Do you feel the earth move?

 Our first proper day in California included an earthquake.

We were sitting in the Starbucks at Warner Brothers curing the h-anger that seems to manifest as confusion and an ability to park when you are nearly sixty, when people stopped, looked at each other, nodded and said, “Earthquake!”

The Long Suffering Husband paused, ham and cheese toasty midair and said, “Earthquake.”

I put my crispy grilled cheese down and said, “Earthquake?”

“That’s what he said, didn’t you feel it?”

I hadn’t but didn’t like to confess just in case it’s a sign of something. Often, when I’m  tired I find the earth jolts a little.  Besides, the couple next to us were muttering something in Spanish about God. 

Obviously, I did what any self respecting citizen does in those circumstances and checked Twitter. Sure enough, a 4.8 had just happened in the Pasadena  area of LA, just 10 miles from where we were. Enough to rattle a few plates, which had happened in the staff canteen. 

It didn’t spoil our day. 

Griffith observatory followed by a walk up a big hill to get a look at the whole of smog-bound LA was the perfect start. The LSH was amazed at my ability to make him climb a mountain on any holiday. Driving around LA is a nightmare but the air conditioning makes it worth it if you take a hike first. 

We were a little disappointed with the Warner Brothers studio tour but would still recommend it.  There’s so much more detail in the UK Harry Potter version but I suspect that it would be different not in the school holidays. After our little walk it was relaxing to be driven round in a cart, looking at elephant doors, a jungle, whole streets that are redesigned for any film that needs them. They have a rule that anything a production company brings in they must take with them but no one told the bamboo! Most shows were on hiatus but it was exciting to see people in hospital gowns stumbling around outside one of the sound stages and I know I will watch any new medical drama. Jack Warner’s motto was, “Anything for the picture,” and the photos you get do look amazing. 

The walk of fame is horrible. It would be bearable if the driving and parking wasn’t such a nightmare and there wasn’t a premier at the Chinese theatre. LA sprawls on massive 5 lane roads, 38 miles across and 44 miles deep without a decent public transport system and so popping back when it is less busy is not an option. You can’t do everything when it is less busy. 

An evening back at Marina Del Rey, where we are staying led to confusion from the restaurant staff. 

“You walked?”

“You haven’t got the car?”

“Where are you from?”

“Oh England.”

In California, you are allowed to hike but you must never walk.

I had a pulled pork dish that included something we hadn’t heard of. The LSH asked.

“What are hush puppies?”

“They’re potatoes. Sort of. Oh I don’t know how to describe them. But they’re potatoes. They’re nice.”

“The only hush puppies I’ve heard of before are shoes.”

The waitress nearly wet herself, “I’ve never heard of that before.”

Hush Puppies at home are comfortable shoes for the over sixties but in SoCal they are little round overcooked croquets with spring onion and jalapeños in the mash part. They were nice, we told the waitress, who left our table singsonging, “Noice! Noice!” as she went. 

LAX

 Social media is full of pictures of other people’s holidays. In truth, vicarious travel is my favourite. You don’t have to spend hours trapped in a metal box at 36000 ft and suffer the panic inducing security checks or freak out the moment you step off the plane and feel truly lost. There’s no dehydration, constipation, airplane cough or time difference. The pictures only tell you the best. Some captions hint at difficulty but you can flick through those. 

The story, however, is in the conflict: The moments people pushed through fear, anxiety or trepidation to go somewhere new. A holiday is the ultimate good news story.

My Grumpy Old Woman travel blog is back for another two weeks of random thoughts on a place I’ve never been before. Of course, I will also post pictures for my friends that don’t want to delve deeper into the conflict but if you want words too, you are in the right place. We flew into LAX which seems to have been contrarily named as the airport was full of the usual rules and rigidity, albeit with a security guard who was amused at how thin our passports were. 

The Long Suffering Husband has a big birthday coming up. How this has happened is a mystery to us all. Sixty sounds ancient and in no way reflects his mental age. He wanted to be in San Francisco on the day, so we booked a trip that involved complicated packing. Two cities, a beach and a walking holiday in 15 days. Trust me, that’s a lot of shoes. 

