Back in the UK.

North America.

"It's like a parallel universe where everyone is just a lot fatter," says Eldest. That's one of the things I jotted down during our trip to the United States and Canada. I tried to make notes as we went along so I could write a 'what we thought of it' blog but didn't get very far. Here's another, "I thought I'd love the food and hate the people," says Middle One, "but it's the other way around." I know what they mean.

There's a mother and child in the lift down the cliff face to see the sea lions on the Oregon coast who are so large I'm worried the cable might snap. And genial is the word for the 'folks' we encounter along the way, particularly the men. One said 'Howdy' to me in Walmart for absolutely no reason. A group gathered to offer assistance as I was putting fuel in our RV. "We only have small cars in my country," I said, and they fell about laughing like this was the funniest thing they ever heard. I could get used to this, I thought, trading on being foreign and having a cute accent.

Some more observations - gas is cheap, roads are in poor repair, campers are quiet and orderly, cheese is horrible and comes out of a can, a small coke is huge, in fact food portions are so large we order for four instead of for five and still there's too much, you can get bitter black coffee everywhere, tipping is obligatory, service in restaurants is fantastic except for in McDonalds in Banff, which isn't half so good as House of Nanking in San Francisco, and Yosemite on a July weekend is as crowded as Westfield on a Bank Holiday Monday.

There was a large group of teenagers on a small inflatable dinghy on the Merced river, all with enormous tits - the boys as well as the girls - drinking coke, listening to loud rap music, laughing and filming themselves on their iPhones as they blithely floated downstream. There's a handy metaphor for America right there, I thought.

Hot Water.

It's a dismal homecoming. We step off the plane to a message from the plumber. "Bad news, I'm afraid," it says, "my mother-in-law died so there isn't any hot water but it'll be sorted tonight." Great. Awful about the mother-in-law, obviously, but not what you want to hear after a eight hour overnight flight without sleep; although on the plus side it was Air Canada and I did get to watch When Harry Met Sally again.

At the house we hang around waiting for the hot water to come on. The plumber was meant to fit the new boiler in its new position in the three weeks we were away but didn't get it finished. To my untrained eye it looks like he hardly got it started. "Don't you need to move it from the middle of the cellar to back against that wall?" I ask. "And attach the flue?"

"Er," he says, shiftily.

"He told me it was his grandmother who died," says my mother when I ring her to say we're back. Kindly, she called him while we were away trying to hurry things along.

Six o'clock comes and goes, then the plumber disappears when we're not looking sending a text to say he's coming back later, and doesn't. 

In the ensuing week his visits to the house are infrequent and fleeting. This is because his grandmother died, again, Worcester Bosch has sent the wrong part, he has to get more copper piping, which takes him four hours and he returns without it, he has to pop out for dinner/lunch/a break and doesn't come back after any of them, he has to take his son to A&E because he split his lip and that trip to A&E takes him the whole of Thursday, and Friday, and still there's no hot water. I take to showering at a friend's house or the gym, forgetting to take a vital piece of kit with me on each occasion.

"He's the unluckiest plumber in south London," I say to my unwashed sons, standing several feet away from them. "And we haven't had the funeral yet, either of them."

On Saturday, when he eventually turns up at lunchtime, we make him leave his van keys on the kitchen table. "You're not going anywhere until the hot water is back," I say. 

Miraculously this works and at 10pm it comes on and I have my first hot bath in weeks.

Love E x

@DOESNOTDOIT

P.S. And that's not a metaphor, it's just a relief.

2668 Memory Lane.

Nine hundred and fifty miles from San Francisco and I'm outside the house in Vancouver where I lived when I was a child. It's all coming back to me. The view of the bay and the mountains, the tree my brother and I used to climb from the deck down to the garden, the basement we played in for hours making brick towns on the floor, squashing the shiny black beetles that scurried about down there when they threatened to encroach on our game (in hindsight they were quite possibly cockroaches), the snails I used to gather in the garden and name and keep in jam jars on my bedroom window sill, the transistor radio my parents bought me for Christmas 1975 through which I first heard Abba's SOS and The Hustle by... who the hell was The Hustle by? No idea.

There was no plan, just a taxi to the address and then once disgorged onto the pavement I wasn't sure what to do next. "The house was blue," I tell my family as we approach from across the road, "but of course it might not be blue anymore." I peep round the hedge. It's not blue, it's grey, and it's even prettier than I remember.

