Color without the U

San Francisco, USA

Please, someone, give me a logical explanation why anyone should spell the word “color” without a U? Yet here in San Francisco, right in its very centre, so many of its signs show my native language has been adapted in a way that defies explanation. Some say the Americans have got it right and we Brits have it wrong. Far from losing a U, in America the English are accused of adding one. Despite this, somehow, our two nations like one other, each fascinated by the other’s ways.

It escapes me why the Spanish, who founded San Francisco in 1776, placed it on the side of so many hills. Beware anyone with heart disease in the city. Everything is either uphill, or downhill, and virtually nothing is totally flat. I imagine the patients with cardiac failure choose either to stay indoors for the rest of their lives, or move somewhere different. Yet the survivors, those who choose to stay in this metropolis of just under a million souls, can clearly handle inclines perfectly. There were plenty out and about at the same time as me today and only one was breathing heavily. That was an Englishman and no prizes for guessing who. The native Americans had no trouble at all. The city is supposed to have been built on seven hills. Actually there are 43. A con trick, I would suggest, to persuade the unsuspecting tourist to drop by. Perhaps also to keep their emergency departments bursting with heart attacks. No wonder US healthcare is in crisis.

I am surprised that our American brethren can handle inclines seemingly without effort, when in every restaurant I must be so careful what I order. Small portions do not exist. A San Francisco starter is any other nation’s main course and if I hesitate to guzzle everything served, my waiter simply looks upset. So now I order one course only and play with it for as long as I dare. Full cream this, full fat that, and an occasional piece of greenery to salve a glutton’s conscience. America is a huge land, with huge ideas and, sadly, plenty of huge people, however happy they look as they walk. But then we Brits can hardly comment.

I am on one of those semi-suicidal trips where I have hurtled to the far side of the world, from England that is, and will be headed home only days after I have arrived. Ten hours of inflight movies one way and ten hours the other, each film’s storyline predictably forces me to sleep. Where does the airline get them? I can feel my eyes closing almost the moment I press “Play”. At intermittent intervals throughout the first film, then the next and beyond, I wake up as if the victim of an electric shock. Moments later it is back to my inflight coma, never reaching the end of any story and thereby vowing to see the thing again on the way home. I suspect it is a carefully constructed plan to ensure that passengers always return with the same airline. Make the movies so tedious, dampen down the oxygen supply ever-so slightly, and your customers must return with you in order to finish the plot. Life could so easily become an endless cycle of inflight movies, a form of torture, where you never reach the end. Like Sisyphus of Greek mythology, never making it with his boulder to the summit of his mountain.

Frustrated, exhausted and confused, I made a further error on my arrival by asking for a larger room at my hotel. The overly serious receptionist nodded, there was a click and thump of computer keys and straight to the 27th floor I was sent. I do mean 27th. It was supposed to fill me with joy. To be fair, the view across the San Francisco skyline was remarkable. Yet thanks to being caught in a tower block fire some months earlier, a blaze where I was fortunate to escape without harm, my sole thought on a San Francisco 27th floor was how to make it out should things go sour. My reaction the moment I entered the room was to request an immediate transfer to sea level, so I write these words from level 4.

You see life better from ground level than from above. At least you see them differently. Date palms, for instance. For some reason I was not expecting to see such things in San Francisco but there were plenty on display. There were girl palms and boy palms - date palms have a gender - right in the centre of town. To one corner of Union Square sat a small group of four, three girls and a boy. The girl palm nearest the boy palm was bristling with health. Her leaves were bushy, her branches billowed and she was clearly thriving. Yet on the far side of the concrete path beside her stood the two other ladies. One was definitely bedraggled and her dates were a joke. They looked more like over-ripe grapes, hanging by a thread. For date palms, only the ladies grow dates; the boys just stand there and look important.

The third girl palm looked equally unhealthy although I was sure I saw her give a date wink to the boy when she thought no one was looking. That is the problem with date palms. If you want them to flourish, and for succulent dates to be the result, you need a mix of male and female as well as palm privacy. Anything can happen between girl and boy date palms after lights out. Ask any Bedouin and he will tell you so. San Francisco’s Union Square showed that to perfection.

But there are problems too, in this city, however glorious and attractive it may be. The beggars - panhandlers to the locals, have increased in recent times. There was a black versus white feeling to boot. One evening, so busy was I concentrating on not getting lost that I failed to stop and offer a panhandler a dime despite his pleas and handwritten cardboard sign carrying a smudged, felt-tip message.

“That’s because I’m black,” he shouted as I walked past. How wrong he was. Thanks to an overdose of travelling, plus living overseas, all I see are people not colour. I was not inclined to stop and correct him, especially as the abusive panhandler was building a head of steam.

And boy, do the San Franciscans like their tips. Not the panhandlers - I am sure they would grab a gratuity instantly - but the serving staff in the city’s restaurants. Would you believe they seek 20%? Maybe that is the modern USA. No wonder they are so wealthy. Mind you, nearby Macy’s, a sort of London Selfridge’s lookalike, displayed some seriously painful prices. Perhaps a 20% supplement to a bowl of crab chowder was the least I could expect.

Did I say bowl? Bucket would be better. I could have gone for a swim in my soup. Everything is huge in this country, from buildings to cars to personalities, to tips, to food portions and, without doubt, to ladies’ rings. Some are truly massive. Not the ladies - although there are a few heavier than our Maker desired - but their rings. Forget the delicate, tiny things on a London lady’s digit. In San Francisco they wear knobkerries on their fingers. Huge golden things with the odd gem thrown in. You would not want to be in the way of an expressive San Francisco lady with a knobkerrie on her ring finger. It would be safer to be a chain smoker. A head injury would be the least of the risks you would run. Yet big rings make a statement, which I suppose is why the ladies wear them.

“This is me,” declares the ring. “I am boss, I am big, I am here, and anyway, who cares if there is no U in color?”