Los Angeles and the Californian Coast: An Affair of Light, Landscape, and the Ludicrous

When I was young, I listened to California Dreamin’ the way one might stare at a postcard — curious, longing, and entirely oblivious to the smell of jet fuel or the cost of a green juice. The song played like an incantation, a warm breeze from a place where winter didn’t belong and nobody wore socks unless they were tie-dyed. I imagined Southern California as a sun-drenched, slow-motion utopia filled with gentle surf, open roads, and people too relaxed to finish a sentence. In my mind, the entire region looked like the final third of a Beatles documentary — all soft focus and barefoot idealism.

Of course, reality has a way of adjusting the lens. It wasn’t until I visited Los Angeles in 2024 that the lyrics finally made sense — not because it was exactly as the Mamas and the Papas promised, but because it was so much more ridiculous. Yes, the sun was shining. Yes, the sky was blue. But so was the billboard for a cosmetic dentist hovering above a vegan strip mall. The dream, it turned out, wasn’t dead — it had just been given a minor facelift and a social media strategy.

And still, I was hooked.

If you ever find yourself standing on the edge of the Californian coast at sunset — and if fate, flights, or foolish impulse allow it, I highly suggest you do — you may encounter a curious kind of clarity. Not the spiritual epiphany type, but something more cinematic, as though the sun, in its final descent, has just been told it's up for Best Supporting Actor.

This is not light that simply falls. It enters stage left. In California, even the daylight has an agent.

Now, Los Angeles — or as it's often known in travel guides and therapy sessions, The City of Angels — is less a metropolis and more an open-air fever dream in soft focus. One part aspiration, two parts perspiration. The hills are alive, not with the sound of music, but with the hum of Teslas, the whisper of screenplays being edited in cafés, and the unmistakable echo of yet another motivational podcast.

And yet, under the botoxed brow of the entertainment industry and its billboarded ego, lies something much older and quietly poetic for the city’s origins are far richer than the Hollywood montage would have you believe.

Consider this: the full name of Los Angeles is El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula, which translates loosely to “Good luck fitting this on your luggage tag.” And yet, beneath the gloss of this glittering illusion machine, there’s a kind of weathered grace. It was founded in 1781 by a group of settlers so diverse (mixed African, Native American, and European descent) that it would put most diversity quotas to shame, L.A. was multicultural before it was fashionable!

The myth of Los Angeles is built on aspiration, yes, but the foundation was always one of diversity and reinvention.

But venture west, dear reader — to the coast. Oh, the coast...

California’s coastline stretches like it’s modelling for a lifestyle catalogue no one can afford. From the brooding cliffs of Big Sur to the hair-tossed charm of Malibu, the land doesn’t just sit there — it poses. Surfers don’t just ride waves; they perform aquatic theatre. The ocean doesn't crash; it delivers a monologue. And if you’re wondering where everyone’s gone, they’re probably within a yoga mat’s distance of a juice bar, reinventing themselves again.

There’s a lot of that here: reinvention. Some might call it delusion; others call it ambition in Ray-Bans. But either way, the state thrives on the belief that transformation is not only possible — it's probably overdue and currently trending.

And yet, amid the Instagram reels and existential retreats, there is substance. Deep substance. East L.A. hums with Mexican soul — murals that speak louder than any influencer, and tortillas that could stop a man mid-crisis. Leimert Park still sways gently to the ghost of jazz, and Koreatown - if you play your cards right, might serve you a meal that makes you believe in the divine power of fermented cabbage.

There is absurdity here, of course. There always is when dreams gather in bulk. Artists, dropouts, ex-bankers turned raw food evangelists — all drawn here like moths to a flame. A dry, hot Santa Ana wind–blown flame that periodically turns the surrounding hills into scenes from an apocalyptic barbecue.

And still, they stay. Still we stay. Because if you squint just right — through the haze of wildfire smoke or the steam rising from your overpriced oat-milk cortado — you might glimpse it. A faint outline of the person you were meant to become. Not necessarily richer or thinner or more Instagrammable, but truer. A version of you unbothered by what came before, and only mildly worried about what comes next.

And for a place built on facades and fantasy, that’s no small thing.

