Wok-a-doodle

I rather feel that jet lag is catching up on me. Matt had a friend called David over to his house last night, and, by 11pm, I was drifting off to sleep mid sentence! Matt kept waking me up to ask if I was asleep! I think perhaps my body is subconsciously telling me that it needs lots of sleep. I polled ten hours last night without the slightest bit of effort. 

I’m still in the wars: still deaf in one ear, and now nursing a large cut underneath my tongue, the product of a nasty run-in with a fortune cookie!
We went to visit two of Matt’s friends for brunch down in Santa Monica today. One of them, Dean, is a writer, and we have a number of friends in common. More bizarrely, Matt suddenly announced that he’d brought Dean and his wife, Tamara, to the party at my house in 1999 where Matt and I had first met. I joked that it had taken them twenty years to return the invite, which must be something of a record! 

It feels rather strange that Matt and I have known each other for exactly twenty years now. The party where we’d met was a house warming for Sam Becker, who’d just moved into the somewhat eccentric flat in Tufnell Park where I lived. It sprawled over three floors.
Matt had come as the guest of a guy called Robbie with whom I’d had a one-night stand which had ended up as nothing but a long giggle-fest. Robbie had told me that, as a child, he’d once sung at the Eisteddfod Singing Competition, dressed in a lamb costume he’d worn in a nativity production because it was the only way his mother could convince him to stand up and sing in front of a crowd of people. He told me that he still occasionally wakes up in the night, in a sweat, remembering the howls of laughter coming from the audience as he walked onto the stage. I enjoyed his company so much that I immediately invited him to my party. And he came, bringing Matt (and, it turns out) Dean and Tamara. 

It was a wonderful brunch, peopled, almost exclusively, by ex-pat Brits. I’ve noticed that the Brits tend to stick together in this mad old city.

My Mum would have described the food we ate as a “cold collation”. There were lots of cheeses, salads, beigels, crisp breads and so on. We ate in the garden, next to a wonderful water feature which attracted hummingbirds and butterflies. 

Santa Monica is a charming part of town. There are lots of little artisan cafes and shops around the corner from the house, and I’m told we weren’t far from Venice Beach. Santa Monica Boulevard, which runs through the whole of LA, is actually the famed Route 66. The Mother Road, as some call it, officially ends at Santa Monica Pier which we visited the last time we were in LA. We ended up playing arcade games, obsessed with winning a set of little cards with images from The Wizard of Oz. I was determined to get the elusive one of Judy Garland to give to my friend Llio. 

We went out for dinner tonight with two of Matt’s friends, Hunter and Roger. Hunter is one of those curious first names which are only surnames in the US. We ate at the worst named Chinese restaurant in the world, Wokano. Its logo shows an erupting volcano sitting in a wok. If it had been my choice, I’d have called it Wok-a-doodle-doo and had a logo with a chicken sitting in a wok. 

The sky in LA is very white at night when there’s a lot of cloud cover. It’s almost like day. There is so much light pollution, it’s scary. We sat around the fire pit tonight eating cookies whilst tiny specks of rain fell onto us. “Should we go inside?” Asked Matt. “Call this rain?” I replied!