The flight to Los Angeles was fairly painful but not as bad as the flight to Portland because it wasn’t quite as long. When the plane was about to land the pilot came on the intercom (intercom? - is that an old fashioned word that nobody except me and a load of dodderers would use now?) and advised passenger using personal computers to start saving their work and power down. It’s become an expression with me. When anyone asks me what I’m doing - well actually they haven’t yet, but if they did I’d say ‘Oh, I’m just clicking save and powering down. How about you?’ It’s a good alternative to the equally ridiculous but shorter kicking back.
We stayed in the Hilton at the airport. It’s a long way out but it’s not too far from Santa Monica and we like Santa Monica. The airport Hilton is all swank - it appears to be run by Mexicans in fancy dress. They seem happy enough to be strutting around in tailed coats, top hats and comical bellboy costumes but I worry that it’s all a bit demeaning.
The room was cheap - Amy got us a deal. It was great to have real pillows after the airport Holiday Inn in Portland where the pillows were filled with foam off-cuts and were .small and tightly packed You had to try and balance your head on them. The slightest movement caused my head to tumble off the pillow. I’ve had neck ache ever since.
The room at the Hilton may have been cheap but like most other cheap rooms there was a catch - the window was directly underneath, and just a few floors up from an array of ventilators that were pumping hot, stale air out of the hotel. The window was hot to the touch and it was noisy. Added to that everything that you might normally expect to be free in a hotel cost money. So we didn’t spend a lot of time there because we couldn’t afford to.
But we had a great view of the queuing up end of the runway from our window. We could sit up in bed and imagine that we were actually controlling all these little planes. For moments we were masters of the universe.

I was going to put a photo of the runway from the window in here but it's still in my camera and there isn't time to download it so here's a picture of an interesting shop we saw round the corner from the hotel. We didn't get to go in - there wasn't time.




We had a couple of days of driving all over Los Angeles, collecting boxes of CDs, hiring amplifiers, that sort of thing. I had my eyes tested because I’ve got completely blurred vision in my left eye. They told me I’ve got cataracts. I was a bit depressed about that as you might imagine but I went and had a haircut in Hollywood and that was quite hilarious.
They put me with Tina. Tina was a gum-chewing Californian chick in her early thirties. Her relations have been staying for a week now and they’ve nearly exhausted her. They come from Phoenix and they’ve never visited LA before so they wanted to see everything – so far they’ve spent a day at the beach, a day at the zoo, another whole day shopping on Hollywood Boulevard. Now the relatives are tired and Tina’s relieved and looking forward to a quiet night in watching a DVD.
Tina would like to travel, though she never has. She’d like to visit Italy, Spain, Australia and other European countries one day. I suspect that Tina has been keeping herself going with amphetamines but fortunately it doesn’t seem to have affected her ability to cut hair.

I had some trouble updating anything for some time. It seems to have repaired itself but what with the hurricane down in Houston I haven't had any time to do anything anyway.

I don’t want to hear that stuff - a band should always strive to give the impression that they arrived in a space craft. Unless they’re a blues band, and then I want to know that they arrived in a Bedford van having spent the night in a lay-by, sleeping in ex-army sleeping bags on top of the amplifiers. The only band I've ever witnessed transgressing rule number three was a Brighton band called The Electric Soft Parade. Their frontman said yeah cheers so often I lost count. The Electric Soft Parade weren't very good. The Dykeenies were but the singer said cheers after the first three numbers so I gave up. Actually that’s not quite true - I was getting cold and I had to go and get organised for my cameo appearance.

I don't know what to say about The Proclaimers shows without sounding corny, trite or bland. Someone who isn't reading this carefully might leave under the impression that I'm using those adjectives to describe The Proclaimers but I'm not - they could never be any of those. So I have to resort to fabulous, fantastic, they went out with a bang etc...
I've probably said it all already anyway. Erika Nockalls played the violin on Sunshine On Leith wearing a green satin frock. I played my green Microfret guitar on Whole Wide World. So there was a bit of colour co-ordination - a matching his 'n' hers Eric section.
Anyway, they were talking about getting together to record a new album beginning next March. I can hardly wait.

There's loads more to talk about but if I start on that I'll get bogged down in it so I think I'll stop now and put this on the site without finishing it off...