Notes from California #1

A few initial observations

You want to be alive in America. In many other places you feel like you are simply one amongst many, and therefore redundant: that if you never existed the world would have been much the same. It’s not that you don’t enjoy living – of course you do – but everything in Europe feels so inevitable, it’s hard to see where you matter.

In America it is different. Most people you meet feel like the main character of their story. Most people assert themselves, demand they are seen. They overtake you on the motorway with aggression, speed up towards an amber traffic light. They take engaging with the world incredibly seriously, in good ways and bad. They talk to you in queues and from across quiet restaurants. They simply ask you for things when they want them, even when you’re all out of waldorfs. They allow you to cut the line when you have a baby, and expect you to step forward proudly, without the awkward apologetic grimace a Brit feels compelled to produce when he is defying a norm. Americans burn always with a hard, gemlike flame.

Americans sort themselves into groups so readily in conversation – I have heard the words “I’m Irish” three times, “my husband is French” twice, and “I’m Norwegian” once; we’ve been here for a week – as though their ethnic identity predestines their character. Non-white people generally don’t feel the need to self-define like this, which is interesting. First-order politics doesn’t come up very much, but this is San Francisco, and I guess normies assume you are a progressive and my weirder friends are, for the most part, simply not interested in politics.

It would be easy to mistake all this for brashness, but I think for the most part it is an admixture of earnestness and pride. Some embroidery proudly presented in a coffee shop in Bernal Heights claims that “the work of liberation belongs to all of us”, as live-laugh-love as you could ever find it. A man named Rodrigo, who was clearly homeless, whom I spoke to outside a bar in the Mission at noon on a Wednesday, told me that he loved God as much as he loved beer, and then asked for my address in England because he’d always wanted to visit London and had “a woman there”; I couldn’t have written a better Country song if I had tried. An Asian-American mum of a small boy named Emerson – we met at the swings in the Moscone play park – said I had made a good choice raising my child in the Bay Area over Los Angeles. It was a much better place to do so; not once had I told here that L.A. was ever an option.

I speak fairly quickly, and frequently mumble, in an English accent, so people often misunderstand me. In London, they usually ask me to repeat myself. Over here they interpolate based on context, or simply ignore me and continue. I make fewer jokes; I’m not sure why, but the stakes feel higher.

Something about the colour hits the eye differently here – I think it’s a combination of the microclimate and the latitude – the red of the Golden Gate Bridge looks softer. The flora is remarkable, and remarkably diverse; residential streets overflow with magnolia, trumpets, lilac; so many neighbourhoods smell wonderful. Groceries are similar in quality, on average, but much more expensive. Bars that don’t serve food are not allowed to permit children to enter the premises, or even sit outside, so never quite reach the small-town conviviality of a pub. It has been, consistently, cold and damp in the morning and hot and dry in the afternoon.

The idea of walking more than a couple of blocks does not seem to occur to anybody, and having a car is the only way to navigate the city with any sort of convenience, even though the public transport is cheap and clean and fairly reliable, if less frequent than the Tube.

I was feeling trepidatious about this move. California has always weighed heavily on my mind, partly because it is so present: in television, in the music I grew up listening to and the novels I grew up reading. So many of the tools I used as a young coder were made in Cupertino, or Mountain View, or San Francisco, or Palo Alto, or San Mateo, or Petaluma; all of these places are within a few minutes’ drive of each other, each one a distinctive madeleine to me. I was worried that crossing the rubicon, as it were, coming over with my family on a one-way ticket, would feel intimidating and scary and bathetic.

I was wrong, of course. The border guard welcomed me to the USA with genuine warmth. I said thank you, that I was proud; I cried a manly tear. I pulled myself and our luggage and our wriggling and jet-lagged and diarrheal daughter through the airport and to the hire car, upgraded from a medium-sized SUV to a preposterous freedom-sized monster Buick. I drove down the 101, each turn on the highway pushing another SaaS billboard into my periphery. The concentration of tech iconography still stirs something in me. The air felt cool and the sun felt warm. I want to be alive here.