The Original Pantry Cafe has been open 24 hours a day, seven days a week since 1924 and claims never to have been without customer. Operated by a former mayor it is clearly a Los Angeles institution. It must be doing something right, but going off the food it’s difficult to see what that might be.

Whatever you order, expect to start with a huge plate of coleslaw and some not very fresh bread. Everything seems to come with a huge slop of almost liquid mashed potato and a tiny portion of green beans that have been boiled to the point of disintegration (i.e. shit on a plate). To compensate for the poor quality, the portions are enormous. In this way it seems to sum-up America’s relationship with food: cook it very simply, serve it very large and price it very cheap.

All this is a great shame because, while the food is barely edible, the Original Pantry Cafe does have a great atmosphere. Perhaps if we’d tried breakfast rather dinner, we’d have been more easily satisfied.
Tag: USA2010. Written 20 June 2010.

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Los Angeles has an awful lot to offer the tourist and yet it is a difficult city to get the most out of. Famously vast and sprawling it is not possible to base oneself in one location convenient for everything as each of the major attractions seem to be twenty minutes drive from each other. As a result, you should expect to spend sometime driving in congested traffic and to spend a fortune on parking.

And yet we’re all the more determined to visit Los Angeles again. It needs more than a just a few nights and the more you work at it, the more it rewards you.

A downtown boutique hotel, the O Hotel is a trendy little establishment of just 67 well appointed, if a little small, rooms. It’s all done very well, except that the hallways are a little bit Travelodge.

Preferring to explore, we don’t usually eat in the hotel, but Downtown is actually very quiet after about 10.30pm and the all night diners are crap. The O had a very well presented contemporary menu served in a bar that may be just a tad self-concious. Their take on bread and butter pudding is particularly worth a mention. Peanut butter and jam sandwiches have never taken off this side of the Atlantic, but having tried the combination some years ago, I am now occasionally struck down by a craving. And bread and butter pudding has always been the king of traditional English deserts. So O Hotel’s bread and butter pudding with peanut butter and blackberry jam served with banana ice cream was a must. It did not disappoint and it’s worth booking a stay here for this pudding alone.
Tag: USA2010. Written 20 June 2010.

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A couple of hours out of Las Vegas in the general direction of Los Angeles is the Mojave National Preserve the main visitor centre for which is at the ghost town of Kelso.

Kelso grew rapidly in the early days of the railroad. Very long trains still pass through, but they no longer need to stop off to secure the assistance of helper engines to get them over the mountains. The end of mining nearby is another reason the town become redundant, although it wasn’t completely depopulated until the mid-1980s. All this is interesting enough, but Kelso is not particularly exciting in itself, especially compared with the ghost town of Bodie (more on this later).

The Mojave National Preserve is most interesting for its natural wonders of which the Kelso Dunes most appealed and are probably easiest to take in en route from Vegas to LA.

The views to be gained high up in this vast expanse of near perfect sand are glorious, but what was particularly special on the day we visited was that the Kelso Dunes were singing. The Dunes are only loosely held together by various grasses and the sands are easily moved by the wind to create an ever changing landscape. As wind and sand moves through the grass, various sounds are created which occasionally harmonise.

To hear the Kelso Dunes sing is supposed to bring good luck, but about an hour-and-a-half into our resumed journey to Los Angeles, we had a tyre blow out. Given the appalling state of California’s highways this was not that great a surprise and we had to limp the rest of the way on a speed limiting space saver  tyre.
Tag: USA2010. Written 20 June 2010.

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Our one regret about booking the Trump, Las Vegas for the first night of USA2010 was not booking a room with view of the Las Vegas strip, something we corrected when we stayed at the Wynn across the road (from where this picture is taken).

Positioned behind Fashion Show Mall, just after a bend in Las Vegas Boulevard it offers the most perfect view of Paradise, Nevada from the Venetian south.

The Trump positions itself as a non-gaming sanctuary and so unlike other significant Las Vegas hotels is not a tourist attraction in itself. That is a plus because it is not just the scale of Las Vegas hotels that can make it hard to feel at home, but that you find yourself in a public place where your swimming pool, for example, is served by a bar populated mostly by non-residents. This certainly helped to ensure that the breakfast we had at the DJT restaurant was the best of the trip (and regular readers will know how much I love breakfast).

Naturally, our relatively modest mountain view suite was a fantastic place, with a substantial living area, (unused) kitchenette and a good size bathroom with twin sinks, spa tub etcetera. One is never short of a towel at the Trump. Towels of all sizes are piled high throughout the suites and in the fitness room every machine has its own towel, which did seem a tad excessive, but hey!

My deep tissue massage was great after our ten hour flight, but I felt the spa was let down just a touch by the vanity area. It’s nice to lay on free razors, deodorant, aftershave etcetera. But not cheap ineffective disposable razors, industrial size cans of Right Guard and down market aftershaves. These items were out of place and jarred with the experience.
Tag: USA2010. Written 16 June 2010.

