Tuesday 17th April 2007. New Zealand to Los Angeles, USA.

I start my day with breakfast at Gabe's. My mate is coming back from work to take me to the airport, these Scottish Kiwis are so very generous!

The trying ticket agent at Christchurch simply did not understand the ticketing situation. She was going on about me being a visitor to the United States...I mean me, a visitor? I was going HOME, but then she doesn't know my history so just go with the flow and her procedures.

My flight from Christchurch takes me back to New Zealand's main city, Auckland.


In summary a last New Zealand lesson...

The isthmus on which Auckland sits is so narrow you can walk from one coast to the other - but then again wherever you are in New Zealand you are never far from the sea. This striking similarity with Scotland may be one of the many reasons I have enjoyed this country so!

Inland are the mountains, lakes, valleys, plains and plateaux that give this country its beauty. The North Island is dotted with volcanic cones and the South Island has its long spine of mountains.

The Polynesian people came here in canoes during mass migrations after their ancestor Kupe found the country and named it 'Land of the Long White Cloud'.

The Dutch explorer Abel Tasman dubbed it 'Nieuw Zeeland' when he arrived in 1642 but it was the British navigator Captain James Cook who came in 1769 and hoisted the Union Jack changing life here forever.

Apart from the missionaries though European settlement was not to begin in earnest until 1840 when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed confirming New Zealand as a British Colony and placing the Maori under the protection of the Crown with continued rights to their tribal lands. In 1947 New Zealand grew to maturity as an independent nation and today she remains a member of the British Commonwealth family.

My flight to LA was less than excellent service. It was two hours before we were served anything...not even as much as a drink of water.

Anyway I settle in and begin my movie marathon with Bobby set against the melting pot of hopes, dreams and tragedy that characterised America in the 60's.

June 4th 1968 was a night when a cross-section of America had gathered for the arrival of Bobby Kennedy at an election night party. It was a night when the Kennedy dream was to die. Bobby was shot dead and the countries life would take a dramatic turn just at a time when the nation was coming to terms with struggles related to race, sexual equality, class and the Vietnam War.

In a nation in crisis one man had seemed to have the ability to unify the races...what a story and what a major league cast dealing with major issues...and what a disappointment.

Next stop is The History Boys (a production I saw at least five times at The National)...The film is the same cast as The National production and I am getting very Arthouse at 30,000ft.

In a strange way this film took my mind to the real world that I've have seen this past year in all its manifestations. Not simply a world outside the ivory towers of academia, but a world outside of Western civilisation. The film served to remind me how much I don't interact well with that world and how much I enjoy the cloistered world of the classroom.

The History Boys took me back to those wonderful Grammar School days I spent in Bournemouth with the cream of young academics from the non-public school elite where I could exercise the socialist ideal of academic and socio-economic advance irrespective of one's socio-economic status...although I must confess the reality was very middle class, the film serves to remind just how sad the passing of the grammar school system was.

In a world of mis-informed ignorance I often hear myself scream, for God's sake someone pass on some genuine knowledge. That is why I have always loved The History Boys as it reminds me of sun-kissed S'level English lessons and June Head's Drama. It takes me back to the Gentleman's Club quiz team on a Tuesday night at the Iford Bridge under the tutelage of Dr Cruttenden.

And I have been lucky enough in my career to work with them all...Hector, Irwin, Dorothy and the Headmasteresque types (whom if you don't watch out they are how you metamorphosise into) with their academic snobbery based on no academic foundation and their hatred of the true intellectuals of the world of which they can never be one.

It does get very bumpy mid-Pacific...and so it is time for a fabulously depressing movie, Notes on a Scandal.

My last attempt at movie going was Marie Antoinette. After my Singapore experience with her mother I meet the French Queen at 36,000ft and she sends me to sleep...Sandra Marsh would be proud!

...Oh yes and this is the second Qantas flight where I have broken the soap dish in the bathroom.


TUESDAY AGAIN....

Descending into this vast metropolis through a thick blanket of smog, I arrive in LA before I have left New Zealand because of the time difference and so I am having Tuesday again.

It was on the airport bus into Union Station that I got to learn that my flight companion and I had more than the Birmingham University connection we had identified some fourteen hours before in common...we also had Bournemouth School (it is such a small world!).

It took some effort but I negotiated the subway and the bus out to my hotel. I have been spoilt in New Zealand which really does have excellent tourist facilities, not so here and the locals ain't proving that friendly either.

I've never seen so many hoodies in all my life as I do on the LA Metro, and here I am looking like the tourist with the coffin and its lime green cousin, the man bag and my back pack.

Well Gabe and Alex tried to warn me; let's just say that a half star would be the limit of this hotel...but when you are on a budget, then budget you must.

What is interesting is the way people treat you. On a public bus with all that luggage and me with my poly bags in toe. Because I am staying in a scuzzy neighbourhood people look down on you; very different to some of the treatment I have had this year as a Glasgow University academic, or indeed the sort of attention I get in my pin-stripe suit with my briefcase.

It is just as well I ran out of cash and it took a few days to update this blog, because I was out of here before my Mum could worry...It was the sort of motel where you expected the murder squad to turn up at any point to take away a dead prostitute from one of the rooms; trust me, never stay in a half-star...before this I didn't even know they existed!