Backpacks & Broom Cupboards: How to Explore Without Leaving Home

Travel, curiosity and wonder from the comfort of your chaos.

In the days when a backpack meant freedom and the open road was a rite of passage rather than a feature of Google Street View, the idea of travelling was intimately tied to the act of going somewhere. Preferably somewhere dusty, sun-blasted, and marginally dangerous. But then something revolutionary happened. The world, in all its eccentric, exotic, and occasionally exasperating detail, came to us.

It’s not that we stopped moving. Flights got cheaper. Instagram filtered the Sahara into something familiar but slowly, almost imperceptibly, the idea of what it meant to travel shifted from geography to curiosity. And for those of us currently sitting in what could generously be described as a “multi-use storage nook”—less Indiana Jones, more Ipswich B&Q—the home office has become the new frontier.

I say this as someone who recently did travel. Back from Taiwan, no less. Two long-haul flights totalling just under 18 hours, held together by three curious hours of wandering around Dubai Duty Free—an environment that smells of every perfume you’ve never bought and every snack you didn’t know you didn’t need. The entire journey was an exhausting blur of airplane “food” (a word I now put in quotes for legal reasons), smiling and nodding at people I couldn’t escape quickly enough, and a kind of limping walk that suggested either athletic injury or ancient curse.

My legs gave up somewhere over the Caspian Sea. My patience somewhere around Gate A12.

But here’s the kicker: after all that, after the turbulence, the tray-table indignities, and the vague despair of someone eating tuna next to me mid-flight, I sat at home in my kitchen and felt—oddly—more at peace. It was here, not 30,000 feet up or 3,000 miles away, that I found myself once again travelling.

The act of exploration—true, giddy, open-mouthed exploration—has always been less about the visa stamps and more about the vision. And in this age of streaming documentaries, 3D museum tours, and the gloriously democratic rabbit hole of YouTube, curiosity has found itself uncaged.

Take, for example, Tuesday evening last week. I had no intention of leaving the house. Dinner was an uninspired plate of beige carbohydrates. But within 20 minutes of clicking around the internet with the distracted precision of a man avoiding spreadsheets, I was deep in the Carpathian Mountains, watching a Romanian shepherd sing to his dogs. Half an hour later, I was learning about the mythological origins of Mongolian throat singing from a man named Sergei, who filmed the whole thing on a Nokia circa 2003. It was, in short, marvellous.

And no queue. No jet lag. No overpriced airport sandwiches with the molecular integrity of tapioca pudding. Just wonder—unfussy, unfiltered, and unrelenting.

There is, of course, a type of romantic who insists that unless you’ve physically been somewhere, you haven’t really been there. These are the people who hike with sticks made of carbon fibre and speak of Wi-Fi blackspots as though they were religious epiphanies. I admire them. I do. But there is something equally noble—if less photogenic—about finding awe in the everyday.

Because the truth is, travel has always been more about the traveller than the terrain. We take our preoccupations with us. The man sulking in Venice about a late train is the same man sulking in Croydon about a missed bus. Likewise, the person who finds beauty in the curl of steam from a chipped teacup is also the one who gasps at the light over the Andes.

This is not a manifesto against travel. By all means, go. Pack the bag, board the plane, lose your luggage in Geneva and your temper in Naples. But don’t imagine for a moment that the act of travelling is a prerequisite for the state of wonder. That, my friend, is portable. And free.

All you need is curiosity. And maybe a decent Wi-Fi connection.

So here’s to the home office broom cupboards, the bedsits, the cramped flats with views of brick walls and possibilities. To the restless minds who wander without moving. To those who, stuck in traffic on the A1, are secretly navigating the spice markets of Marrakesh in their minds.

Exploration isn’t an itinerary—it’s an instinct.

And in this chaos, in this glorious domestic sprawl of mismatched socks and unpaid bills, we can still travel. With our minds, our screens, and the occasional daydream that smells of jet fuel and grilled halloumi.

Backpacks are optional. Curiosity is not.

Start Where You Trip: The Case for Failing Gloriously

Why your first attempt might be awful—and why that’s perfect.