Weirdly, I get very anxious going through security. Luckily, with being nearly 60 comes an ability to only hear half of what is said. This is a skill the LSH has practised for years but through security at Heathrow he put it to extreme comic effect, which got me through the gates with my breathing under control. 

“Can you lift your jumper up, Sir?”

It was a simple request that surprised everyone when the LSH, who was mirroring the shadow picture started to do star jumps. Laughter really is the best medicine. 

“I thought he said, ‘jump up’,” he said slightly embarrassed but relieved that I was more relaxed.

Sometimes you arrive in a new place and immediately feel at home. The language might be different but there’s a sense that it feels right. I’ve felt this in two places: Greece and Vienna. I was particularly surprised in Greece because even the letters are different. You would have thought that America would feel similarly familiar. They speak the same language and you’ve seen most of it on film, however, this place baffles me. I feel alien. A good night’s sleep and some adventures the next day should help. In the meantime, there’s a sea lion barking outside my bedroom window and a woman is in the bar downstairs telling her boyfriend how she had to book an expensive massage to see the sunset on a holiday in Greece because at certain times of the year the sun sets in the East there. 

Live Pricing

“You are through to our award winning customer services. How can we help you today?”

Do those words make you twitch with righteous sarcasm? Do you want to know, ‘What award?’. Do you shout into the ether, ‘You wouldn’t need award winning customer service if xyz was done properly in the first place.”

You are not alone. 

The thing with award winning customer service is that the company you are ringing gets so many complaints that they have to employ teams of people to persuade you that you  are plain wrong. You put the phone down, thinking, “Stupid me. How could I have not known that?” Then you spend several days thinking about it. It wakes you at 3am - what doesn’t? And you write a blog.

“It’s live pricing, madam. It’s on our website. It does state it clearly, if you would just care to read it.”

I was vaguely aware of live pricing. Actually, more than aware. I’ve worked in a bank on a graduate training scheme where I hated almost every moment except foreign exchange. I happened to be doing my few weeks to learn everything foreign on Black Wednesday and while older men with paunches were running round ashen faced, I found the lines and lines of red ink oddly satisfying. Then in my few weeks on stocks and shares I understood that live pricing was about making up a cost for something imaginary. And things that are not real can change all the time. My imaginary friend from childhood, baby Cumby, who is sometimes green and sometimes not, said, “I wonder how much I’m worth today?” Obviously, baby Cumby was priceless. Then I moved onto gilts and the precious metals market. Catalytic converters had just been made mandatory and so the price of Palladium had gone through the roof. I passed my economics banking exams by biting my tongue and not writing the word immoral during an essay on supply and demand. 

I suppose it makes sense for items that are in high and variable demand, like money, oil, holidays or Taylor Swift tickets. You have to give people with loads of money the chance to make even more by buying those items cheaply and selling them on to poorer people. 

You are probably wondering what item had caused me to ring the award winning customer service team. It must have been an energy company, right? If you’ve walked the Pembrokeshire coast path then you’ll have seen the boats waiting outside Milford Haven until the market changes for them to get the best price at which point they all scramble to be the first in. (If you haven’t walked the coastal path then you should and you should stay with my lovely friends Liz and Dave in Tenby https://www.penmar-tenby.co.uk/ )

But it wasn’t. It was a printer cartridge, for quite an old printer. Who knew there was a market in toner?

I had ordered a branded version and they rang me up and persuaded me to swap it to their own version and they would refund me the difference. When it arrived it was broken and didn’t work so I asked them to send me what I’d originally ordered. 

“You haven’t actually credited the refund for the difference to me,” I said with certainty, “So you can just cancel that.”

“Oh no, madam. I can’t do that.It has already been processed. It’s on my computer.”

“If you can’t stop it then you can take the amount again.”

“It doesn’t work like that. I can credit the refund to your account and you’ll have to reorder the product you’d like or I can replace the item with the same.”

The branded toner cartridge had increased in price by £10!

“Can you not honour the original price, as you sent me a faulty item that I didn’t order on your insistence?”

“Oh no, madam. It’s live pricing.”

Swarm

 I’ve neglected my blog. I crashed into the school summer holidays doing the usual things: reading books, cleaning cupboards, walking, eating, watching the Limpics (why, oh why do they have to shout, though?) and taking photos of bees. 

