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.

The American West owed its existence—as an American West—to the federal government. And the federal government owed much of the legitimacy and authority it assumed during the nineteenth century to the American West.

No republic is eternal. It lives only as long as its citizens want it.

What a demented doctrine, that man is born evil; how cruel it is. It’s not found in Judaism; Paul made it up to explain the Crucifixion. To make sense out of Christ’s death, which in fact makes no sense.

Spanish colonizers, and later their Mexican and American counterparts, drastically underestimated and misinterpreted the depth of complexity and sophistication of Indigenous Californian societies.

I had a filthy cold last week and missed two rides, so it was in a snotty and enfeebled state that I gathered Lenny on Monday morning. He reported that there were large predators afoot. By “he reported” I mean that he was snorty and on tiptoes, his eyes on stalks.

His usual demeanour being more of a cocky strut, Pam the trainer allowed as to how there are mountain lions in the area and that he was probably correct in his surmise. We decided to lunge him. He’s extremely left-handed so we’ve been working on his right lead canter. With only minor plunging and leaping for dramatic effect, he gave us beautiful transitions into a steady right lead.

I wish you could have seen him like that, jazzed by the excitement, fit and shiny in his metallic summer coat, arching his neck and flexing his horse abs. His surfer-blond mane standing like flames along his crest. When he’d settled a bit I got on. A hundred or more red-winged blackbirds flew low over us. Lenny stretched down into the bridle, carrying me as if I weighed no more than a feather.

Our children always grow to live in a foreign country

Four children of the same parents do not receive the same parenting.

Often we do not grasp what has happened to us until we tell someone else about it.

Humboldt never changed his mind about Berlin, insisting that the city was a ‘little, illiterate, and over-spiteful town’.

Dull people found him amusing. Interesting people thought him desperately dull.

The descendants of those who inhabited the region during that cataclysmic moment of turmoil and warfare sometimes refer to it as “the time when the stars fell.”

Those Europeans who reached across the canyon of language and culture, as curious fellow humans rather than as combatants, almost always discovered Indians willing to respond in kind. The list of such men is short

Without the stars it felt like someone had unplugged the world

One wing of the British Museum, in a crowd in a heatwave while jetlagged, but I did get to see Lindow Man (an ancestor), the Sutton Hoo ship burial and the Lewis chessmen. One wing of the V&A on a cooler day and lunch with a friend in the spectacular cafe, the first museum cafe ever, what a good innovation. A bookshop in Notting Hill; no, not that one, the other one. Bike rides to Westminster and Chelsea. The Chelsea Physic Garden with a glass of Pimm’s and another friend: you are my medicine.

Our rental car: an electric blue Mini Cooper. Avebury henge, even more beautiful than I imagined it, with a gratuitous game of cricket off to one side. The warm surface of the stones, so large, so lichen-y: more ancestors. Oak trees in golden grasslands like it’s freakin’ West Sonoma county out here. Cheshire at golden hour, with hares grazing among the sheep and cattle in the hayfields. Reading Elizabeth Gaskell, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor (not that one, the other one), Virginia Woolf. A Hendricks and tonic under a tree at the Cholmondeley Arms. A walk around the Roman walls of Chester. Jodrell Bank, peering out at the cosmic microwave radiation: another ancestor.

Although Britain has yet to produce the quantities of superb art found on the continent, there are one or two examples of carving on bone, ivory and stone. My personal favourite is a very confident yet delicately executed horse’s head on a fragment of horse rib, found in a cave at Creswell Crags, Derbyshire.

She considered other writers aloofly. “Shakespeare,” she said reluctantly. “Perhaps Goethe,” she added, using a pronunciation of her own.