Another timeslip week of writing and ~ mostly ~ walking along the glorious coastline here, watching the birds: pelicans cruising overhead, curlew and teeny sanderlings paddling the rim of the sea, immigrant gulls that have travelled 190 miles from Lake Mono to this shore... The wild flowers are vividly indifferent to colour co-ordination in a way that  would exasperate an interior decorator ~ orange poppies, pink and golden iceplants, yellow daisies, blue iris, maroon scabeous, and big bushes of purple-blue echium where bee-sized humming birds buzz. And as well as seals sunbathing on Moss Beach, this week I had a distant glimpse of two Big Grey whales, jetting spray and breaching the water like dolphins.
On Wednesday Mo and I went to Ocean Beach where we found hundreds of sand-dollars littering the low-tide sand. These beautiful circular formations are not shells but skeletons of animals: they're  echinoderms like starfish and sea-urchins. Live ones would have a dark red fluffy covering, a bit like a 1970s Plumbs sofa-cover, but these are definitely collectors items.

As the temperature topped 23 degrees, and I'd finished my 'month of poems', I inaugurated a 'poem space' ~ simply staring at the taffeta tones of the sky without word-shaping. My last piece in the poem notebook was a Recipe for Miramar Beach cocktail:
     1    Beat some sea foam into firm peaks and set aside
     2    Sift white sand with enough saffron to tint to the colour cappuccino icecream
     3    Take a vat of Blue Curaçao and pour steadily on the base
     4    Slowly add Crème de Violette to deepen the tone at the top of the blue
     5    Spoon the beaten foam along the base
     6    Add a twist of birdsong, garnish with golden poppies, and enjoy!


Thursday night was a trip to the city for a meal in Original Joe's and to see Beach Blanket Babylon, the world's longest running musical review, served up old-fashioned music-hall style with red-curtained stage and drinks service to your seat. It's a unique-to-San-Francisco show, billed as 'hilarious spoofs of pop culture and political characters, spectacular costumes, outrageously gigantic hats...'  and that's all true. Fast moving, funny, with gloriously OTT costumes ~ the headgear gets crazier and crazier, culminating in a massive hat comprising the entire skyline of the city in the final number. My favourite sketch was Thriller with a brilliant Michael Jackson impersonator and the English royal family as the zombies....

My last full week here ended with a great music night at Mo and Anjas, fantastic food and five hours a fabulous playing & singing from seven guitarists and a fiddler ~ including, this being California, Dylan, Paul Simon, the Eagles... today we all feel a little frail.

Meanwhile, back in my real world, good reports of the Story Friday night which included my monologue, and I'm pleased I'll be back in time to see my short play The Human Angle produced by Ripped Script for the Exeter IGNITE festival ~ it's on at the Globe Inn on June 7th, bookable here.

To encourage my aim of walking every coastal path in striking distance, Mo took me to his building project above the cliffs at Moss Beach and loosed me there like a homing pigeon, except without wings and -more significantly- a sense of direction. He pointed me south and said 'Remember the tide's coming in' and I set off, scuttling like a Purple Shore-crab across the boulders along the rim of the ocean. I know the type of crab because my route took me through the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve, 'one of the most diverse regions in California' according to the pictureboard. Volcanic action has shaped the rocks into huge hoops which are a haven for all kinds of wild life: while I was focusing on some comatose seals about thirty pelicans came flapping slowly past.
"Seals don't hate us, honey, they just want to be left alone" a woman was consoling her child.
Keeping the Pacific on my right and the skyline hills on my left for about 3 hours brings me back to the harbour where I can watch the windsurfers riding the long waves with a gigantic fig icecream. Me, not the surfers. They need their hands free.


The Haight is the hippy area of San Francisco, a bit like Glastonbury but harder-edgy and with more sunshine. Mo and I had a mooch around the coffee bars and a browse in Amoeba music shop and then headed for Diamond Dave's open mic night.
Diamond Dave boasts the longest running poetry cafe in San Francisco. "On that street some call Haight and some call Love, I turned 30 in that golden summer of '67" he tells us, and introduces us to the eclectic audience: "We have a representative of the British and Irish working class, coming together to prove that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, isn't that beautiful?" Guest of the night was a self-styled beat in Ugg boots nostalgic for the murk of his drug days, but better stuff came from the floor readers, a few similarly self-indulgent but some sharp and topical. Highlight was Dee Allen whose poem Face Down moved the agenda from rainbow-tinted nostalgia to powerful political protest at the recent killing of Oscar Grant by two Bay Area Rapid Transit police officers.



And I'm now again lost for words. Here's a few more images: