Welcome to Hermosa Beach

Well, we made it. We are here in lovely Hermosa Beach, a few days into our househunt and readjusting to life in Southern California.

Thanks to a half empty plane, and an enormous bag of snacks and toys, the flight was not too painful after all. Lady P's body clock has not caught up with the time zone change yet, and we're enduring some 4am breakfasts and long, shouty nap fails. But we're hoping it won't be much longer till she chills out and rolls with the SoCal vibe.

It'd be hard for her not to, because Hermosa Beach (and neighbouring Manhattan Beach) is all about with the chilled out SoCal vibe.

The holiday flat we're staying in is covered in surf and beach themed knick knacks. Judging by the number of houses we've passed with 'this way to the beach' or 'beach house' signs on their exterior, I think this is the way people round here decorate.

The local corner shop is adorned with surfboards, sells wax, and specialises in surf-friendly smoothies.

People are jogging, skate boarding and beach biking along every sidewalk. (Yes, I said sidewalk. When in Rome.) There are bowls of water for dogs outside all the shops and cafes. People smile and say hi when they pass you on an early morning coffee run. It's almost like being in Saltburn, for friendliness.

Apparently the kids at Hermosa and Manhattan Beach schools can opt for surf as one of their Phys Ed choices. The pier has a 'Surfer Walk of Fame' on it.

The beach is dense with volleyball pitches and Baywatch style lifeguard stations.

I could go on, but I think you get it. It's a nice place to live. In fact in many ways it reminds me of Saltburn: a small, friendly community by the sea.

Now we just need to find somewhere in it to actually live.

Hands across the ocean

We're off, taking our tiny tyrant on a long flight to the land of perfect teeth and endless summer. Last night we crashed at our dear friends, the fabulous e-tailing entrepreneur (is that a word? Let's make it so) and her family.

The Fabulous One and I have been close co-conspirators since we met in our first grown up jobs. We've bridesmaided for each other, and once visited a ropey strip joint together. So you know we're fast friends. And for most of the time we've lived at opposite ends of a large city, a country and a continent and whatever you call the girth of the USA and the Atlantic added together.

The Fabulous One lived in Dubai for a spell, and a few years later in Tallinn, while I was firmly embedded in the NW5 comfort bubble. We quickly devised a method of emailing chat where we'd answer each other's questions in CAPS LOCK: to the outside observer it looks like shouting but we knew it was just the fastest way to answer important queries about fripperies, tittle tattle, TV shows and so on. We used to post each other magazines, complete with post-its and scribbles ('LOVE these boots!', 'Thinking of getting my hair cut like this, whaddaya think?') to recreate the feeling of flipping through a glossy while in the same actual room. And we were early Skype adopters. I made a few trips out to see her overseas, too, back in the days when I was footloose and financial-responsibility-free.

When I first moved to the US with TLOML, she was one of those friends I took for granted it was 'au revoir', not goodbye. We bridged the gap with emails and Skype, again. Despite the much longer flight, and the fact she had two lovely daughters to leave behind, her and her husband visited us in Malibu for a priceless few days of constant chitchat.

So it felt fitting to spend our last night in London with people whose friendship has already survived plenty of time spent apart. I calculate that we've lived in different countries for over a third of our 18 years of friendship. And I'm sure that in another 18 years we'll have just as much to say to each other, as we reconvene over a G&T and a Harper's Bazaar somewhere in the world. The same is, I know, true of friends like my WonderTwin, and my favourite little sister.With Skype on our phones, and most importantly, the willingness to swap idle chit chat whenever the opportunity arises, I know we'll still be besties even though we're far apart.

Thus fortified with friendship, I head off on my voyage. Au revoir!

Friendly skies

Up until about a fortnight ago, Lady P was a notably chilled out baby. You might almost have called her placid. Sure, she has her moments of wild giggling. And she loves to stampede about on her hands and knees. But she's one of those babies who will lie in her cot chatting away to her toys for a good 45 minutes in the morning. The kind who doesn't squeal if you take away, say, the iphone she's got her hands on, so long as you replace it with a rattle.

More to the point, she was a baby who would sit on TLOML's lap in a cafe, quite content to play with a sugar packet or pepper grinder while we enjoyed a relaxed coffee. And she honestly enjoyed sitting with a book. I'm not sure she fully appreciates the narrative ark of 'That's Not My Lion' but she loves turning pages, saying 'oh' at each turn, and touching different parts of the page in wonder. Her mealtimes were leisurely, if messy, affairs as she worked her way through a range of flavours with interest. She made her own amusement, fairly quietly, in many a confined space. So you can imagine we weren't too worried about travelling with her.