I had no desire to comment on the complicated issue of who is allowed to compete in which sport or Joe Biden’s resignation, or Trump’s never ending self delusion. Although tragic, I had no opinion on the mass murder incident in Southport where children at a Taylor Swift dance party were stabbed to death (except to say how lucky it was that guns are hard to get in this country).

However, the recent spate of riots do interest me.

Not with the hand-wringing despair you hear from people my age. You’ll hear no, “What has happened to our country?” remarks from me. No. I’m only interested in the behaviour.

“These riots are crazy,” said the Long Suffering Husband, while we were on our evening fart walk. He had stopped as he is unable to multi-task and had got out his phone. “What do you think has caused it?”

“It’s the temperature,” I told him. 

“Not Farrage, or poverty, or immigration.?”

“Nope. It always happens. It’s young men with all that Testosterone swimming around in their ball-sacks and …”

“You can’t say it’s men,” he warned.

“Have you seen the pictures? Anyway,” I said, refusing to be diverted, “When their ball-sacks get up to a certain temperature…”

“Will you stop saying ball-sacks?”

“No. You asked my theory. Now listen! So, as I was saying, it always happens after a couple of days of sweaty ball-sack weather they get into groups, swarm and fight each other.”

“You said it again.”

“I did. Ball-sack! See, I said it another time!”

This is where our conversation ended, except that every now and again, I’ll grin and say, “ball-sack”. Don’t tell me you can’t have fun in a long marriage. 

However, I am serious about my theory. Before we get all hand-wringy about the state of the nation we should acknowledge that young men swarming to fight each other is a biological phenomenon when the temperature is between 27 and 32 degrees Celsius. 

Honey bees swarm as a natural part of their reproductive cycle to create new colonies. Are humans much different?

Carlsmith and Anderson (1979) were the first to notice that violence was curvilinear and Lance Workman worked out the specifics of the temperature needed to cause a riot and stated that when it gets to 32• ‘it’s as though people can’t be bothered.’

Summer bank holidays at Southend Seafront in my childhood were often spent watching gangs of young men swarm at each other and I can confirm that never happened on rainy days.

There was an incident like this at the end of July https://www.essexlive.news/news/essex-news/southend-machete-fight-update-eight-9448596.amp that wasn’t linked to Southport. 

Now that the weather has stayed warm but not too hot, it’s the summer holidays and there are people on social media prepared to give these sweaty ball-sacks a side to pick the fights will continue.

I’m convince that instead of kettling, riot shields and violent water cannon, a light spray down of the pant area would have hundreds of young men standing there wondering what they were doing. Or we could pray for a heatwave. 

In other news the LSH has just walked past and I told him, “I’m just writing about ball-sacks” and he has gone out to cut the grass.

Donald Duck

 A picture can win or lose an election. Think of Ed Miliband’s ugly mouth chomping down on a bacon sandwich. Ed Davey played to this strength by having the most fun on an election campaign - ever. 

What would do it in America? 

He could take a bullet for his country.

So patriotic. 

Shoot him in the head and have him survive? Perfect. What about his brain? What brain?

I remember watching the attempted assassination  of Ronald Reagan when I was small and worrying that his security men had squashed him. The report of the gun rang out and he was pushed onto the floor with 20 muscular men on top of him. 

‘I hope he can breathe under there,’ I remember saying.

This time, with Trump, the security were not so quick. There was time for Trump to expose his head and chest for the greatest shot of all time - and I mean the photo. 

I love a conspiracy theory and my first thought when I heard was, ‘Well that was a set up.’ However, there are some things to bear in mind. 

1. He’s not the president, so the security detail would have been less.

2. The security person closest to him was a woman and I do not blame her for not throwing herself on top of a self-confessed pussy grabber.

3. This has been a divided campaign that has purposely stirred up aggression on both sides (You might not have seen the Biden punch bag that people were encouraged to kick, punch or stab)

4. Trump isn’t famously known for following orders.

5. When they shouted, ‘Donald, duck!’ He is likely to have jumped up and said, ‘Where? He’s my favourite, after his uncle. Don’t you just love Scrooge

6. American mass shootings are common. There were 630 in 2023. That’s roughly two a day. 

7. They have the shooter’s gun. An AR-15. Legal in many states, the choice of school shooters and not known for pinpoint accuracy. 

