To my surprise, I have been enjoying the long drive to San Juan Bautista. As you turn from 280 to 85, the Cold War radar tower on Mount Umunhum swings into view. A little further south, on a clear day, you can pick out the white domes of Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, badly damaged in the Boxing Day storm. I like to think of them as the Argonath, twin sentinels guarding Coyote Valley, a beautiful flood plain where the redwood-forested Santa Cruz Mountains meet the golden oak savannah of the Diablo Range. When its orchards are in bloom, Coyote Valley looks like the old paintings of Silicon Valley, the valley of heart’s delight.

The drive is long enough that in the last month or so I finished all 38 hours of Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy. It could’ve been longer! I will listen to it again! It helps that the audiobook narrator made Russell sound like Roger Allam’s Douglas in Cabin Pressure (goodbye, Stephanie Cole; you were the funniest.) But he is in any case enormously good company: generous, rigorous and laugh-out-loud funny. I thought he would be a hard act to follow but I just started Kevin Starr‘s California, and I think I’m gonna be aight.

The lover of beauty ends by finding it everywhere about him, a vein of gold in the basest of ores…

 He was killing time in that singular way that’s so delicious when you get to live in your favorite city, when even boredom can feel diverting and luxurious.

London is such a beautiful place that it can be easy, as you stroll around the city, to forget that much of it was built on imperial plunder.