California gleaming

This was, either my first or my second visit to California, I am not entirely sure. As a business press journalist from the UK in the 1990s, I was sometimes invited on lavish trips to computer and electronics manufacturers, software developers and others in the high-tech industries of the day. Realising there was little future for me in this profession, I left it in 1996 to become an entrepreneur. I started an online media agency, one of the first in the UK, and ran that until I moved on in 2001.

I remember the scene, depicted in the above photo, so well. I was staying at a hotel in or near San Jose. Along with a bunch of other UK writers and editors, we were ferried about in buses and cabs and so I had no car. One free afternoon I took a walk away from the hotel. I recall there was no sidewalk. After all, who walks from place to place in California? I ended up at a nearby parking lot turned over to a British car convention of some kind.

Used to be the case that British manufacturers marketed their goods abroad as 'British quality' but I knew different. As a youth, I rode around on a British-made Triumph Tiger 650cc motorcycle. So I know what the owner of the Morgan meant by his bumper sticker:

All parts falling off this car are of the finest English workmanship

Ha ha! Seeing that comment made me smile. That bumper sticker was clearly not made in England, as the depiction of the Union Flag of Great Britain is not accurate. You can see what I mean if you compare with this version:

Notice the diagonal red cross is offset to the central red cross of St George.

I have visited California three time, the last time 30 years ago with my wife and our then 5 month old first daughter. My only other visits to the US were to Lexington (Kentucky), Washington DC, and to The Commonwealth of Massachusetts: Cambridge and Boston. I also made a brief visit to Chicago. All memorable trips. Lots of tales to tell. Some await the telling, some I have already told. Like the time I visited the town of Raymond CA with my two best girls. Or the tale of the two USS Constitutions, the one in Boston harbor, the other in the Pimlico district of London.

A Town Called Raymond was also the first book of fictional stories I published, taking its name from the lead story about a young lad who thinks he is going to San Francisco but ends up in this isolated town, Raymond.

Another story that was inspired by my various Californian adventures was a bit closer to home. In the sense that it featured, as its main character and narrator, a freelance author invited to write the biography of a wealthy tech entrepreneur. Sadly I won no such commission during my time as a technology and business journalist but one can always dream...

I have never visited Andover, Massaussetts, by the way. I recycled the location from an earlier story that needed to be set somewhere cold and snowy in winter. Having visited Boston during a snowfall, this was an obvious choice, but then I wanted somewhere smaller and more provincial. I settled on Andover because I once stayed for six months for a work assignment (not writing) in the Hampshire, England, town of Andover. I like to write real connections into my stories to help think myself into the place. Here is the story set in Andover, MA...

Location location location

Setting is so very important to a fictional story. The reader demands a sense of time and place so that they can get a sense of grounding the fictional characters in reality. That is why I often set my stories in real places. Sometimes they are places I know well and visit often, sometimes they are placed I have never been to. These days you only have to use resources like Google maps to help create a sense of place.

On which note, I return to the US State of California, a place I will probably never visit again. As I get older, I find I have a need to stay near to home, close to the things I know and the people I love. Much as I would like to see places like Alcatraz Island, Monterey Bay, Boston Harbor and the Windy City again, there are other states to visit. Should I ever feel the inclination to cross the great Ocean again, I think I would like to see Arizona, New Mexico, the Carolinas, Florida, Louisiana, Texas and other southern states. I would also like to trek around the wide open spaces of Wyoming.

California will always remain a place in my dreams, perhaps with more stories to come. Some of these stories are hiding away in old 35mm photos.