Happy New Year - California back to England

Catherine and I had our first and only New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles and spent it very quietly with a home-made chicken curry followed by traditional trifle [deliaonline] and a fairly random movie (The Company of Wolves). Dance music featured only on the ipod during washing up and we were in bed by 1am. Good-bye nightclub - hello middle-age.

No matter what timezone you are in it is now officially 2007. Procrastination ends here for me and things will rapidly start to change in the coming weeks. We might be leaving Los Angeles as soon as the end of February which prompts speculation as to what will be missed, what will not be missed and if there is anything about the UK that we are looking forward to at all!? With the sun streaming into our delicious west-side apartment the following is probably highly biased and I’m sure my perspective will change after our return. Read on for the complete list which is in no particular order and avoids all humans.

##Things I’ll miss from California

• sunshine
• lack of rain
• lack of wind
• lack of clouds
• lack of cold
• lack of winter
• ability to walk into work every morning in a t-shirt
• guaranteed weekend weather
• eating lunch outside daily
• having coffee outside daily
• access to good bagels
• access to good sushi
• access to Ethiopian restaurants
• lack of smoke in any building
• ability to leave mail in the mailbox of your house and have it taken away
• right on red at stoplights
• ability to drive to mammoth for a weekend of snowboarding
• snowboarding
• national parks such as Sequoia and Yosemite
• the Big Sur coastline
• the close proximity of a desert
• weekly street cleaning
• checkout staff packing your bags
• abundance of rich people
• posh cars everywhere
• fancy shops only a short drive away
• Michael’s house
• Jacuzzi at Michael’s house
• garden at Michael’s house
• do anything attitude
• pride in the rich and successful
• lack of schemies
• reasonable day length in winter
• lack of drunkenness
• coffee culture
• carefree attitude to money
• general friendliness - although fake
• quality of staff in Trader Joe’s
• REI
• REI’s returns policy - if not satisfied ever they will replace
• low price of outdoor gear
• low price of computer goods
• low price of petrol (gas)
• low price of clothing
• low price of almost everything
• newegg.com online computer part store par excellence
• ability to order almost anything on the Internet and have it delivered
• valet parking at restaurants
• price and abundance of ice cream
• everybody driving at maximum speed
• undertaking on the freeway
• lack of roadworks
• pedestrian crossings that are predictable
• ability to walk around car parks and having right of way
• diagonal parking
• parking spaces with double lines for door opening room
• things done with no expense spared - eg. Getty Center
• Santa Monica 3rd street shopping area
• sense of safety at sporting events
• emptiness of restaurants on Sunday night
• emptiness of shopping malls early on weekends
• surfing
• pacific ocean
• ability to see dolphins at the ocean on any given day
• ability to see whales at selected times of the year
• Fry’s electronics warehouses
• Whole Food’s meat counter
• ability to buy 1000 paracetamol / acetaminophen tablets at Costco
• Costco
• access to 4 Ikeas within 20 miles
• Bed, Bath and Beyond
• suicide lane for making left turns
• UCLA campus
• ability to go to the gym without being called a gay / vein
• general quality of people’s teeth
• activity levels, positive attitude and style of older people
• possibility of bumping into stars at any moment
• having an apartment that almost never needs to be heated
• apartment with huge windows and light streaming in at all times
• wood flooring that almost never feels cold
• American style toilets
• the penny on the counter system of change exchange at shops
• sensible attitude towards credit card transactions and signatures
• ability to walk off after signing the cc bill at a restaurant
• efficiency of service at restaurants
• empty 5 lane freeways (rare)
• cellphones do not cost more to phone - owner pays for incoming

##Things I won’t miss about California

• traffic
• excessive heat in summer
• seeing very young people driving expensive cars
• complete lack of pub culture
• Ralph’s
• expensive bread
• crappy sweet bread
• lack of back bacon
• people being overly surprised and pleased at anything
• use of the phrase ‘just kidding’ at the end of a sentence to avoid offense
• general fakeness of people
• requirement to be polite to everyone at all times
• need to say ‘excuse me’ whenever you walk within 3 feet of someone
• ‘have a nice day’
• need to say ‘good thanks - how are you’ to store greeters
• general filthiness of commercial zones with signs everywhere
• hideous overhead cables in otherwise pleasant locations
• stupidly large curbs so you can’t open the car door
• ridiculously complicated No Parking at Any time (except 6pm-5am) signs
• offensively rich people everywhere
• ludicrously large houses
• everyone having a nicer car than you
• people doing their makeup whilst driving at 70mph
• people not indicating - ever
• people pulling out of side roads and forcing you to brake hard
• freeways with merge on before merge off
• people not getting out of the way when you want to merge on a freeway
• dementedly huge pickup trucks
• dementedly huge SUVs
• social vacuum
• complete ignorance of 5pm on Fridays
• lack of any regular car safety testing (eg. MOT)
• me, me, me attitude

##Things I’m looking forward to in England

• country pubs
• country villages
• daffodils
• sense of spring
• sense of autumn
• frost
• sense of humour
• general cynicism
• BBC comedy
• radio 4 news and comedy
• channel 4 weird programs
• swearing on tv after 9pm
• lack of religion everywhere
• not all music is rock or new metal
• dance music no longer classified as ‘techno’ and ‘gay’
• Waitrose Supermarket
• French bread
• easy access to Soreen Malt Loaf aka sticky bread
• easy access to Ribena, Branston Pickle, Tea, back bacon
• little coffee shops with good food (possibly Edinburgh only)
• cherry blossoms
• long summer nights
• birdsong
• good curry and onion bhajis

##Things I’m not looking forward to in the UK

• high price of everything
• chavs, schemies and other disaffected youth
• general drunkenness
• general grumpiness and pessimism
• couldn’t possibly do that attitude
• resentment of success and successful people

• price of petrol

  gas

• drizzle
• rain in Summer
• lack of sunshine
• dampness
• nanny state
• requirement to be interested in football (soccer)
• weird accents
• being told stupid things about America / Americans
• sense of not belonging in either UK or USA
• impending doom of global warming