Lambs
As we tucked into our delicious Easter Sunday lunch of roast lamb and vegetables, some of the sheep outside were in the process of giving birth. As we munched away, the farmer and his family were riding around on their quad bike, jumping off to inspect the newborn lambs and then chuck them into the trailer with their mother to take them down to the nursery field. When the farmer had gone we saw a mother sheep aggressively headbutting a newborn lamb away from her: once, twice, three times. It was distressing to watch until we realised that she was doing the right thing. It wasn’t her lamb and she wanted to preserve her milk for her own young ones. The lamb’s real mother soon turned up and the crisis was over.

Geese
On the way into town I had to stop the car because the neighbour’s geese had escaped onto the road and were too startled to get out of my way. I got out and herded them back into their garden. Once in town we all went for a walk along the beach. Overhead a flock of wild geese flew north, towards Scandinavia. I thought of H, who is on a literal wild goose chase these days as he writes a book about the journeys of Arctic Geese. Around five minutes after we’d seen the flock, a lone goose could be seen and heard overhead. He was honking madly and flapping his wings for all he was worth. Presumably he’d been left behind and was now trying to catch up with the group. I hope he made it.

Dogs
We went to Findhorn to visit P’s friend, S. S has a lovely dog called Cracker, who has something wrong with the soft tissue that lines his throat. He can’t swallow properly, although he is otherwise in good health. When we arrived S was exasperated with Cracker, who had run off that morning and eaten something he shouldn’t. Because he can’t swallow properly, eating becomes dangerous and he risks ingesting food into his lungs. He’s had pneumonia many times in the last 18 months and S has had to give up his job to care for him. S barely sleeps at night as the dog needs medicine every four hours! P and I were talking about it afterwards, saying how we couldn’t sacrifice so much for an animal. And yet, Cracker had all the personality of a human friend. S says he has thought of having him put down, but when he looks into Cracker’s eyes he sees a lust for life that can’t be denied. I told P about my first dog, Tessa, and how she’d eaten a poisoned rabbit while I was walking her and then taken 17 hours to die. The vet stayed up all night trying to save her but the strychnine was too strong. When I woke up the next morning my grandfather broke the news and I cried in his arms. Something closed over in my heart that day, and though I’ve loved other animals very much, I don’t think I could care for one in the same way again. Humans are more important than animals, I always say, but I admire S all the same. He calls Cracker his guru, and I think I understand why.

Flies
On the way up we stopped at a service station in Perthshire and a fruit fly snuck into the cabin of our van and hid there until I noticed it in the Highlands. I joked that we were taking it on holiday and it would struggle to fly the 100 miles back to its home. I assumed it would fly out of the van while we were unloading it, but three days later on the return journey I noticed it again, still alive. We were pretty near the service station where it had joined us, so I wound down the window and let it out. I wonder if it made it ‘home’?

That said, the last few days have been extremely eventful, and there have been some moments where I’ve thought to myself: “this is one of the coolest things you will ever experience”. Some examples:

Driving
I’ve always been dismissive of Americans and their attachment to their cars, but until you visit somewhere like California and start driving yourself, you can’t really comprehend just how dependent this nation is on the automobile. Take somewhere like Mulholland Drive for example. It’s IN Los Angeles, and yet it is so high up and isolated from amenities. There are houses all along it, but no gas stations, no stores, no hospitals. It’s in the center of a massive conurbation, but if its residents didn’t drive, they’d literally starve to death. Out in the sticks the distance between houses and amenities is just staggering. I don’t think I could live here purely because I’d feel so vulnerable to the price of oil.
That said, I had the most amazing driving experience of my life the other day. I drove us from Monterey to San Francisco, a drive that takes in an incredible freeway that winds down through spectacular hillsides, and another that cruises up Silicon Valley and then hits the city. We finally got the iPod to work and I caught my first glimpse of San Fran to the sounds of Yello’s ‘Oh Yeah’. Fans of Ferris Bueller will appreciate the juxtaposition. Driving a big SUV along an American freeway to a classic song – that makes you feel all conquering and all powerful. No wonder these people cling on to that part of their way of life with such defiance.

Animals
On the way up I’ve had the chance to see elephant seals and sealions up close in their natural habitat. So close, in fact, that I can tell you elephant seals are STINKY, and sealions are total posers. No matter how low I’m feeling, animals always manage to bring me out of myself. They’re just so much themselves, so idiosyncratic, and somehow so similar to us. Americans adore their pets. In fact I’ve even seen anti-PETA advertising exhorting Americans to stand up for their ‘right to own a pet’. Our preferred motel has a welcome policy to pets, and so there are generally happy looking dogs bounding about and barking up a storm. It’s nice.

Strangers
My poor brother took ill yesterday, after some dodgy Chinatown seafood in San Fran. He was forced to spend the day in bed, and so I was forced to go out and make my own company. We were staying on Geary Street, on the edge of the tenderloin district, which is one of the skankiest places I have ever witnessed anywhere (waaay worse than anything I’ve seen in Asia). There were people smoking crack on the street, women covered in track marks, homeless guys wandering around in the middle of the road like zombies, doing scary random shit. This gave me a somewhat unfavorable initial impression of ‘America’s most beautiful city’ and I wandered as far from the hotel as I could get. This meant an overdose of shopping areas and tourist attractions, which tired me out. Somewhat disillusioned at the end of my day, I wandered back towards the hotel. Just a few meters up the street I chanced upon a nice looking coffee bar, with some normal looking people inside. I wandered in and began reading my book. It didn’t take long before I got sucked into a conversation with the bar owner (a Turkish Cypriot) and a psychic called Elizabeth (a reformed psychic, to be precise). It soon became apparent that I’d wandered into the epicenter of neighborhood social life. Everyone who walked by popped in to say hello, ask a question, share some gossip, try and sell a stolen bicycle, find a partner to play poker with. I must have been introduced to between 15 and 20 people, each of whom had something interesting to say. At some point a local homeless guy came in and asked to play the piano. I sat there, listening to a bunch of amusing strangers discussing the nature of reality as this guy played one haunting melody after another on this utterly tuneless old piano. It was a truly beautiful moment. If it wasn’t for the black poker chip nestling at the bottom of my handbag this morning, I’d think it was all a dream.