More to love about LA

'...[A] settler pushes west and sings a song, and the song echoes out forever and fills the unknowing air. It is the American sound. It is hopeful, big-hearted, idealistic; daring, decent and fair.'

I've sometimes asked musician friends if they can identify the source of this quote. Aaron Copland, Elmer Bernstein (the creators of 'Big Sky' music)? No, it's from Ronald Reagan's second inaugural address. Whether the speechwriter (Peggy Noonan?) was thinking of 'The Open Prairie' sequence of Copland's Billy the Kid ballet I don't know, but it reminds me that I share Reagan's love of the open spaces of the West.

I was struck by this love when we were at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley earlier this year. It's the reason for the site.

And I caught my breath again recently when we saw the San Fernando Valley from back of the Hollywood Hills.

This landscape doesn't have Central Australia's ribbons of ochre and mauve hills diminishing into vapoury blue peaks, but it still has the heart-swelling invitingness of open space. I love the feeling.

I love also the way you pass through different language areas in LA. Of course there's always Spanish, but you might pass through a Korean precinct

and the other day down Victory Boulevard we saw a script we couldn't identify - Russian, Thai? The woman sitting next to us on the bus filled us in. She was reading Los Angeles' Armenian-language newspaper.

These zones you pass through give the clue to how to see LA. It's not a city in the traditional sense of something derived from the old walled-city concept. It's a conurbation of old ranches (some maps show where they were), farms, orange groves, movie lots...Tarzana was once the ranch of novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs, who named it after his most-famous character. Calabasas Junction, where I went swimming at the lap pool last week, was an old stagecoach stop.

As a city, LA's quite diffuse. You have to get most nearly everywhere by car (though we've walked from Kittredge to Ventura Boulevard and back, and they're restoring the public transport). And it may not have the compressed excitement of a Manhattan. But there's citrus and sunshine and birdsong as compensation. And it's no less active nor vibrant for all of that.