Homeward bound

According to Delta’s twitter feed we were good to go this afternoon, so bade farewell to our hosts and had lunch with R, who gave us a lift to the airport. It was our third trip to LIC Market, highly recommended.

The flight back was long but untroubled, but we got back to find the housesitter had left the place in a terrible state. She’s taken moving in a bit seriously, there were some breakages and a strange stain on the bath. On the plus side Boo was happy to see us and is sticking close.

There was also apparently another earthquake just off SF, but at this point I’m too tired to think straight.

Bittersweet Sunday

Sunday and it’s a Grand Prix day – this time the French speed circuit at Magny Cours.

I was a bit worried because Formula One isn’t too popular in this country. Nascar rules the racing roost and I was wondering where I could watch the race. As it turns out I needn’t have worried. A quick web search found the San Francisco Formula One club, who gather each race morning at 10am in a local bar to watch the spectacle over brunch.

They’re a good crew and are passionate about the racing. I met a wine maker who’d driven over from Oakland for the race, and a Brit who’d been over here so long he sounded Australian. Even got an invitation to a party next weekend from one of the club DJ, plus there was a fun raffle at the end for some good prizes.

The bar brunch wasn’t up to much – basic eggs, bacon, home fries and toast but now I know the form I’ll take some Marmite along to spice up the meal. Still, the barman mixed an excellent Bloody Mary, even if he was a bit heavy on the olive juice.

But it was a bittersweet morning. Back in the UK I’d grab a couple of bottles of wine and head over to R&B’s for a lunchtime race, then W-A-L-K the dogs (you can’t the word otherwise they go nuts until it’s time to go) and then an excellent dinner. Home seemed a long way away as I wandered down 7^th avoiding a homeless lady performing her morning ablutions.

Still and all it wasn’t a bad morning. The race was pretty good – Hamilton screwed up again and it was clear it was going to be a Ferrari one two, until the end when Raikkonen’s exhaust dropped out and he sacrificed the lead but managed a skilful drive to second. Trulli deserved his third; it took real guts to risk a crash to defend his spot on the second to last lap.

Considering the early start (an alarm going off at 8.30am on a Sunday is seldom a happy occurrence) and the two drinks I went home to the hotel, had an hour’s nap and decided to cheer myself up the best way I know how – buying a few books. So it was over to my favourite San Francisco bookshop: City Lights.

It’s a great little place, steeped in history, firmly independent and packing a selection that the majors wouldn’t touch. Plus I found some books I’ve been meaning to get for years; Howard Zinn’s autobiography ‘You can’t be neutral on a moving train’, the third book in the Chalmer’s Johnson trilogy and ‘Canticle for Leibowitz’, a masterpiece of post-apocalyptic science fiction from the early 1960s.

Another reason to love the bookshop is its proximity to the San Francisco Brewing Company, so I took my purchases down there to peruse over a pint of Emperor Norton in the late evening sun. Then, feeling much more cheerful I headed home, with a brief stop for spicy noodle soup and spring rolls in Chinatown before having an early night – must be fresh for Monday.

Hiatus, imagined and ultimate

I’m still waiting for the final go, and it looks like no progress for a week. It’s getting so every time asks me when I’m going I clench a little inside. At this rate I’ll be stuck over for a major birthday and that’s not going to happen.

So Easter will be a hiatus, and time to do some ruthless pruning, in the garden and the wardrobe. Some charity shop is going to do very well this weekend, if their category of success is a few suits and two bin bags of vendor branded clothing.

Ten years of press conferences have led to an astonishing assortment of t-shirts, baseball caps, sweatshirts and even a pair of fingerless leather gloves. I’d have loved to have been a fly on the wall in that marketing meeting.

The other real problem is the books. I’ve around 2,000 of the little tyrants hanging around and the move was supposed to be a winnowing, but there’s precious little I really want to get rid of. I’m certainly dumping a box of juvenilia; I doubt there’s really a market for 70s schlock horror and books about 'humorous' graffiti.

There’s a fair few duplications too. There’s a web site V told me about called Bookcrossing where you can print out a form, stick it in the back of the book and then leave it in a public place. They then log onto the site and tell you where it is and what they thought of it, repeat as necessary. The only problem I can see is that in these paranoid times leaving a hardback at an airport might be construed as a security hazard.

The morning’s rather grim task was to write the obit for Arthur C Clarke* . The man was a visionary, and a very humble one. He once said that but for Jules Verne man wouldn’t have stepped onto the moon. But thanks to him we’ve made massive strides and will make many more with any luck.

Clarke’s work opened up science and space to a generation of us, and hopefully more in the future. I can still remember sitting under the blankets in my Scots uncle’s home reading one of his short stories, ‘Summertime in Icarus’ and getting lost in the story and the mechanism behind it. He told cracking yarns, packed with detail and loved the occasional verbal fun, such and ending a story with the punch line “All that is left of the ship is a star-mangled hammer.”

He had his flaws, notably the lack of strong female characters and putting his name to a lot of co-written rubbish in later years. Devoting pages of Imperial Earth to how the rotary dialler for phones would last for millennia must also have made him wince, if a guest had been so rude as to bring it up.

But he spoke of a dream of making space exploration "the moral equivalent of war", a stunning concept. Clarke flowered in the Second World War, helping invent the radar that guides planes to land in bad weather. He knew what could be achieved if a country, or a planet, buckled down and really concentrated, and considered it a far better use of money than, for example, the $300bn Iraq has cost.

When it became clear that the end was nigh he recorded a final goodbye to family and fans in a video message. It is characteristically self-effacing and included three wishes, one of which was for peace in his beloved Sri Lanka.

If you haven’t sampled his stuff I’d recommend Childhood’s End, 2001 (helps finally understand the film), 3001 for closure and The Fountains of Paradise. The latter may prove the most important, since a space elevator is the only way to move equipment into orbit at a profit.

But the job wasn’t all bad, I had a keyboard cleaning moment after logging onto the Popbitch message board that made me love the site again. Clarke was a humanist but it would have been nice for him to chuckle as I did when the news had been posted thus:

“Arthur C Clarke Dead. Suffering breathing problems, apparently. Pretty extreme problems by the sound of it.”

*It stands for Charles – no I didn’t know and neither did anyone else in the office. This sparked one of those search-engine hunting sessions where you find the middle names of other authors. Hunter S Thompson has the improbable Stockton, where as Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald makes me wonder if his parents were deranged.