Bloggers about

Another old friend from the UK came into the office today. J and I worked together a decade ago and while I left the dark world of PR he has climbed the greasy pole and is now a bigwig in-house guy.

So when his PR company suggested a meeting I jumped at the chance. We dispensed with the work side of the briefing in half an hour and then devoted the rest of the time to catching up. It’s fun to see where everyone is and compare war stories and as he used to work with Si I took him down to meet her.

It was Si’s last day and so we chilled out at the conference awards dinner before she had to get a red eye back to New York. Then she’d secured up passes to the VIP post-awards party and so we headed off to a sweaty nightclub in the heart of SOMA.

J and I discussed the things men do after the second vodka and tonic (marriage, life and the eventual heat death of the universe) and then as we were making our way through the crowd I ran into a blogger I’ve been reading for years, Girl with a One Track Mind.

Now I may not agree with everything she writes but she turns a great turn of phrase and deserves credit for having the guts to write about topics not usually covered before the internet, and for getting a book deal out of it and not turning in the usual piece of drivel bloggers have been known to do in such circumstances. I wrote a couple of pieces about her, particularly after she was disgracefully outed and it was good to meet briefly in the flesh before she was swarmed by fans.

Hot stuff

San Francisco may be a food haven but there’s one cuisine I’ve lusted over but couldn’t seem to find a good example of – Indian.

I came to good Indian food very late in life. Ten years of enforced eating of boarding school curries, complete with apples and sultana, left me with a horror of them and I avoided anything curried for nearly 20 years.

It’s a pity, because getting lashed up and going for a curry is a popular pastime, and one brilliantly sent up by the Goodness Gracious Me crew in their sketch ‘Going for an English’.

Then, a few years ago the Masala Zone opened up down the street from work. J and I would meet up about once a month to catch up and have lunch, usually in whatever was new in our area, and the Masala Zone was mentioned. So I agreed, with a certain amount of dread.

But to my surprise I really enjoyed it, and felt none of the queasiness that had accompanied previous attempts to sample curry in the past. The think dhals were delicious and while some stuff is still not to my taste I began carefully sampling a wide range of dishes.

So when I met up with C and his Indian friend we were going to go out for a Chinese but when he suggested a curry house that had been highly recommended I jumped at the chance.

The New Delhi curry house is a wonder. It looks just like a good curry house in the UK, if said place had the money to do the job of decoration properly. Ceiling fans spin merrily, carvings adorn the walls and the serving platters are mostly authentic.

The food is superb, even if the other two thought it wasn’t spicy enough. My lamb rogan josh was perfectly; a dark, rich tomato sauce with well cooked chunks of lamb floating through. The nan was delicious, moist enough to tear well and puffed up like little spicy pillows of delight. Don’t even get me started on the poppadoms.

Add in Kingfisher lager and excellent staff and it was a great night. The other two were on for a late one so I bid them goodbye. Hopefully C and I will meet up sooner next time, six years has been too long.

Friends reunited

I was on my way out on Tuesday night when the phone rang. It was an old friend from school, C, who was in town and wanted to know if I fancied a drink.

That night was out of the question but we met up tonight. C and I were at school from 16-18 and were goodish friends; both class jokers in our way, taking the same A levels and writing for the school magazine. He wrote an excellent piece about elves in the North Pole labouring in inhuman conditions under the evil Santa ‘Claus’ Barbie while I concentrated on cynically humorous advice columns.

Anyway, in the early 2000s Friends Reunited came along and we got back in touch. He was in the technology field like me and we met up for a drink that ended up morphing into dinner, more heavy drinking, an unsuccessful attempt to chat up two air hostesses and me pouring him into a taxi at 3am, only to hear the next day that his wife had locked him out of the house.

We sent each other the occasional email but when Facebook came along we got back in contact and exchanged numbers, thus the call.

It was good to catch up and as the drinks flowed we found out a lot about what else had happened to the class of ’87. An astonishing number of classmates had left Derbyshire for a while and then come back to live. One is a landlord of one of our old drinking haunts, another teaches at a nearby college (and married one of his students!) while yet another was the town librarian until it was shut down.

However, a few of us have flown the coop. One old chum in currently in Spitsbergen, high up in the Arctic Circle, studying polar bears. C himself ran a telecommunications company in Outer Mongolia for a while. Another copped a packet in the first Gulf War. It’s amazing how people get around.

All in all a very good night, only slightly soured by finding out that C got off with a girl I had lusted after two years at the leaving disco. No matter, it was over 20 years ago and we’ve all passed a lot of water since then and it was a damn good night, so we’re meeting again tomorrow.

Beware Sake

Spent Sunday out at Coit Tower, the highest publicly accessible point in the city centre. I was showing a couple of my friends around and decided to do it literally.

Coit Tower is on the peak of Telegraph Hill and looms over Fisherman’s Wharf. It has survived pretty much everything the geographically unstable city can throw at it and was built by the delightfully eccentric* Lillie Hitchcock Coit.

Coit was a card; wearing trousers when such behaviour was thought shocking, gambling and smoking cigars and generally scandalizing society one hundred years ago. She was also an honorary fire-fighter, and commissioned a very butch statue to them in Washington Square Park.

It’s a lovely building, made even better by a huge display of murals featuring life in California, done in a very nice 1930’s style.

Then we wandered around North Beach, then down to China town and across to the foodie heaven that is the Ferry Building. Then back to the hotel to meet the others for dinner.

We were taken to a very upscale Japanese restaurant - definitely an OPM (other people’s money) place. I later found out it cost our host $400 a head - and the waiter agreed to add a few covers to the receipt so the host wouldn't get fired.

There the night was filled with sake, sushi, sake, Kobe beef and a few more sakes. I didn’t realise quite how drunk I was until I got outside and the air hit me.

This morning was very grim. All in all not the state to meet my new boss in.

*ie a bit mad but with plenty of money

Old friends

There’s a major technology conference on next week so a lot of British friends are over.

It’s really good to see R, I and M and M again. You don’t realise how much you miss people until you can’t see them every week and it was superb to see them again. We caught up on gossip, shared stories and generally chewed the fat.

I’m growing accustomed to the American way of life but there’s a part of me that will always be British, and they exemplify why. Frank, and frankly obscene at times conversations, chuckles over times past and plans for the future. Damn good to see them again.

Intro/Outro - with a nod to Neil Innes

At the tail end of last year I got good and bad news. The bad is that the head of our San Francisco office had decided to move companies, and indeed countries. The good was that they needed someone to replace him and I was in the running.

Now it looks as though I'm not only in the running but the favourite, with the next best option being a three legged nag expecting a visit to the nearest Pedigree Chum factory. So long as I can get certain details sorted it looks as though I'll be able to start the 30 day clock some time in the next week or so and be in Fogtown by April. Exciting but a wee bit scary.

The last few months have been a tad stressful and there have been many ups and downs, some of which will get referenced at some point I have little doubt. But in the meantime, at the suggestion of a good friend I'll be blogging the experiences of a dyed-in-the-wool Brit moving to San Francisco and becoming a stranger in a very strange land indeed.

The following blog will hopefully serve many purposes. It'll save an awful lot of phone calls by keeping my friends and family updated, let me vent in a city where I know fewer people than the fingers on my left hand and give an outlet to write.

Writing's what I do for a living and it's also my passion – there are very few things in life that can compete with feeling of a good sentence flowing onto the page and the others generally involve other people, intensely good music or near frozen Moskovskaya Cristall with an en suite snow-bound sauna.

Read and enjoy, and comments are always welcome.