Month: May 2006

Week Thirty-Five: petescully is Away

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I hate airports. Some people see them as places of excitement, full of people travelling all over the globe, every continent and every country coming together in one place, huge metal birds soaring across the horizon, and all of that bollocks. In reality they are inconvenient places packed tight with tired and stressed-out travellers in inappropriate clothing for the climate, families with noisy young children who have to take up the entire row of waiting-area seats with various coats they were never going to wear, soulless security staff who have been trained in the art of humourless arrogance, and shops full of things you really don’t want. Yes I know that’s a glass-half-empty look at airports, but that’s how I see them. I don’t like them.

San Francisco International was actually quite nice. Incredibly modern (lots of glass and white painted metal) with interesting displays of public art. Hardly anybody about, so there was space to breathe, and there was none of that waiting in a queue for a couple of hours to check in. I hate how airlines insist on you being two or three hours early, mainly because I do not ever want to spend any more time in an airport than I have to. It didn’t take too long to get around it, either – some airports are so huge you need to take a plane to get across them. Of course, there are the travelators – which, as Seinfeld once pointed out, people often forget are actually for travelling on, not for just standing there, leisurely passing the world by, ‘look at me, i’m not even walking’.

Usually it is such a relief for me to get on the plane and get off the ground. Unfortunately, United Airlines employ the sardine-method to air-travel, and I was clamped into place with nothing but King Kong for entertainment, on a flight I was expected to sleep on. I didn’t make the journey any worse by actually watching it, so I read a little, listened to some music, tried to sleep and failed. The air-hostesses, their baggy eyes caked in make-up and their uniforms threatening to throw stitches and release unwanted air-pressure, waddled the aisles unsmilingly offering pretzels and sodas and food with less taste than the Daily Star. I watched the map anxiously, passing over the Rocky states, past places with names like ‘Big Baldy Mountain’, across Canada and Greenland, over Iceland and finally into Britain.

And into Heathrow, one of the world’s largest (and therefore most irritating) airports. Baggage reclaim is always fun, isn’t it? It’s like a gamble, did my one make it, or is it in Sydney? And then you start to wish that you’d tied a ribbon to it, because everyone’s bag is large and black and looks just like yours. People pile around the treadmill ready to pounce on any bag slightly resembling their own, pushing other people out of the way in fits of jetlagged desperation. And then a sigh of relief as your luggage comes out; and a smug look on your face as if to say to the others still waiting, “well, I guess I’ll be off, good luck getting your bags back from Australia, suckers!” Yes, airports are really lovely places.

Week Thirty-Four: End of the Season

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The dramatic FA Cup final shoot-out, the tense (and ultimately rigged, in my opinion, all’italiana) race for fourth place in the Premiership, the return of Barcelona as Champions of Europe – it all passed without so much as a murmur over here. Same with the Eurovision Song Contest. Nobody cared, except maybe the one guy I met wearing a Barcelona shirt, who innocently wondered if I supported Arsenal, and received a look so foul it would have turned an M&M sour. And yet there can be no doubt about it – this week is the End of the Season: the TV Season. All the long distance shows have been running since September (‘Lost’, ‘Gray’s Anatomy’, ‘Desperate Housewives’, to name but a few), and are all culminating in their own two-hour season finale Cup Finals. I fully intend to sing ‘Abide With Me’ before tomorrow’s ‘Lost’. I have a feeling that one will end in some sort of shoot-out as well.

The American TV Season is one of the big cultural differences between Britain and the US. In the UK, a series will often last for six, maybe even eight episodes; an American show will last for over twenty. But how do you stretch twenty episodes into almost forty weeks? What they do here is they show a few new episodes, then they repeat some, then some new ones, then some repeats (pronounced re-peats, not re-peats). In this way, the suspense is, well, suspended. And it can be really irritating, not least because there appears to be little pattern of when they will show repeats and when they will show new episodes, making the series incredibly frustrating to follow. The repeats they show are equally arbitrary – they have no order, they serve no purpose, other than to rest star players. It is as if Claudio Ranieri is in charge of the TV networks (actually, I really wish he were).

I have no idea what will take place during the summer. I would like to see all the different shows get together and have their own World Cup – we could see Eastenders vs Sex and the City, or at the very least a fist-fight between Jeremy Paxman and those imbeciles on ABC News10. I would pay good money for that, really good money. Who knows, this might even be one World Cup where the English actually beat the Germans. I’ll settle for the real thing; though I know they will show some matches, I will be watching it for the most part on the Mexican channels (that is, when I come back form my holiday to BBC land). Speaking of which, you know the way films sometimes have different names here? Well that film ‘Goal’ is currently listed in theatres here with the catchy title ‘Goal: The Dream Begins’, while in Mexico it is listed as ‘Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool!’. Strange but true.

Week Thirty-Three: If You Can’t Take the Heat

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Yesterday, someone said something that gave me the impression that they thought it was still Spring. I told them, look, if it’s nearly a hundred degrees Fahrenheit outside, that means it is Summer. I was assured that this is indeed still Spring, and that I will be looking back on the days when it was only in the 90s like some bygone cold spell. In Davis – in the Central Valley generally – it gets hot, and I mean HOT.

Not that I can go outside, of course. The hay fever is especially bad right now, and I’m tired of everyone asking me what I’m taking for it. Nothing works for me, and anything medicated makes me ridiculously drowsy. I’ve realised that the best thing for me is to just stay inside, in the safe insulated bubble of my office. I don’t have a window, so I don’t see how sunny it is, but my spies tell me it’s glorious right now.

