Hello

Hi and welcome.

On these pages you will find a personal account of a two month stay in San Francisco during the summer of 2007 that can hopefully either inspire, educate or illuminate your own visit.

The blog was written in answer to a challenge issued by a friend who asked me to send him news and requested something like Alister Cook's Letter From America that was broadcast on the BBC for many years.

In reply to his challenge i sent him a letter inspired by each of the 24 letters of the alphabet. Learn how to SURVIVE the EARTHQUAKE , take part in a QUIZ and see DANCING CORKSCREWS.

For Europeans there is some useful advice in avoiding SHARK ATTACKS and here you can discover how ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY concluded the challenge.

Effectively this blog is now archived, it may come to life again if and when i next return but for the moment i am blogging here.

So explore and let me know what you think.

Asterix and Obelix

Hi, still basically blogging on the other blog - bitsnbobsshowntell.blogspot.com - but i wanted to update on Jesse and Pez (see elsewhere).
I sent him a box of 20 ( two of each) Asterix and Obelix Pez dispensers, which he doesn't seem to have in San Francisco and even more amazingly doesn't seem to know as characters.
The return parcel will be a real surprise.

The Other blog

So yesterday i mentioned the new blog.
It's here: www.bitsnbobsshowntell.blogspot.com

postscript

If you have been reading this blog then you will have met Jesse who figures in the section "P".

If you haven't then go ahead.

Any which way, Jesse contacted me recently with a bit of news that i wanted to share.
Here it is:
"We won the StarbucksCase, kept 'em from opening..a 10-1 vote by the Board of Supervisors...A Great Victory...
In fact just today, we kept 'em from opening up another location. This time fortunately we did not have to do the whole drawn out court "thing"..
they just backed down."

And if that makes no sense have a look at "P", and if you are still lost then understand that this blog was an attempt to record a personal exploration of San Francisco with each post representing, in some way, a letter of the alphabet.
The order of the posts was randomn(ish)but important.

A letter from San Francisco..directions

If you've just arrived here head straight to the archive and pick out The Beginning.
Thanks.

A Letter From San Francisco….Bye Bye

Bye.

A Letter From San Francisco….The End

Well, that wraps it up for this series of letters; it was fun writing them but so much got missed out; did I have time to talk about the Pelicans that seem to be flying on a continual loop around the edges of the city, Mitchell's Ube Ice Cream, the stateliness of the Palm Trees, the song of Mexican voices in the Mission District, the hunger/peace demonstration on a back street part of Broadway, and did I describe the clarity of the blue skies faithfully enough?

August is all but over and on Monday I flew out of San Francisco and back to Europe. As the plane banked over the Bay and began the tiring return eastward I looked back a final time at the city that had been home for almost two months and a thick layer of fog covered everything, starting way out east, and only the skyscrapers and Bay Bridge remained visible. Tendril like fingers of fog reached past Telegraph Hill and I realised that these thoughts and stories were already being swallowed up in the Bay.

This morning I woke at 1a.m, jet lag refusing my request for sleep and I lay listening to the silence that surrounds this house at that hour. There was no siren from the fire department trucks, no footsteps from people returning from the all night grocery store, no television from an apartment down the hall.

Suddenly there was rain and in my dozy state I imagined it to be the sound of Pacific waves, but the sweet smell of earth and pine that was liberated brought me back to this place, this forest where I live.

And as the storm passed I lay in the dark and listened to the sound of a single drip falling on a solitary leaf, something I never expect to hear in San Francisco.