The only way I can justify my transatlantic flight (feebly) is to say that we had a sort of symbiotic holiday in which we went to look after a good friend’s house which contained seven cats, a rabbit and four fish tanks, while she travelled to Dublin in order to celebrate the new year. Unconvinced? Hmm, I see your point.

Los Angeles. Where to start? Vast beyond imagining – 46,000 square miles we were told, the product of eighty cities expanding and merging, and containing nine million vehicles. The message about curbing profligacy has surely not reached those shores yet. Reaching anywhere involves a lengthy car journey on particularly noisy roads as they are all surfaced with concrete (as tarmac would melt in the summer temperatures), thus we didn’t venture out an awful lot as it was not intended to be a driving holiday anyway.

We did however visit Pasadena (I just love that name!) and took in the Norton Simon museum (which I keep needing to call the Homer Simpson) – quite small, fearfully tasteful, and it contained some amazing originals including Van Gogh, Renoir (a spectacularly talented fellow IMHO) and Degas, although he seemed to have gone rather overboard with his horse and ballerina figurines. I can just imagine Mrs Degas heaving a sigh as he produced ever more things to dust. They had a fair few Rodin sculptures there too, including the Thinker.

The stark contrast between the astonishing talent of real painters (the way they managed to depict folds of fabric and skin tones never fails to inspire me) and the artless dross displayed in the ‘modern artists’ wing is astounding, although that woman with her elastic (see below) hadn’t got there at the time of visiting.

Los Angeles had a mere four inches of rain last year, an inch of which probably fell over two nights while we were there, but other than that, the weather was mostly warm and sunny, akin to an early autumn day in the UK and reaching the high 70’s on a couple of days. Glorious. In the garden by the front door of the house in which we stayed is a lemon tree laden with fruit (and this is in winter), and apparently the fruit literally cooked on the tree during the hottest part of the summer. Difficult to imagine.

BA cancelled our flight back without warning which, on the other hand, is entirely possible to imagine. A letter of complaint has been sent, not so much about the cancellation, for these things happen, but more about the abysmal attitude of their staff after the event.

We don’t expect anything to change.

This post is about a tiny moment - a tipping point from comfort to mild despair that you may also have experienced.

Picture the scene: you are lying all cosy under the duvet in the predawn dark, listening to the rain splattering on the windows, feeling smug.

Then you realise that in a few minutes, you are going to have to get up and wash and dress in the gloom, and even once the sun has allegedly risen, it will still be dim and grey till dusk. All the cosiness flees, and the pleasure in listening to the rain evaporates.

"Stretching Stretch

Thursday 31 January 6pm - 8pm at Bridport Arts Centre"

This extract from the Marshwood Vale Magazine events section illustrates what I find so annoying about some modern art: you need a whole screed of text to explain it, and by the end, you still haven't the faintest as to what you will see. Funnily enough, the event has been 'cancelled due to unforseen circumstances': perhaps the elastic gave out? What a fine metaphor for real life: drawers drooping around ankles!