I read somewhere that California got it’s name from the Spanish words ‘cali’, meaning ‘hot’, and ‘fornia’, meaning ‘oven’. Hot Oven. I don’t know about that folk etymology, but it’s a pretty good description. The hottest place in the world is in California, down in Death Valley. It is, of course, a ‘dry heat’, which means that you won’t sweat to death in desperate humidity as you might in the South. It also means that air-conditioning is essential, or plenty of fans at least. In our apartment, for example, we have more fans than Milton Keynes Dons.

And so all that was recently green is already golden brown, and the flooded plains that stretch from Davis to Sacramento have already all but dried up. The snowmelt from the Sierras is causing some Foothills rivers to rage violently, with frequent warnings about going anywhere near the icy cold torrents. Over on the East Coast, however, they are having some terrible rainstorms. By all accounts we in Davis have had our rain now, that’s it, that’s all we get until the winter. Not for Pete though – I’ll be back in London in just under a fortnight. Better bring me brolly.

Week Thirty-Two: On the Road

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Going from northern to southern California usually requires a motorcycle, a head full of poetry and the famous Big Sur coastline. You leave the foggy Bay Area behind, and head for the palm trees and suntans of the Los Angeles beaches. For us, however, the north-south jaunt took us down Interstate-5 from the rising heat of Davis down the agricultural furnace called the Central Valley, over the Grapevine mountains (turn off the a/c, folks), and into the traffic and cooling smog of LA and Orange County, the ‘OC’. We were going there for the wedding of a friend who, a century ago in Aix-en-Provence, introduced me to my wife; ultimately, you could say, it is because of said friend that I now live in the US. We stocked up the ice-chest with Sobes and sandwiches, filled up the iPod shuffle with Jack, Art and Joni, and head off down the highway.

America is all about its roads, and some of the most memorable Americana springs from that. I’ve never read Kerouac, and despite many visits to the City Lights store in SF, I probably never will; I have seen Convoy, though, which is why every time I see a helicopter or police light aircraft while out on the sun-washed freeway I announce that there’s a ‘bear in the air’. As we speed past a backdrop of already browning hills, I get a sense of just how massive America really is; though it is not one country, but many. You have to travel among them to tell the difference, a lot of the time. Even the States, who make their presence felt in the license plate game (when I wonder to myself what story brought that SUV down from the distant grey shores of New Jersey), are not particularly real entities, and passing over the mountains into the land of LA, I get the feeling that, yes we’re in California, but this is a different country, and the road has brought us here.

Yes, the sun is clearly getting to me, so I splash a bit more sunscreen onto my arms. We eventually roll into the rich country of the OC, strolling by the Balboa Island waterfront, shopping and eating in Newport Beach. The wedding was beautiful, a mixture of Irish America and colourful Persia, in the spectacularly Mediterranean Laguna Beach. It wasn’t the only wedding in town, though; down on the shores of the Pacific, other Happy Couples were snapping photos with long sunset shadows and shimmering waves. We wandered among the palm trees and tuxedoes for a bit, before retiring to the hotel, to finish off the previous night’s cheesecake.

And then back on the road, the very next day. Back over the mountains, back into the Valley, watching the thermometer rise from the early 70s to the late 80s (completely bypassing both punk and new romantic). I noticed that in the supposedly smoggy OC/LA area, my hay fever and related allergies actually cleared up. No sniffling and sneezing for me (I was all ready to put it down to tears at the wedding, too). It took less time to get back to our part of the world than it had taken to go south – or at least it did, until just as we were getting into Sacramento, our car threw a flat tyre, forcing us onto the side of the freeway. We had to wait to be rescued, while juggernauts and Sunday drivers whizzed by at speeds that made the ground shake. An ironically fitting end to a road trip – stuck on the side of the road. At least we weren’t far from home.

Week Thirty-one: Don’t Give Me Your Huddled Masses

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The key issue here this week is immigration. Actually, it’s not, it’s the criminal President and his criminal war, but the news channels don’t want to tell us about that any more. On Monday there was a national protest known as “the day without immigrants”, when immigrants both legal and illegal showed solidarity for one another and took the day off work, just to show everybody how much America depends on them. This is a country founded by immigrants, they cry, and they have a damn valid point. As a recent immigrant myself I’m with them all the way.

But the immigration debate is a minefield. In Britain, tabloid headlines rarely distinguish between “asylum seekers”, “economic migrants” and “illegal immigrants”. The consequence is that the public lumps them all in together, and treats them just the same. The same arguments people use in the UK are being used by people here, namely “they are coming over here and taking our jobs” and complaining that with them here, wages will be forced down because they will work for much less than a local. And so they become victimised, and scapegoats.

Hang on a minute, though – where are all the jobs really going? Big corporations are outsourcing their industries abroad, to Asia and elsewhere, because they can pay lower wages there. Are we then to blame the Chinese and the Indians for that? Why don’t we blame the corporations? We seem to be quick to pick on the worker, to pick on the poor sods who bust their bottoms all day and night for a pittance, just because it is a better life than what they left behind. Why are people so quick to attack them? They come to America because they have to – it’s supposed to be the richest country, and everyone wants to take part in the American Dream. Oh yeah, remember that?

And then there is the whole language debate. “They come over here from Mexico, they don’t even want to learn English!” People talk of forcing everyone to learn English, as if in a society dominated by English-language media they wouldn’t anyway. And was Spanish not spoken in California way before English? and the Native American languages before that? It is quite ridiculous that California can support the “English First” policy (whereby they make English the sole official language, thus ‘protecting’ it), when almost all its major cities have Spanish names (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, San Diego – hardly Anglo-Saxon). I’d say that, truthfully, the English-speakers were the immigrants, wouldn’t you?

I didn’t take the day off, though (it being my first day on the new job proper), though I did stay away from the shops. The immigration debate is big and sticky, and all sides have real concerns (even the language concerns have some validity). But I think it must be remembered that people come here because there are opportunities denied to them at home, it’s that simple.