I knock on the door on the off chance that someone is in and a nice lady opens it. "Excuse me," I say, "I used to live here in 1975/6 and..." I don't get to the end of my explanation before she invites us inside. No sooner have I crossed the threshold than I burst into tears. I had no idea that would happen. I didn't expect to cry but then I didn't expect to be invited inside. I don't know what I expected. I just wanted to see it again.

"Stop trying to recreate your childhood through us," one of my sons said a few days ago when I bemoaned something not being exactly the way I remembered it.

Is that what I'm doing? Maybe. Or maybe some places have a hold on us we can never shake off and this house is one of those places for me. No wonder, now I'm back here I understand its grip - it's beautiful, in a beautiful place, more beautiful even than I remember it, improved upon and extended with an additional storey on the back.

"Your parents probably had this room," the current owner says, showing us into the first room we come to on the right. "It's the den now."

"They did!" I say, and then I'm overwhelmed by tears. The whole thing is too incredible. To be transported back in an instant to another world, a world in which I am nine-years-old and living with my parents and my brother in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, 5000 miles from where I've spent my life since.

"I think you need a big hug," she says.

We walk on through the living room to the deck outside. Despite the smoke hanging over Vancouver from the forest fires burning in the east, you can still tell that on a clear day there's an incredible view, all the way to Vancouver Island. "Such a shame," says the owner, "that you can't see it today."

She takes us on into the dining room. Suddenly it's 1975 and my parents and brother and I are sitting round that table having Sunday lunch (we might have been living in Canada but we were still British) seagulls are flying down to the window, landing on the wooden platform the owners we rented the house from had erected for this purpose. Chairs scrape back as my brother and I rush to feed them with scraps from our plates.

After a comprehensive tour and swapping contact details with the lovely owner, we walk to my old elementary school using Google maps on my phone. "So," says one of my sons, peering in through a classroom window, "Canada, how many provinces?"

"No idea," I say. "They didn't teach us stuff like that. I was in a progressive classroom. I had to plan my own timetable so I wrote stories about witches and warlocks for nine months."

On the bus back to downtown Vancouver I hum The Hustle to Middle One.

"Van McCoy," he says.

Love E x

@DOESNOTDOIT

P.S. Ten provinces and three territories. I looked it up. 

The tide is high.

I'm lying on a beach in Washington State near a place called Willipa Bay with my eldest son. As we drove here deeper into the wilderness across a vast bridge that spanned the inlet with the setting sun turning the water silver and the forest black against the sky, I thought it the most beautiful place I'd ever seen. Now the sun has gone and the moon is high and the waves are lapping gently against the shore, and it's even more beautiful.

He builds a fire on the sand, expertly using cardboard pieces and bits of barbecue briquette he brought with him to the beach. Once these catch he adds driftwood lying nearby, selects music from his phone, and lights the spliff he bought earlier.

Buying cannabis from one of the many legal cannabis stores we passed along the highway in Oregon was one of the things he wanted to do on this trip, so when the rest of us were hitting Safeway again - for yet more food supplies for the RV - he asked if I minded him nipping across the road to a store he saw as we were parking. "Of course not," I said. "You're 21, an adult, and it's legal here, it's your choice." Then I added, half in jest, "I might even join you."

When dinner was over and washed up and the others hit the hay or quietly crept off to a corner to read, he called my bluff. "Do you feel stressed?" he asked. 

"I do, quite," I said, because driving hundreds of miles in such a short space of time in a hot metal box with four men was taking its toll. So he suggested I go with him to the beach to smoke the single joint he had purchased in the cannabis store for six dollars; called Pineapple Express. I haven't smoked marijuana since I was a student and I didn't like it much then, but I reckoned it would be nice to tag along and maybe have a few puffs.

There's no one else on the beach. With the fire flickering and the music playing he lights the joint, takes a drag, then passes it to me. My first puff is a baby one and the second, by the third I inhale deeply and cough a lot. "You did it right that time," he says.

It has no effect at all. I will have to lie and pretend I'm stoned when I'm not, I think. Then I notice something. "Have you seen the waves?" I say, "they're almost up to our toes in no time. The tide is higher and it wasn't before."