There is a special kind of horror reserved for watching yourself try something for the first time. It is the kind of horror that grips you when you hear a recording of your own voice, or worse, see your own dance moves captured in the unforgiving retina of a smartphone. That’s not me, you think. Surely that’s a computer-generated parody. And yet, there you are: uncoordinated, uncertain, half-drenched in sweat, fully immersed in delusion. It's an exquisite kind of humiliation. And, let me tell you, it’s glorious.

I tripped—metaphorically and very nearly literally—into my first photography vlog not long ago. Armed with a camera I barely knew how to turn on and the sort of optimism normally reserved for cult leaders and toddlers in capes, I hit record. What followed was an assault on cinematic tradition and coherent narration alike. I was out of breath, out of frame, and halfway through my monologue when I realised I’d been speaking to a lens cap.

And yet, something beautiful emerged in the edit: not competence, no, but defiant evidence of a beginning. The kind that reminds you not that you're not there yet, but that you've left somewhere behind.

The notion that failure is something to be avoided is a relatively recent one. In the ancient world, people failed constantly. The Greek gods, who were essentially a reality TV cast with lightning powers, spent most of their time failing—at love, at war, at parenting. And they were worshipped for it. Somewhere along the way, modern culture decided that our first attempts must be dazzling, or else quietly buried beneath a blanket of self-imposed shame and a Google search for “how to fake expertise convincingly.”

This is nonsense, of course. You wouldn’t expect to play Chopin your first time at a piano. You’d expect to sound like a walrus stepping on a cat—and rightly so. The mess is the music. The trip is the start. If you skip the fall, you rob the rise of its story.

What we fear is not the failure itself, but the witness. We imagine a chorus of onlookers, arms crossed, eyebrows raised, ready to call us out as the imposters we already suspect we are. But let me offer a gentle correction: no one is watching. And if they are, they’re mostly relieved it’s not them under the spotlight.

We’ve grown up in a digital age that edits out the awkward beginning. We scroll through curated confidence—people baking flawless loaves of sourdough, running marathons at dawn, speaking Italian while doing their taxes. What we don’t see are the burnt loaves, the shin splints, or the “Ciao, your tax return is overdue.” We see only the polished product, and mistake it for a starting point.

This creates a dangerous mirage. We begin to think the first draft should be good. That the first YouTube video should go viral. That the first run should feel like a montage scene in a sports movie instead of a slow shuffle with frequent gasps and a face like an overheated tomato. The truth, naturally, is the opposite. Your first attempt will likely be bad—cringingly, stomach-turningly bad. And that’s perfect.

There’s a term in aviation called “flying dirty.” It refers to flying with landing gear down, flaps extended—maximum drag, minimal elegance. It’s how planes fly when they’re close to the ground, where precision matters more than performance. It’s not pretty, but it’s how you land.

Starting anything new means flying dirty. It means giving up on the illusion of grace and embracing the grinding, grunting, elbow-bumping effort of learning. It’s the kid on a bike with stabilisers. The amateur guitarist mangling “Wonderwall.” The first pancake that looks like a failed reconstruction of the Moon.

These are sacred rites, and they deserve not mockery but celebration. Because if you’re willing to fail in front of your own ego, you’re halfway to something better than competence—you’re on your way to authenticity. And if you do it gloriously enough, with conviction and just a touch of mad joy, you might even stumble into brilliance by mistake.

My own catalogue of glorious failures now forms a kind of museum of human endeavour gone slightly wrong. There are videos where I look like I’ve just been chased through a hedge. Photos taken with the lens cap still on. Blog posts with titles more promising than the content below them. Each one makes me wince—and smile—because each one is proof that I had the guts to try before I was ready.

So here’s my proposal: fail big. Trip on stage. Stumble in public. Make a noise so utterly daft and off-key that someone looks up and thinks, “At least I’m not that person.” And then, just when the ego is licking its wounds, get up and do it again. Because somewhere in that mess, that wobble, that undeniable humanity, is the start of something genuinely brilliant.

The only real mistake is to sit on the runway, engines off, wondering if you’ll look foolish in flight.

Fly dirty. Start where you trip. Fail gloriously.

And then? Keep going.