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There is little doubt that Avatar is a movie event or that it looks absolutely gorgeous in Blu-ray, but that wasn’t enough to keep me glued to the screen for much more than an hour.

The problem is that the story is predicable, with protagonist — ‘I told them I was from the jar head clan’ — on a journey with a very obvious conclusion and a cast of stereotypes. An hour in you suddenly become aware that there another two hours to go and nothing of significance has happened yet.

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Out next Monday 31 May, Winter in Wartime comes across as a deceptively simple film; you know where you are with Nazis the oppressed people of Holland and the odd collaborator. But what emerges is coming of age film as the protagonist, Michiel, discovers that all is not so black and white.

Some reviewers have been less than generous, but while it’s true there are no particularly great surprises, I felt it was well made and well paced. The film very much depends on Martijn Lakemeier’s Michiel and fortunately he makes for a convincing fourteen year-old slowly robbed of his naivety.

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I loved the first Iron Man and was looking forward to Iron Man 2, but while it looked great on an Imax screen and certainly entertained, something was missing.

The problem with this film is that the underlying story was just too feeble, as was the character and back story development. This wasn’t entirely due to a lack of effort. There is clearly an intention to develop an overarching narrative to sustain several films, with more than a hint of other forces and conspiracies.

In the end though the temptation to go for spectacle above all else prevailed, resulting in an enjoyable but, on reflection, empty experience.

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The Bishop of Croydon, the Right Reverend Nick Baines, has prepared a set of three prayers to be deployed by England fans over the world cup. And what a killjoy he turns out to be.

In the event that ‘all around are gripped with World Cup fever’ we should be asking the Lord for ‘the gift of sympathy’. Stuff that.

Surely the appeal of a tournament like the world cup is that it allows those who feel the need to let off a little steam, indulge their tribalistic side and behave is a quasi-racist way without doing any real harm. Who on earth wants to experience ‘common humanity and a growing attitude of generous sportsmanship to others’?

No. We want to win. And to win big. At any cost. And we want to humiliate our opponents. Having indulged that emotion, we can then return to being reasonable, considerate human beings.

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‘We are not in Afghanistan for the sake of the education policy in a broken 13th-century country. We are there so the people of Britain and our global interests are not threatened.’
– Liam Fox, Defence Secretary

It’s no great surprise that Liam Fox has sought to present himself as ‘a guarantor for the Conservative Right’ in the new coalition.

He’ll delight many Tories with that pitch, given that the Lib Dems have somehow bagged the chairs of more than half the cabinet committees where ministers hammer out the detail of government policy. It can’t be long before every Lib Dem MP is a minister — good for them — and perhaps Cameron really is delighted to be able to neuter the Tory right. When the Conservatives swing back to the right, as they surely will, Fox will be hoping to lead the right against the Lib Cons and later lead the party.

Yet his comments on Afghanistan, in which he belittles nation building, show that he is a man of little vision. He is right that Britain cannot be the world’s policeman and it follows that we are even less able to run the world’s schools, but he fails to recognise that poverty and ignorance are radicalism’s greatest allies. Educated, wealthy peoples do not go looking for wars that will take them back to the thirteenth century (or whether it is Fox finds Afghanistan).

We can’t fix everywhere, but we need to do all we can with Afghanistan. Afghanistan really is home to a band of ultra-conservatives who think bringing down liberal democracy is a religious duty.

Reading Fox, one can’t help but remember that he is the founder of the Atlantic Bridge, a think tank originally established with the ‘simple aim of “Strengthening the Special Relationship” exemplified by the Reagan-Thatcher partnership of the 1980s’. So what would Thatcher do? Thatcher was no nation builder. She preferred to use the overseas aid budget to support the career of her arms dealer son, a man who may not enter the USA because he has been convicted of a terrorism related offence.

Fox’s belittling nation building in Afghanistan further confirms that he remains a simple Thatcherite. Those who believe that there is no such thing as society simply cannot see the need to build it up.

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With a holiday in Las Vegas and beyond looming, my thoughts have been turning to the volcanic ash cloud and the risk of an even larger eruption.

I know my travel company is obliged to look after me, but there’s always a chance they’ll try to do a Ryanair. With insurers assuming airlines will do the right thing, a little ash could be expensive.

So well done to Paddy Power and their Volcanic Ash holiday protection product. Insurance has always been a posh word for betting after all; we have to bet we’ll crash the car and hope we won’t win.

I’m going to bet a few quid that I can’t fly back from Las Vegas, which seems fitting, so should the worst happen I’ll at least have some spending money.

So go on, have a flutter on not making it home, it’s just another form of holiday insurance.
Update: I should have added that if you follow the links from this page (which Paddy Power have paid for) you’ll get a free £20 bet.

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