Days like these

There are the days you come for, and the days you expect, and the days that the world in fact delivers: and I at least am a fine imaginator and a poor prognosticator and sometimes an astonishingly lucky man, and so all three of those can vary wildly one from another.

When Karen proposed that I should come out here for a lengthy stay in the spring of the year, obviously I don't know what was actually in her mind but I do know what was in my own. I know what I'm like in foreign countries. Left to myself, I will play flaneur in the city streets, just watching the people, absorbing difference; I will browse the shops and markets, ditto ditto; I will seek out museums [musea?] and galleries and monuments and such; and I will find quiet accommodating places where I can work. In this instance, Karen's clubhouse, aka the shed at the bottom of the garden. (I speak ironically; it is far superior to any shed. If I ever remember that I have a camera with me, I shall post pix when I get home.)

So, yup. That was my plan: to spend easy weeks wandering the neighbourhood and getting plenty of writing done while Karen was at work, and then playing live-in cook and feeding her when she came home. And then probably falling over with abiding jetlag.

Then Helen and frumpo suggested that they might fancy a week or two in California. Hee. So now a roadtrip lies at the core of the plan, and all the Americans I meet (there seem to be quite a few of them out here) are much convulsed with mirth when we describe it. "That's three states you think you can drive through in a week. Three big states..."

So. Really, from Friday? I have no idea what the days will be like. Yesterday, though? That was the kind of day I came for. Awake from half three, up at six and working; saw Karen off and went a-wandering. Up the road to Lucky's (we don't say supermarket here, apparently, we say grocery store: which to an English ear suggests something very much smaller, I think) for the essential gin and tonic (to correct a strategic error I made in duty-free at the airport: I bought whisky, little recking that Karen would still have the bottle I brought last year)(but it really didn't matter, because gin here is Astonishingly Cheap: I resisted the half-a-gallon-for-eleven-bucks deal, and paid, whoo, seventeen...); downtown to the bookstore; away up El Camino Real to another larger grocery store. Where, bizarrely, in a bargain bin, I found a first edition hardcover of the very novel I had been extolling to Karen the previous night (Manda Scott's Dreaming the Eagle, a book I unreservedly adore).

And betweentimes I worked, tho' not actually in the shed clubhouse because the kitchen actually suits me fine; and when Karen came home we went out for Afghan food today just because we could, and then to a bookstore where I signed the first copies of Jade Man's Skin I've actually seen in the wild, and then to a pub! An English pub! (Except that I assert that if it were truly English, the mirror above the bar would have had an apostrophe in "British Bankers Club" - there is at least one US style guide that would refuse it, which just seems weird to me...)

And then we came home and I fell over from da jetlag and went to bed at ten o'clock. I'm really no fun as a guest, y'know.

And this morning it is raining, and the whole house chimes with fallen water. I haven't known a building this noisy in the wet since I stayed in Amelia's illegal apartment in Taipei, under a corrugated-iron roof, and we had a tropical rainstorm. Man, that was loud...

And today I shall roast a chicken for supper. With beets and potatoes and little baby carrots. Really I'm only doing this because I want the carcase to make stock for a risotto tomorrow, you understand. It's a hard life.