Its an odd thing really, but I love roller-coasters, really love them, the speed the tumbles, all of it. What Santa Monica reminds me of though is how much quicker the world is than it once was. There was a time when this roller-coaster on the pier would have been reckless and a weekend highlight. But to us seasoned riders its tame and scarcely worth a mention except that the much younger me would have found it the most exciting thing in the world - such was they way I viewed our annual visit from the travelling fair back in Newtongrange, right up until I was about sixteen, when I graduated into being a full-time working man instead of a part-timer boy. Excitement changes though, new places, new sights, new sounds; having spent my youth wishing I was in America - the music, the movies, the sunshine and everything that went with that view from a coal mining village south of Edinburgh - it is all a bit of an illusion. Don't get me wrong, Santa Monica is great and we move south tomorrow to San Diego, but there is a rose-tinted veneer. I overheard a conversation in a restaurant I have heard in many guises before (and seen exploited) 'We had Mel Brookes in the other day. Seems he comes here all the time. I wanted to say, "well you're a producer and I am an actress..."' Fifteen years ago I watched a couple of Producer colleagues (colleagues not friends) tell another wait-actress in Century City that we (yes me included) were in town because we were in the movie industry. Every waiter and waitress in the restaurant dropped by our table with a Hollywood smile (whiter than white). It made me sad then and now too, I guess. It was true, we were making a film, but those guys were just making fun and it wasn't pleasant by any stretch of the imagination. What goes around comes around, I suppose - and I could tell a tale about that but I won't. Though I did see something Californian today, they were making a movie just off Malibu Pier and on Malibu beach - I didn't pause except to take a picture of them making a picture - seemed just about right. Maybe I will post that tomorrow. For now I am going back to a fairground in the 1960s, when I first heard this as I spun on the waltzer with...
