun.
  
And now it’s lunchtime, I am going to settle down in front of the telly with a bowl of home-made spaghetti Bolognese and a glass of Rioja.

I’ve already burnt the calories off, after all.

Maybe I’ll have seconds.
  
   

To Hike or Not to Hike - That is the Question


Okay, today is the day. It really is.

After four years of living in LA, I am finally going to do a hike.
  
There are many people who, I am sure, wish I had done a hike in a very different context; some have even told me that to my face.

But ever since I got here, people have been begging me to walk to Runyon Canyon Park where, I am assured, the views over LA are spectacular.
  
Now, to be honest, I am dubious, as they have very strange ideas about what constitutes a great view here. I come from Wales, where the sea and mountains provide breathtaking views that could easily compete with the best in the world, But here, your friends can drive you two hours to see something they have told you is amazing and then, when you arrive, it’s an average sized rock sitting in a puddle.
  
“Isn’t it amazing!” they cry, staring at the thing barely bigger than a carbuncle. I go on to tell them about Snowdon, Pembrokeshire, the waves crashing onto Aberystwyth sea front on a windy day – but no, they are very happy with their rock, thank you very much, and why would they leave America anyway to travel to a place where the national sport is dragon-slaying.
  
So, I am not holding my breath for any great revelation at the top of the canyon, especially as most reports inform me that whatever view there is will be hidden under the familiar LA smog.
  
But I have been promised something else, something far more important than any view.

Celebrities.
  
Runyon Canyon is the place, especially on Saturdays, where celebrities apparently flock in their smart leisurewear to work their butts off – literally. They don designer gear, full make- up (and not just the women) and Gucci sunglasses to take to one of the three trails – relatively easy, medium, or hard.
  
Already I am stressed, wondering which trail I should take in order to see the most celebs, but think I had better start off with easy, as this will be my first time.
  
I am also worried about what I should wear, as I don’t have much casual gear, and I am not sure that anything in my Issey Miyake Pleats Please collection will survive the sweat that will no doubt be issuing from my every pore.
  
I’m also worried about toilets. I have a very small bladder and once had to empty it at the side of the Brontes’ house in the middle of the Yorkshire Moors, owing to the lack of rest room facilities.
  
And where will I rest along the way? There are apparently no bars and restaurants en route, just a table with a few snacks and water. Won’t I even get a beer for my efforts?
  
Then there’s the issue of the number of dogs who inhabit the place. I am a huge fan of dogs, but large dogs frighten me and I have a pathological hatred of stepping into doggy-do, of which I understand there is a great deal along every trail.

Even the thought of bumping into Gerard Butler is not incentive enough for me to do anything that involves my having to excavate poop from the bottom of my trainers for the next three days.
  
And what if the sun comes out? I have very fair skin, and even wearing Factor 50, I burn easily.
  
Will I be able to get reception on my iPhone up there? I recently went to a celebrity wedding where, because it was being filmed for TV and photographed for a magazine, they took our cell phones from us at the gate. I had such a panic attack, I had to leave the reception at 9pm.
  
Anyway, so far (and it’s only 8.15am, at the present), I am showing willing. I have dyed my hair, which was cut yesterday, and am currently in the process of bleaching my teeth. Very soon, I will be putting on my make-up and choosing my costume.
  
Or I may just keep writing this and decide, after several hours, that I just won’t go.
  
Too tired, too hot, too much to do, too stressed, too much on the telly. Too can’t be arsed.

I’ll let you know.  
  

   

Friday, August 9, 2013

Catching up with the Angel Gabriel - in a Suit

And so, I am finally up to speed with Suits.

My broken heart at having had to delay my trip back to LA was finally mended yesterday when I sat down to watch the four episodes of Suits I had missed when in the UK.
  
There is nothing quite like the excuse of jet-lag to enable you to don a dressing gown and lounge on the sofa with a glass of wine in one hand and the remote in another.
  
The fabulous Patrick J. Adams, who plays Mike Ross, appears to have grown a foot, and now spends more time kissing than talking, which is a good thing for viewers, although less good for the firm, I suspect.
  
Gabriel Macht is even more beautiful than I remember him. The hair and the suits of his character, Harvey Specter, are perfect, every follicle and stitch a tribute to the make-up and costume departments who make this faultless specimen of manhood possible.
  
