Not LA again

The last time I was in LA, I tried to write a book. I came home with no book, a new fear of Los Angeles and the hangover of a psychotic episode. So naturally, I came back…

I’ve been meaning to start this Substack for a year. A year of procrastinating over what I’d say, what it should feel like, what it should be about. If I’m honest, I don’t even know what this is. And I’m only writing now in the notes app on my phone because of a data roaming issue and I can’t doomscroll.

I’m writing to you from the famously weird city of Los Angeles. A place I’ve been coming to for 20 years now and a place I once thought could be home.

It’s summer holiday time of course and we are here because my beloved fiancé, Mesh and I have a difficult time on agreeing what a holiday should be. I think it should be lazy, on a beach, he thinks it should be in a city, with things to do. LA feels like a good compromise, right? I argue I shouldn’t have to comprise on holidays but that’s for another Substack completely. It’s not that I hate LA, she’s fine I guess but she’s not exactly Saint Paul De Vence is she.

MY ideal holiday would look like this:

10am - Wake up, no hangover, thin bed sheet, you can smell the sea, eat a dead nice hotel breakfast.

11:30am - Silent reading time/earwigging around the pool til lunch. It’s 32 degrees with a mild intermittent breeze. Crickets or whatever are making that noise and it stinks of pine.

3pm - Lunch of ice cold white wine and some delicious shellfish that an old man on a rock by the sea has made. He serves it with chips done in a chip pan. Salty.

4:30pm - Pass out.

5:30pm - Flap about in the sea for a bit, no waves, there is a rock to jump from, salt water up the nose.

6:30pm - Beer on the beach. No one is playing a saxophone.

8pm - Shower the sand off at the hotel…You’re SO tanned.

8:30pm - Aftersun and a beer on the balcony with those Spanish crisps in a clear bag.

9:30pm - Garlic heavy dinner. Still sweating.

Midnight - Bed.

Repeat for 14 days.

Perfection I’m sure you’ll agree. Mesh thinks this sounds like hell (red flag) and complains he feels “trapped” and it’s waste of money to pay to stay somewhere just to lie down. He’s conformed to many of these over the years but now he’s had a beach holiday uprising. I tried to fight it with a few gentle pitches of various Greek islands, a saunter through the SOF or Menorca but was hit with a never before heard phrase “I’m Europed out” he said.

Ok Brexit Barbie.

So here we are in the land of big fat ugly lights switches, driverless cars and waiters asking my least favourite Americanism “are you still working on that?” with regards to my lunch. Are you still WORKING on that? Yes I’m still very hard at work on this.

Like I said the last time I was in LA I wrote. Well I tried. I was here for 6 weeks with the vision of maybe never coming home and living here or at least coming home with a fully formed book which I’d had commissioned many months before and was now staring down the deadline.

Try as I might (I didn’t try really) I wrote jack shit and came home with nothing but this new found fear of Los Angeles after suffering the single handily most terrifying experience of my adult life.

As we boarded the plane to LAX it was the very last day of 2021, a year that had been brilliantly transformative for me. I’d left Radio 1 (which I LOVED btw but it was time), we’d all gotten over covid as a nation, I was feeling free, inspired, excited, older in a fab way, all that good stuff. I felt a physical, geographical change was needed to match the upheaval I was processing in my career and also in my head. I didn’t want to be just sat in my house during January with a big glaring Radio 1 shaped gap in my diary so LA it was, on the basis it had daylight and they spoke English.

Like a pop-star after an album run, it was time for a refresh, a new hair-do maybe, dismantle some stuff, have a think about what’s next. I mean, did I even like radio? Or had I just done it for 14 years? What if I make music videos instead? What if I became nocturnal like Robert Smith? What if I take up painting? What if I’m a chef for a bit? What if I move to Los Angeles? That could be good?

As we took off on New Year’s Eve we welcomed 2022 twice. Once on the plane and then 8 hours later at our friend’s house in Silverlake.

Happy New Year!!

Happy New Year!!

I’d decided not to drink for a while and thought Los Angeles would be the perfect place to dabble in a little restorative sober season. I’m not a weed smoker but because I was in California I thought I should immerse myself in the local culture and get stoned? Maybe that will make me feel at home here. One of the locals.

I decided to smoke the entirety of some high grade synthetic skunk and experienced a still-not-funny-in-hindsight psychotic episode where I thought the nurses at the hospital were not nurses at all, but hired actors trying to kill me by drowning me in the carpet. It lasted for 12 hours.

The next day it happened again. This time without smoking anything.

“hey, I know you!” said a dog on a hill to me.

Not great.

Thankfully, everyone I know in LA is crazy and therefore I had good access to a variety of doctors; mental ones, regular ones, homeopathic ones, ones recommended by rappers, ones that could prescribe over text, ones that do drive-by’s and I got sorted. The prescription read: don’t smoke drugs. Got it.

You can read the whole saga in my book Soft Lad but you can see why I’m sceptical to be back here. I feel like I’m white-knuckling this trip….What if it happens again? What if it happens right now? What if I read this back later and it’s all in Wingdings? And why aren’t we in Hydra?

Everywhere I looked over the past few days has been a trigger….the palm trees, the traffic lights on Sunset, that big mural of Lemmy, even my beloved Erewhon has been getting the deep-exhalations-for-6 seconds treatment to help me from descending once more.

Thankfully it hasn’t happened again, it was almost as if it was the drugs. And maybe drugs can have an effect on your mental health. Someone should have a look into that.

Through being uncomfortable here I’ve found myself missing home, something I never feel usually on a holiday. Not once have I on a European beach thought - awww miss the tube.  But I have this time. Which is odd because for the majority of my life I’ve felt at home anywhere, happy to sleep on any sofa, any plane, any spare room of any next stranger but as I’ve gotten older I’m not that person and for the first time maybe I’m homesick. Maybe I feel trapped. You know like Mesh does in a five star hotel in Europe.

I worried I’d feel like this here, so before I came out to LA my therapist had been helping me with coping mechanisms “think of your happy place wherever that is, some people think of a beach, a field or a forest.”

I think of watching telly in bed.

So everyday so far here I find myself searching through the horrors of LA’s gone by to find that happy place, telepathically taking myself off to bed in my head. Imagining the dogs sleeping on me, a gentle breeze coming through my bedroom window as I nod in and out of the Antiques Roadshow. Safely packed in next to my neighbours in rows of terraced houses.

It’s almost the end of our time away and although we have had a DEAD NICE TIME, i’m glad we are going home. Glad I didn’t make the move to the other side of the world those 4 years ago. Maybe I was meant to be scared into being home. Maybe it was a lesson.

The other night here, we went to a wedding and I had a moment of realisation. The wedding, in the former home of Madonna on a multimillion dollar compound, made me feel grounded, made me feel safe. Maybe I wasn’t homesick after all. Perhaps I was just….mansion-curious?

“wait, maybe I could live here” I said to Mesh.