Just Walking In the Rain.

Johnny Ray

Just walking in the rain
Getting soaking wet
Torturing my heart
By trying to forget

Yes those are some of the lyrics of the famous Johnny Ray song (written in 1952 by Johnny Bragg and Robert Riley), and today (Sunday) I was walking in the rain and I got to thinking that in Los Angeles it was something you couldn't do. Mainly because when it rains there it really rains.
The city, or the 83 cities that make up Los Angeles, is built on hills and when it rains it flows from the Hollywood Hills like Niagara Falls; the wide storm drains can hardly contain the water and as it doesn't rain that often, the rubbish that has fallen into those drains, gets washed out to the beach – so that is not the time to go for a swim.
But raining here in London, is a gentler affair – sometimes it's heavy – so you can walk around like Johnny Ray with a broken heart. One time one could go in to a pub and shelter from the weather but these days most of those pubs are closing; I might have mentioned it before!
But it's the pubs' own fault – or their owners – for they went for the wrong type of customer. People come from all over the world to visit the London pubs but because the old local pubs sold out to the young and the sports fans they're going to be disappointed. Recently pubs had been turned in to sports bars with TVs all over the place and customers just buying drinks when play slowed down.
Before that the pubs were just excuses for one armed bandits and other types of gambling and gaming machines so the landlord could fly off to the sun for their holidays a few times a year. If you asked for a whiskey or even a whisky you got a measured half an inch in the bottom of a glass and if you wanted tonic with it, or another kind of mixer, you are drinking the most expensive drink in the round.
So is it no wonder that the expensive cold devoid of atmosphere and ambiance places are being closed at around 50 – 100 a week; depending on which report you believe.
In Los Angeles the bar man just pours from the bottle and hopes to give you a good measure but here – you can get drunk for a fraction of the cost in a pub from a supermarket.
The bottoms of my jeans were slightly damp today, as I walked, and in the old days I might have gone in to the pub I passed, which was boarded up, and dried my trousers by the warm fire – real or otherwise.
You can kind of do that in Los Angeles, in a way, by walking right through the bar and sitting in the sunshine at the back!
Los Angeles is not a safe place at the moment, for the police, as a renegade cop who has been fired by the LAPD, is wandering around fully armed and taking revenge on members of the department he blames for his dismissal.

Memorial to an Irvine couple and a Riverside police officer dead allegedly by Dormer.

His name is Christopher Dormer and he is built like a brick shit house; he has killed at least one cop and other cops have fired upon two pick ups by mistake driven by people not matching the description of the suspect.
There's a million dollar award, some of it donated by Dodger fans, for the capture of Dormer; there's always something going on in Los Angeles which is on the news every day. When we lived there a crocodile was in one of the lakes and nobody knew where it came from; that kind of disappeared when another big news story hit the headlines; but that's another story.
By the way Dormer was fired in 2008.
So that's what they are looking at and reading about in Los Angeles – they probably don't know that the Ben Affleck movie, Argo, has just won best film and best director at the British Oscars - the BAFTAs; but would they have known in any case?

Congratulations to Ben Afflick.