Then there’s Harvey’s hunger for power – never more impressive and sexy than when his back is against the wall (which brings me to another fantasy, but enough dribbling for one day. But gosh, he is beautiful).
 
It is, quite simply, fabulous TV, and now I will be living for Tuesdays for the foreseeable future. So don’t call, don’t drop in, just leave me to my angel.
  
I’ve also been catching up on Mistresses, which is as laughable as Suits is brilliant. And yet it is strangely addictive. Quite why Joss (Jes Macallan) has chosen to be a lesbian with the clingy Alex (Shannyn Sossamon), when she had a bloke who could get her bra off in one flick of a light switch movement, is anybody’s guess, but she’s still my favourite.
  
Savi (Alyssa Milano) has good taste in necklaces, but why do her eyelashes permanently look as if they are trying to do a runner from her face? Give them a visa and they’ll be off, I’m telling you.
  
April (Rochelle Aytes) is prettiest of the bunch, but it’s a bit of a bummer that her dead husband turned out not to be dead, after all. Still, she should have been grateful for the extra customer in the shop. Has she sold ANYTHING since the series began?
  
And then there’s Karen (Yunjin Kim), who stares into the middle distance while speaking in a voice that is so tiny, it could send a tiger into hibernation. Will they ever manage to excavate a personality? Will she ever get her fringe cut? Will she ever manage to get another patient, now that the only one she ever had is dead?
  
There is not a man in Mistresses to compete with Gabriel Macht, alas, and Dominic (Jason George) is the best of a very mediocre bunch.
  
But he and Savi work in a very odd law firm that is not a patch on Harvey’s Pearson/Whatever-that-English-bloke’s-name-is-in-the-second-half-of-the-title.
  
They never have any clients, never do any work, and have all their mates and spouses popping in at all hours for casual chats.
  
Apart from Savi and Dom’s quickie, there’s no office sex there, either, whereas in Pearson Thingummy, you can’t even go into the photocopying room without ending up with someone else’s sticky DNA on your hands.
  
British actor Max Beesley has now joined the cast as “fixer” Stephen Huntley for a few weeks and he is ALWAYS in the photocopying room. Let’s just say he never emerges with anything in his hands. Not papers, anyway.
  
And here’s the really confusing thing – Gary Cole, who plays Harvey’s nemesis, Cameron Dennis, in Suits, is also ballistics expert Kurt McVeigh and on-off lover of Diane in that other great legal drama, The Good Wife.
  
Anyway, Suits is back, and that’s all I care about.

My Angel Gabriel is flying high once more.

Saturday, August 3, 2013

Another Summer of Discontent

Summer is the season of loneliness.

Now, in my mid-Fifties, it’s not often I feel the loneliness that blighted the greater part of my life.

In my 20s, 30s and early (although less so, later) 40s, I used to look at friends with partners and children and fantasise about their perfect lives, while I sat in trains, planes and bars alone, thinking that I had missed out.
  
That all stopped when I hit 50. On the last day of my 40s, I decided to treat myself to a trip to Los Angeles, a city I had visited and loved 30 years previous. I continue to spend most of my time there, loving the work ethic and relishing the TV and film industry that pervades every corner.
  
But, every summer, my heart sinks. Summer is me at 13, when my grandfather died in Wales. I remember the sun and smell of freshly cut grass outside and welcoming its freshness after leaving the dark wood and shadows of his bedroom, sticky Lucozade rings on the bedside table like the patterns my Spirograph made at home.
  
Summer is 1989, the last one I spent with my dad, who died in January 1990: him trying to force Mum to put the spare butter pats from their Plowman’s lunches into her handbag and her refusing because they would melt.
  
Summer is the memory of my childhood holidays in Cornwall as a family: jars of pebbled sweets, whose smooth grey and white surfaces made each one a jewel.

Summer is hacking into the cliffs at Southerndown, near where we lived, and alighting upon a tiny insect, stored for centuries, its legs spread-eagled forever in time.

Summer is late night hot doughnuts and milk at Butlin’s Pwllheli, the joy of watching the wet batter emerge solid and sugary like a life transformed.

Summer is that terrible day in Los Angeles four years ago on August 4th, when I heard that my dear friend and mentor, Blake Snyder, had died.
  