"I don't think so, Ma," he laughs.

"No, really." I say, "look at the waves."

White waves are rolling towards us, whiter than they were before and fuller, much fuller, and a lot closer.

"Those waves are definitely coming right at us," I say, taking the joint from his hand and puffing away on it several more times. "In fact... they're quite sinister."

He laughs again.

I lie back on the sand and look up at the stars. They're so beautiful. The whole night is so beautiful -  the stars, the beach, the music, my son. It's all unbearably beautiful.

"How are you feeling now?" he asks, and for a moment I can't answer for the tears, which I wipe away quickly.

"Fine." I say, "I feel fine."

Later we walk back through trees to the RV and I stop dead in my tracks to look up at the sky. A buttery moon is silhouetted against spindly pines turning the whole wood into something like a scene from a Tim Burton movie.

"Oh my God, have you seen the moon!" I say. "And the trees, look at the trees! The moon is the mooniest moon there has ever been and the trees, the trees are so... treeish."

"You're high, Ma," he laughs.

When I get back to the RV, I lie on the bed in my clothes, not remembering that I was just lying on a beach and so getting sand everywhere and then when I get into bed properly later, unclothed, between scratchy sheets provided by the RV rental company, it's like being exfoliated by two pieces of sandpaper.

I can't sleep. I'm wide awake thinking about the fire and the music and the spliff and the walk through the wood with my boy and most of all the waves that were coming straight at us up the beach, closer and closer.  

Love E x

@DOESNOTDOIT

Hitting the road.

I miss most of the spectacular scenery on the zigzag mountain road west from Yosemite back down to Napa Valley because I have my eyes closed. I can hear a pathetic whimpering sound: it's me. I have my foot on the floor trying to apply the brakes and I'm not even the one driving, which is a good thing, given that I have my eyes closed. When I do gingerly open them I concentrate on my knuckles, which are white because they're gripping the dashboard, and on the Beatles album I'm listening to through my headphones, which is also white. At least if I'm going to die While My Guitar Gently Weeps will be the last thing I hear.

"Mummy is freaking out," I hear a boy say. This is true, I think, and a perfectly rational reaction to taking Italian Job turns down a mountain with a sheer drop to certain death to our left, in an enormous metal box on wheels that has such a long braking distance it practically needs written notice in advance. Thank God they drive on the right side of the road here.

Actually, just after I booked this trip I thought I'd got the route the wrong way round for this very reason. Going to Canada we'll be on the inside lane on the scenic 101 and not next to the ocean, I thought, so maybe we should do the thing in reverse instead and end up in San Francisco rather than beginning there? When we went to pick up the RV I changed my mind back. "Oh my fucking God," I said. "It's huge."

You might say I should have known it would be huge since I booked it. At least on the inside lane all the way north we won't career off the road into the sea. I hope. Or off this winding road down from Yosemite. Why did we even go to Yosemite on a road trip to Canada? you may ask, like my boys did. The answer is that my mother suggested it. "And are you doing everything to please your mother?" my boys said.

"Isn't everyone?" I replied, "and mine is quite bossy."

"Ours is too," they said, except for one of them, who said, "No she's not, our mother is a hippy."

I like being called a hippy, even if it is a wildly inaccurate portrayal of my character. Perhaps he thinks I'm a hippy because I brought him to San Francisco and suggested we hit the road in an RV? The truth is that the RV terrifies me and so far I haven't driven it once, although it is true to say that I love the freedom it brings. It's a joy be able to go wherever you like with everything you need in the back, like we're a band of snails with the three baby snails actually pulling their weight for once because they're so happy. Attach the shore line, we say (that's the electricity cable), fill the water tank, check the propane, get the collapsible chairs from the trunk, and miraculously they do it all without complaint.

Of course we do make it down the mountain from Yosemite in one piece and then we camp in a State Park in Napa Valley near a place called Calistoga. We're in woods with a creek at the back. At night there's no other sound but frogs and cicadas and nothing to see but stars. It's like Little House on The Prairie on wheels. The boys complain about the heat in the RV at bedtime so I say leave the main door open to the elements and just use the insect screen and they're horrified. "But California is full of serial killers!" they say.

"Like who?" I say.

"Like that Zodiac killer, with the code," says one of them, "they cracked it, and it turned out he was saying he wanted to hunt the most dangerous animal of all... man."

