But there are beautiful pockets. There is still an orange grove on the university campus at Northridge. We went walking up in the Santa Monica mountains at the end of Reseda Boulevard. You can reach the sea from here. It felt familiar to me as desert, hot, dry and scrubby, and yet, look closely at this picture and you'll see snow-capped mountains in the distance. This is a real buzz for me.
I know people love to knock LA, but out in the suburbs in the San Fernando Valley where we stayed, I would sum it up as 'birdsong, grapefruit and sunshine'. Don't forget that that when someone once couldn't understand how the arch-European intellectual Arnold Schoenberg could live in LA after Vienna, he said, 'I get to play tennis every day.'
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