8. The shooter, Crooks, now dead, fits the profile of a mass shooter. White, 20, loner, bullied at school, wore hunting outfits, played video games where you pretend to shoot the president and named Lee Harvey-Oswald as a hero. 

9. There were casualties. It’s not all about Donald Trump. Corey Compertore, a 50 year old former fire fighter died, 57 year old David Dutch and James Copenhaver are critically ill from gunshot wounds. Those who were slightly injured, grazed or just scared shitless are not worth of a slightest mention in the press. 

The only conspiracy that the USA need to face is the idea that guns make them safer.

The blog you are expecting?

 ‘Oh no! I expect I’ll read this in a blog tomorrow.’

When you hear those words, you feel as though you almost have a duty to report. Especially, when the incident that prompted those words was your own social awkwardness and inappropriate snorting during a speech that brought tears to the eyes of the unrelated diner behind. 

I would tell you about a staff curry to celebrate the escape from the madhouse of four of my favourite colleagues, except that it’s often tricky to talk about difficult things.

FOUR!

That’s all I’m prepared to say.

FOUR!

Four of the very best people that won’t be there to make my days brighter. (And I am sorry that I snorted during the speech). In the words of the children, “That’s totally skibbidi beta!”

Burying the sausage

 I appear to have stepped into a twilight world. One where the rules have changed, where things that were impossible are now probable and routines, traditions and expectations are borrowed from any country or religion you fancy. It's a world I like but I am having to check my thoughts. 

The world I'm talking about is the wedding planning planet.

Weddings bring out many emotions. Just looking at venues or talking about who won't be there or the roles that those who will be might take is enough to bring tears to the eyes. A different kind of stinging eye-watering happens when you start to look at the cost.

As a happily married parent, you look back at your own wedding, with rose-coloured specs. You might try to persuade your child - yes child, which brings more wetness to the eyes - that they should have everything you had. I can imagine that if your marriage had broken down then you might be temped to persuade them that any money spent would end up being a waste. Even if you had an extravagant wedding yourself and had no regrets, then the fact that inflation rules seem to have by-passed the wedding industry will make you feel as though a fish-bone is stuck in your throat (which has nothing to do with the fact that your baby has grown up - honestly!).

I know that people have been getting married all this time but I really haven't paid much attention to the conversations.

'That's nice,' I would have said, not really listening because the details of what the new rules are didn't matter to me.

However, now that I'm on Post-Proposal Planet I've started to listen and much of it is really funny.

We have been looking at venues in the worst summer weather I can remember.

'Oh no, the poor bride,' everyone thinks. I'm not sure why it's just the bride but that's what people say as they look at the sky, darkening, threatening. 

'She'll ruin her Jimmy Choos,' they say, looking at the rivers of rain, flooding the courtyard.

'I've heard that rainy weddings are often the best because everyone makes more of an effort,' my daughter told me.  

There is a tradition, that I hadn't heard of before last week. I was actually properly listening to a conversation about a wedding that was due to happen soon.

'I'm checking the weather every two minutes and it changes all the time.' 

The bride-to-be was hoping for an outdoor wedding.

'Is there an alternative?'

'Yes but I don't want it. I'm getting married outside. No. I am getting married outside, even if we need wellies and umbrellas.'

'You need to bury the sausage before the wedding.'

'Yes, I'm planning to,'

Wait. What? My properly listening ears were confused. Bury the sausage? It sounded like a euphemism but surely you weren't meant to see the groom before the wedding. Maybe that tradition is one that has been dropped.

'What kind of sausage?' I asked. 'Do you have to cook it? Does it have to be you? Would it help if we all buried a sausage?'

Apparently, it's a Spanish tradition, so I suspect it should be Chorizo but someone told a story of how she had taken one from a fridge, prompting an irate call from her groom, who was confused that he now wasn't able to give sausage sandwiches to all of his groomsmen on the wedding morning. She had no regrets and swears it worked, even though it was December and she slipped on some ice.