"That's great," I say. "That's so going in my blog."

"I forgot about the blog," he says. "I take back what I said about you being a hippy."

Love E x

@DOESNOTDOIT

P.S. We're on the 101 heading north now. "I'm on the road I want to be on, going to the place I want to go, with the people I love the most," I say.

"Lame!" shouts one of the boys, smiling.

Retrieving my heart - in San Francisco.

I'm in the aircraft loo, changing out of my jogging bottoms back into my jeans, when we fly over the Golden Gate Bridge. "Epic fail," say the boys when I return to my seat, "you just missed it." I peer out of the plane window. San Francisco is sprawling beneath us: high-rise buildings, bridges, sparkling sea, dusty brown hills in the distance. Tears prick my eyes.

"But did you see it?" I say. 

They did. That's all that matters.

I've been reading my mother's journal of the journey we did when I was a kid, from Vancouver to Mexico. She mentions tears filling her eyes too, as we drove across Golden Gate Bridge into the city. I remember that moment and I was only nine. I want my children to have similar moments to remember, even if they are coming a bit late in the day, and are only a fraction of what my parents were able to give to my brother and me.

We're flying United Airlines, which we think might be a drag... but fortunately turns out not to be, in fact it's a breeze. I read a whole book, listen to two albums, watch a movie, sleep and eat. I don't feel remotely tired when we land, or for hours afterwards, and neither do the boys. As Eldest says: we're wired.

A friendly 70-year-old Iranian taxi driver speeds us into the city, weaving in and out of the traffic like he's Ayrton Senna on caffeine. Downtown skyscrapers loom before us, glorious in the Californian sunshine. 

Crossing a raised concrete section of highway that resembles the one in the opening sequence of La La Land, I feel like jumping out of the car and doing the dance routine right there and then. The boys feel the same: they're euphoric. They've seen lots of Europe - we left the Isle of Wight and Devon years behind some time ago, when we finally had funds to take them further afield - they've also been to North Africa and the Caribbean. They've visited the ancient ruins of Herculaneum in the shadow of mount Versuvius, a 2000-year-old Roman city where the charred bones of its unfortunate citizens still lie where they perished on the bay of Naples, which blew my mind, but nothing has enthralled them like this. "We're in America!" they keep saying, like it's the coolest place on earth. If anyone thinks the States is losing its grip on Britain's youth, one that began some years back with a love affair with rock and roll and Elvis, they're wrong.

Eldest rushes out the minute we hit the hotel to a grocery store opposite. "They look foreign but they speak English!" He informs us, returning with a Hershey Bar (which you can get in London). Then he declares it crap - "poor quality chocolate."

After showering at the hotel we head straight out again to eat, to Chinatown. The guy at reception suggests we try House of Nanking. The restaurant is lined with old wood paneling interspersed with tiles and buzzing with life. "What do you recommend?" I ask the patron. He says to leave it to him, so we do. Dish after dish arrives, the best Chinese food we've tasted, all piping hot - noodles with peppery watercress, tender pieces of beef with crunchy pak choi, battered prawns with fried apple (we think).

"Jamie Oliver came here," he tells us, bringing yet another plate and pointing at a framed photo of Mr Oliver on the wall. "He said the food here is pukka! Pukka! I thought he meant poker, like the game."

"It's an Indian word," we tell him.

"Ah!" he says. "He can cook and he speaks Indian!"

We walk on through North Beach. Eldest is beside himself. This is the best city in the world. This place is so cool. He wants to live here. 

He has his 1978 Nikon camera round his neck, snapping away. "Nice camera," says a guy walking past. "Nice dress!" shouts a girl out of a car window, at me.

We turn left heading back to the hotel before we get to Fisherman's Wharf - saving it for tomorrow - and start an ascent. There's a glimpse of view behind us, shimmering sea in the bay, an island in the distance with a building: Alcatraz. By now it's three o'clock in the morning (for us) and we're climbing Nob Hill in the sunshine, a 1 in 3 gradient.

"What's that movie?" I ask Eldest, "you know, San Francisco, that guy, the one who...."

"Milk," he says.

