So I’m being churlish of course – you give a taxi-driver a written-down address on a piece of paper and you would of course expect them not to have heard of the large region of Los Angeles where things like the Sony Pictures Lot are located. I mean you’d obviously expect that right? That would be normal. And then you’d expect them to spend about ten minutes while driving very slowly typing the address into their GPS / map thingy while looking confused. And then of course you’d also expect them not to be able to read an American address and take you to completely the wrong place. And then – of course – you’d expect them to bitch not-so-very-quietly to themselves about how you actually told them to go to the wrong place and that it wasn’t their fault, when in fact all you did was give them the bloody address written down on a piece of paper and frantically gesture at it while saying, “This is where I’d like to go please! Thank you very very much!” And then you’d expect to get into a huge row with them in which you say, “For God’s sake, you ludicrous man! I gave you the bloody addres on a piece of bloody paper. The address was written down by an American. It’s written in exactly the format and style that you’d expect it to be in. It’s even in a large bloody font! So why the hell are you shouting at me about giving you the wrong bloody address!”
And then – of course – you’d expect to still pay then $50 for a $20 cab fare because it simply wouldn’t occur to you that when a cab driver made an obvious mistake they’d still expect you to pay for the whole journey and not apologise or anything. And of course you’d give them a tip. Because it would be rude not to…
Anyway… Little taxi-bastards aside, Los Angeles is already proving tremendously good fun. At this point, I’ve done very little though – just spent a little time hanging around with Kerry, had beer and tequila in his office and watched the 100th episode of Angel. Shortly we’re going to visit his ex, Sean, and at that point we shall have Tacos. Everything over here remains kind of beautiful and kind of monstrously tacky at the same time, but at least there’s lots of sky, which matters to me. The flight was – unsurprisingly – good for sky, and we went over Iceland and Greenland again and just like last year I took far far too many pictures of the ice-flows, mountains and seas.
But the most important thing of all is that I’m not in bloody London! I can already feel my frantic and jellied-up brain shudder a little and let out the tiniest little gasp of relief. Should Kerry actually permit me to sleep at some point during the next few days I should be nicely fresh for ETCon. In the meantime, in my few remaining off-moments, I plot the death of taxi drivers and think about visiting the Apple store…