Neither Has Shakespeare

We "need sometimes," the Harvard philosopher [George Santayana] wrote, "to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what."
by Pico Iyer - foreword to Wanderlust

I once bought a card to send to a friend as an apology for having been out of touch for so long. The card read "I know I've not written in a long time, but so what? Neither has Shakespeare!"

Not much of an apology, I know. The irony of that is that I never even sent it.

DonJuanna will continue at JuanLuis.com. There will be no more postings to DonJuanna - this is the last one.

Rest assured, however, I will continue to blog over there with the same dedication and regularity as always, i.e. utterly unreliably.

Few of us ever forget the connection between "travel" and "travail", and I know that I travel in large part in search of hardship - both my own, which I want to feel, and others', which I need to see.
Pico Iyer, foreword to Wanderlust

Our year in London came to an end, our travels and travails reaching a logical if slightly unexpected conclusion, which was to return to California in early 2008. I'll say candidly I was hoping to be in the UK another 4-6 months or so, but due to "circumstances beyond our control", it made sense to return now. That's one of those phrases like the people who are "helping the police with their enquiries", code for getting beaten up in the room at the back of the precinct until they sing like a canary.

I've never left a city or a country wanting to leave; like a sitcom cancelled at its peak, with viewers left wanting more. I think we made the most of the time we were in London, and it's not as if it is going anywhere. I would hate to leave a place happy to never return. I believe, perhaps naively, that we will return. The great news for now is that both Donna and I found exciting jobs in California. Jobs which, to be frank, were not available to either of us in the UK. Donna is concluding work on Speed Racer at Digital Domain, a brightly coloured and stylised film set for imminent release, and I will be joining Digital Domain not on a specific project but in a somewhat different role, helping them out with some of their technology and processes.

I'm writing this from Los Angeles. I've been here a little under a week. Yesterday I wandered around Westwood, my old haunt. The UCLA girl's student uniform hasn't changed; grey UCLA hooded sweatshirt, denim short-shorts, flip flops, tousled hair and the "just woke up at 3pm" squint. A decade ago I was too geeky to hang around them, now I'm the slightly too-old-to-be-there guy at the party. I'm doing the rounds of the places I used to know, taking stock of what is there. Half of the cinemas I knew are gone; CD and record shops too. The travel bookshop on Pico. The restaurants that haven't changed their decor in a decade look a little tired. Empty windows and 'For Lease' signs litter the places where I used to spend a lot of time. It would be hypocritical of me to pretend that I dislike Starbucks, but even I don't need one within 200 yards of me regardless of where I am. Still, many independent businesses seem to be clinging on in the face of massive corporate competition.

On the plus side, my friends are for the most part all here still, and welcomed me back with open arms, the years in between seeming irrelevant. I've already had the wonderful look of incredulity from shop keepers who look at my credit card and can't square the hispanic name with the tall English-accented white boy in front of them. "You don't look like a Juan," they say.

I promise to write more, but don't forget, you wont find those updates here, they will all take place on my blog at juanluis.com.

For now I will leave you with a selection of pictures from London this past year.