"Yes!" I say. It reminds me of that, and that reminds me to ask for milk at reception when we get back to the hotel, for our tea. They laughed when I packed that travel kettle and those tea bags. They won't be laughing when I can make a nice cup of tea first thing in the morning.

We hit the sack at 8pm local time, 4am for us. When I wake later the room is cloaked in darkness and the street below is silent. I'm back in San Francisco after 42 years, it's 4am local time. I get out my laptop and write: "retrieving my heart."


Love E x

@DOESNOTDOIT

P.S. Have a nice day.

The loveliness of Paris seems somehow sadly grey

The glory that was Rome is of another day

I've been terribly alone and forgotten in Manhattan

I'm going home to my city by the Bay

I left my heart in San Francisco

High on a hill, it calls to me

To be where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars

The morning fog may chill the air, I don't care

My love waits there in San Francisco

Above the blue and windy sea

When I come home to you, San Francisco

Your golden sun will shine for me

What is a holiday?

What is a holiday to you? A holiday, in my book, is taking some books and going to Italy and doing not very much at all except reading and eating. A holiday is a flight and a hire car, hot sun and a cold pool, a lazy saunter to the village shops to buy provisions, which must include some of those giant creased tomatoes that look like they've been injected with steroids, then later attempting to cook those provisions for lunch on an unfamiliar hob, invariably one of those God-awful induction ones that require you to hold down the invisible buttons in a random sequence until something eventually starts to heat up and then the next time you come to do it you can't remember the sequence, because you stumbled across it randomly, so you have to go through the whole rigmarole all over again.

A holiday is taking the anti-mozzie plug-in thingies, then forgetting to plug them in on the first night because you were past yourself with exhaustion (as they say in Yorkshire) because you just did a 13-hour door to door journey (and you were only flying from Gatwick to Pisa) so you get bitten and spend the rest of the 13 nights with your arm under the table at dinner, scratching that bite on your ankle that swells up like a boiled sweet and leaves a welt that scars you for the whole of the rest of the year, as a souvenir.

A holiday is letting your younger kids have pizza and ice-cream and coke at every meal and your older ones drink alcohol and then not bothering to tell them to brush their teeth when they go to bed and leaving them to sleep until lunchtime, because you can.

A holiday is sitting on the sun lounger for so long reading a book that only the front of your legs get tanned.

A holiday is working out which place has the best bread and when the fried fish van comes to town, on the penultimate day.

A holiday is meaning to go and see that amazing thing in the local museum/art gallery/next town but never actually getting round to it and then on that last day saying, shall we go and see that thing? Nah, can't be arsed, we'll be travelling all day tomorrow anyway.

A holiday is using the barbecue precisely twice and then having to spend twice the time it took to cook the sausages scrubbing the thing clean and getting sprayed with burnt-on black bits, on the last night.

A holiday is the deafening sound of cicadas, church bells waking you on a Sunday morning, a row about using the sat nav ("either follow its instructions or turn the damn thing off!"), Boots Soltan Factor 30 you've had in the back of the bathroom cupboard for five years, fishing insects out of the pool with a net, the local market full of foreign tongue, both to listen to and to eat, a tatty old sun hat, a fancy pair of wedges you pack to wear in the evening and then never do because they're much too impractical, sand in the bottom of the bath when you get out, someone else's scratchy sheets and too hard pillow, buying salt and pepper then finding the rental supplied it already, supermarkets with whole aisles of lovely crockery you want to stuff in your suitcase and take home but you know that you can't so you just get one pretty bowl and when you get back home someone puts it in the dishwasher and most of the pattern comes off. THAT is a holiday. And is that what we're doing this year? No.

This year we're not going on a holiday at all, we're going on an adventure of a lifetime to the west coast of America to embark on a road trip because I once did something similar as a child and last year we came into a bit of money that will finally make it possible and if we don't do it now our kids will have gone off to live their own lives without us, for good.

This year there will be no house, no pool, possibly not a lot of hot weather because the pacific northwest is not exactly known for it, just me and my four males, of various sizes and degrees of smelliness, in a 30 foot metal box on wheels, travelling from San Francisco to Seattle then ditching the RV and going on to Vancouver by train, then hiring a car to take us into the Rockies, before flying back from Calgary. And am I complaining? Of course I'm not, I'm lucky as hell and I know it.

Love E x


@DOESNOTDOIT

P.S. Watch this space...