What is it about summer that brings memories to the fore? What is it about those memories that, last night, had me consumed with a loneliness I have not felt for some years, as I sat by myself watching other holiday-makers locked into their own August world?
  
Everyone is away with somebody else. Friends, partners, husbands and wives, children – I feel like the cripple in the Pied Piper of Hamelin, left behind because the Piper has led everyone into the secret holiday mountain -  except me.

Away on work, I sat in the Marbella Club listening to the Hammond style organ playing “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” It had that incessant beat beat beat that these instruments bring to all songs, and, as usual, accompanied by a very mediocre singer who delivers every note at exactly the same pitch.

On the dance floor, a lone couple smooched, separating only when the organ and singer launched into Abba.

Were they in love? Were they high on Sangria? How long had they been together? Had they only just met?

I wanted to know their story, but whatever it was, it made me feel infinitely sad. Suddenly, I wanted to be in a cheap summer dress with bleached blonde hair, being held by a man from whom I would, in all likelihood in daytime, run away from.
  
I tried to think of the disastrous men I have been involved with during summers past (all the names have been changed). Tony, with whom I sat on a table outside a Primrose Hill caf̩ and he told me he was falling for me in a big way Рand phoned the next day to say he had come out in a facial rash and it was all over.

David, who told me on a hot summer’s day in Paris that I was the brightest, funniest, most wonderful woman he had ever met – but he just didn’t fancy me.

Alan, who enjoyed the five star hotel I paid for one summer in the south of France – and then ran off with Bonnie the nurse from Boston.
  
When I moved to Paris in 2001, I recall sitting on a café terrace in St Michel, alongside the Seine, reading a book, drinking a glass of Rose but feeling sorry for myself, when I rang a friend and she told me who they had round for lunch.
  
In my mind’s eye, I saw a huge ballroom, couples dancing, happy children running round in gingham, dinner plates piled high with every luxury – and then, in the background, I heard: “Look, if you don’t shut up, we’re going home right now!” followed by loud screams.

“I would give ANYTHING to be sitting by the Seine with a book and a glass of wine,” said my friend.
  
I have never been someone who thinks the grass is greener on the other side; I love the side I am on.

In fact, most of the time, I don’t know how anyone can bear not to be me.
  
But there is just something about summer that brings out that little bit of wasteland in me when I recall summers past.

And then, I remember Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 and these words: “Summer’s lease hath all too short a date”.

For me, it can never be too short.

I comfort myself in the knowledge that it will soon be autumn and, as Keats said: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”

Oh, yes.

      

Saturday, July 20, 2013

The Angel Gabriel


For months, I have been waiting.

Months of longing, tears and frustration. Months of checking the TV schedules in magazines and throwing them across the room when it failed yet again to materialise.

Then, a few weeks ago, the TV announced that it would be returning on June 16th.
  
I stayed in. Waited again. More longing in my heart and loins. Then, I discovered that the return date was July 16th. I was a whole month early. More tears.
  
But this week, it returned. Suits. The brilliant, fantastically produced, stunningly written, Suits. Even repeating the word thrills me. Suits.
  
Gabriel Macht in a suit. A handsome, sexy man playing handsome, sexy lawyer Harvey Specter. In a suit.
  
And all would have been well with the world, had I not been in the UK. I would never have booked that flight, had I known the television trauma I was about to endure: awake at 5am in my UK bed, unable to sleep, knowing what I was missing thousands of miles away on the other side of the world.
  
My flight schedule meant that when I returned to the US on Wednesday, I would have had two episodes to watch. Delayed gratification is good, I reasoned. But I have had to change my flight again, as I have the chance to interview Eva Longoria in Spain at the beginning of August.

It was a tough call – the world’s most beautiful woman versus the world’s most beautiful man. Eva won out (mega close call, but I was being paid to interview, not to drool). By the time I return to the US, there will be five episodes of Suits to catch up on. I just hope that the delayed gratification doesn’t kill me before I get my hands on the remote.
  
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t love Suits, which is also perfectly cast, with not a glimmer of a weak link in the chain. Macht is, quite simply, superb. When I recently bumped into E L James, author of 50 Shades of Grey, I begged her to get Macht cast in the lead role of Christian Grey.

He really would be perfect. Please, please, please. He’d be great. On and on and on I went. Alas for her, flying at 35,000 feet, she had no escape route. I just pray it lodged somewhere.
  