That was up until about a fortnight ago. Now it is a different story. Now she shrieks like a pterodactyl* if anything she wants is not immediately placed within her reach. Mealtimes are a rollercoaster ride of pleasure - when she finds something she likes - and terror, when more of that thing isn't instantly provided. Books are for shouting at, bashing and throwing on the floor. And her favourite game is moving at pace into a place of danger, shouting and shrieking on the way.

They say babies change quickly and everything is 'just a phase'. Please pray that this phase is a shortlived one. Or pity the poor sods who are on an 11 hour flight with our tiny tyrant in a few days time.

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*Actually we don't really know what a pterodactyl sounds like. But if you close your eyes and imagine a high pitched, repetitive shriek... well, you get the idea. It's what we imagine a prehistoric angry bird sounds like.

Househunting, again

We are househunting, again. Actually, we've been househunting for months. Ever since a return to LA was a glimmer in TLOML's eye, we've both been quietly surfing real estate porn. I'll admit I am often distracted by the high end, 'if we won the lottery tonight', stuff in Malibu for real, droolworthy surfing. But for the most part I am trying to stay focused on somewhere to live once our temporary accommodation ends.

So we're both constantly plugged into Zillow, Trulia, Hotpads and Westside Rentals. Not to mention Craig's List, which we will always favour because it's how we found the place we had on the beach in Malibu. Sigh. Anyway, sketchy surf shacks are no longer going to work for us. Nor will rabbit hutches, nor will cockamamie flats.

We need a proper, tidy, sweet little family home. With a grassy yard, or at least a decent patio. Preferably a shortish walk to the beach.

I'd like to live here

Or here

But do we need somewhere with 'nice energy'? That particularly Californian turn of phrase crops up on quite a few property listings. Call me a sceptic but I'm okay with just average energy, to be honest. And how about 'fully executive ocean views'? Seriously, one place really did claim such a feature. And so far as I could from the listings, they didn't mean a view of the skyscrapers of Downtown LA. Weird, and definitely not something that made the list of 'essentials' for our next house.

You'd think we'd have learned, from our NY experience, about the perils of househunting from afar. (We viewed about a dozen flats only to rent one we'd never seen, which turned out to be unimaginably small). But we've wandered the streets of Manhattan and Hermosa Beach on Google Maps Streetview so many times now I feel I know the place like the back of my hand.

Of course, there are real limitations to looking online. One of those is psychological - I know it's daft but I just can't get excited about any property with a grey sky behind it. So those streets which were photographed after the hazy marine layer lifted, and have that classic Californian bright blue sky in the background, shoot to the top of my list.

This time next week we'll be looking at these places in person. Yikes! I might delay any face-to-face appointments to the afternoon, when the marine layer has lifted and the sun is shining.

Adaptability

Like all good middle class parents, we eschew television for tinies, knowing it isn't helpful for her development. Much better for Lady P to have a fun singsong or look at a book or a toy with us. (Or, failing that, look at the toy on her own while I sit nearby playing on my phone).

Predictably, we're as fussy about food too. Almost everything she eats is lovingly handmade, from scratch, using low sodium, organic, ingredients. Except the Dairylea, but that's really just a treat for special (yikes, we're out of carrot soup) days. Oh, and the Aptamil. But let's not get into that again.

So far so wholesome. I even make her banana pancakes at the weekends. It's idyllic, honestly.

But now we are moving, and our stuff has been shipped today. So we are camping, with limited kitchen kit, until we leave on Monday. TLOML and I will work our way round our favourite Saltburn takeouts, a sort of victory lap for our final week. But Lady P is not so easily fed. I could scramble her an egg, and provide her toast and porridge and fruit. But the days of elaborate stews, soups and bakes are over. For now.

So I've stocked up on Ella's Kitchen: the acceptable face of convenience foods for babies. I hope she likes it. Actually, part of me hopes her first words are 'no, I prefer mummy's cooking'. But then again, she'd get awfully hungry this week. So yes, I hope she likes it.

As for the TV rule... well, ten hours in the air is a lot of time to kill with singing and books and toys. The TSA rules won't allow enough space for the amount of toys it would take to keep her amused for ten hours. And yes, she might sleep. But on our last transatlantic trip she napped for a total of an hour, during 20 hours of travel. Ouch.

So I've downloaded a series of In the Night Garden for her to watch. And we've ordered some ridiculous baby headphones in case she wants to hear the sound - so she can really appreciate the full narrative arc. I suspect she won't have much of an attention span for the iPad but I also know we'll be grateful for every 3 minutes of waking time that is not spent wriggling, grumbling or bothering other passengers.

How fitting that as we leave wholesome Yorkshire for a new life in LA our baby gets to watch her first TV and to eat her first convenience foods. Welcome to America, Lady P.

And if these strategies succeed, and she enjoys eating food from a packet and watching a screen instead of interacting with us, the next question will be - how do we wean her off the telly and the convenience foods and get her back on 'Dear Zoo' and my home cooked shepherd's pie?