Specter’s sidekick, Mike Ross, played by Patrick J. Adams, is the maverick turned good guy to Specter’s mean and bad.

And Rick Hoffman’s Louis Litt is a character with barely one redeeming feature, and whose attempts to be a better person are always doomed to failure as a result of his weaknesses – namely, paranoia and insecurity. But it is those weaknesses with which the audience identifies, and that is why we still like him.

The USA Network is my favourite station  - my other big worry at the moment is the date of the season premiere of White Collar; I am very worried about what is happening to Peter in jail. Maybe that, too, has already returned, and, when I finally get back to the US, I will be able to spend an entire week in my dressing gown, catching up.

In the meantime, Twitter people, stop giving the game away in Tweets before the rest of us have had chance to view. I may not be a fan of delayed gratification, but at the moment it’s the only thing keeping me going.

Well, that and the fact that I’m going to meet Eva Longoria.
  
    
     

Friday, July 19, 2013

Give Me a Richard Branson Lounge and I'm Happy


There was a major crisis at LAX, and the man causing it was going nowhere fast.
   
Virgin Atlantic, which has a spectacular lounge at Heathrow for Upper Class passengers travelling to LA, has always had to make do with Air New Zealand’s less than spectacular offering when travelling LA to London.
   
It is, however, managed by the wonderful manager Thierry, who beats everyone else hands down when it comes to airline customer care. It’s not his fault that ANZ catering has heard of nothing other than butternut squash soup, nor that their idea of a salad looks like the staple diet of an anorexic rabbit; he looks after the people – often making valuable introductions and forming friendships between passengers that, in my case, certainly, have continued for years.
   
But inferior as the ANZ lounge is to Virgin’s (quite why Virgin does not have one at LAX has never been fully explained to me), it is still the best of a bad bunch. So, imagine my surprise when, last week, I looked down at my Welcome card and saw that the “new” venue for Virgin passengers is now Air France.
   
The man in front of me was having none of it. He demanded to speak with Virgin. He demanded to speak with ANZ. They, alas, were having none of him. So I snuck up the stairs, went to the ANZ lounge, told them of my immense distress at this tragic turn of events, and hey presto, I was suddenly sitting all nice and cosy before another bowl of butternut squash soup. For all I know, Mr Angry is still at the check-in desk, shouting for Sir Richard himself.
   
It was harder to come back to the UK this time, as I confess to being very LA Loved Up. Having lived in Beverly Hills and Santa Monica – the former like the Rigor Mortis Saloon before the Grim reaper calls your name; the latter, beautiful sunsets but might as well be Wales for all of its proximity to any action – I decided to move. To West Hollywood. And I love it.
   
I am The Only Straight in the Village. Well, pretty much so, and I feel incredibly safe. It’s a lot more lively at night, and several UK friends are within walking distance of my rather gorgeous apartment, which is not only a darn sight more upmarket than my Beverly Hills one (honestly – someone should really give those landlords a lesson in the meaning of “high spec”) but a darn sight cheaper.
   
So, it was hard to leave it, although obviously, I am pleased to be seeing friends and family. My first stop was Denise Welch’s wedding in Portugal (I was almost The Only Straight in the Wedding, too); after Cardiff and London, I am off to Marbella to interview Eva Longoria – and I am literally palpitating with excitement over that. I might invite her round for tea when we are both back in LA, although I suspect Danish pastries are not high on her list of afternoon treats.
   
And so to the UK weather. Dear Lord. Are the Brits ever satisfied? The last few times I’ve returned home, they banged on endlessly about how long the winter was, how cold they were, how they would never see sun again. And now, here they are in the middle of a heat-wave, and it’s oh dear, will this awful sunshine never end, blah blah blah.
   
And now there’s a whole new breed, who love the sun, but don’t like people who don’t; so while one group moans about the weather, the other people are moaning about the people moaning about the weather: the Second Degree Moaners.
   
So far, I’ve spent just half an hour in the pub garden with them, as I am sitting indoors catching up on all the US TV I crave when I leave LA.
   
I’ve had to change my flight to fit in my interview with Eva (it’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it) and at least I’ll have the Virgin lounge on this leg of the journey on my way back. This time, though, it’s a one-way ticket. That Air France lounge will just have to wait. 

Come on, Sir Richard, get building! Your passengers need you. 

More than that, they need your lounges.