It's been years since I last visited LA, so the Broad was new to me: an enormous modern art gallery downtown, with two floors of exhibits and 2,000 pieces in storage, ready to be loaned out around the world.

Our friends in San Diego used to live in Los Angeles and took the opportunity to come back up to the city with us to visit the gallery. On a cool Sunday afternoon in March, the entryway was busy with people, but most of them were queuing for one of Yayoi Kusama's infinity rooms. Upstairs, the bulging, organic concrete shapes give way to light, open galleries: it's the kind of enormous modern building that can hold hundreds of people without much trouble.

It's my first time being in the US for girl scout cookie season, so I finally get to actually try some instead of just imagining what they're like from pop culture references.

We got most of ours from order forms brought into Jules's work by doting parents, though the kids did help with the deliveries or write little thank you notes. One girl scout was selling cookies outside of the supermarket, so we even got cash out to let the kid practice making change – though her mum was doing most of the actual selling, and to be honest I guess handling actual money isn't really a useful skill any more (friends with kids report that shopping playsets now come with pretend credit cards and pretend readers).

The ones I've tried so far:

Thin Mints: These are fine, I guess? Much like an After Eight mint with a biscuit inside. I really liked mint-flavoured sweets as a kid – the green Cornetto was a favourite, and also inexplicably the mint Aero – but as an adult I tend to prefer real mint, and to eat it with savoury food.

Tagalongs: Heavy on the peanut butter, for which (the opposite of mint) I’m more of a fan than I was as a child, but I still don’t much care for the texture.

Girl Scout S'mores: A sugar bomb, but sometimes you want a sugar bomb. I’ve never actually eaten a proper campfire s’more, though as a teenager I did regularly babysit kids who – having lived in the US for a couple of years – liked to try to make them in the microwave. And I did once get evacuated from a hotel after some drunk people tried to melt marshmallows on a gas hob. These cookies are a quick and efficient way to eat chocolate and marshmallow that don't involve any appliances.

Adventurefuls: We asked the very shy child selling cookies with her mum outside the QFC which were her favourites, so of course we had to buy a box of them. They’re drier than you’d expect for something marketed as ‘brownie-inspired’ (so I guess not made with real Brownies?), but salted caramel is popular for a reason.

Samoas: Okay, these are actually really good. Enough coconut to make them interesting, not too much chocolate, and the caramel makes them nice and chewy. I would buy these in their own right. The main problem is that they are very small, so it’s far too easy to eat five in rapid succession.

I still think there’s something a bit odd about training up little kids as individualistic fundraisers, and I think there’s probably a lot of frazzled parents running logistics operations. But I will eat the several boxes of Samoas we’ve got tucked away in the cupboard now, and order more next year.

We flew down to Southern California this weekend for admin reasons (there's a consulate there that Jules needed a visa from) and also to see some friends in San Diego. They have a little house in the hills with a garden full of jade plants, which I had only ever seen potted as house plants in the UK. We came home with a bag full of loquats and lemons the size of my head: a bit of sunshine to lighten up a cold Seattle March.

I've just finished reading the Booker Prize-winning Prophet Song, a near-future dystopia in which author Paul Lynch imagines Ireland spiralling into an authoritarian fascist state. The novel follows Eilish, who is forced into more and more desperate actions as she struggles to hold her family together amidst the terror of disappearances and violent conflict.

As well as a literary novel, Prophet Song is a genuinely gripping read, and one I stayed up late reading (and stayed up even later thinking about). It feels very real: because it is very real. From Gaza to Ukraine to Syria, ordinary people like Eilish, with their ordinary jobs and ordinary children and ordinary concerns about ordinary aging parents, are living through extraordinary violence and hardship.

Though they're very different pieces of writing, Prophet Song echoed, for me, Jon McGregor's short story, 'Supplementary Notes to the Testimony of Appellants B&E' (in his 2012 collection This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You) which I read a few months ago. McGregor's story transplants the harrowing experiences faced by migrant refugee children as they attempt to flee conflict, to the fenlands of eastern England.

Like Prophet Song, 'Supplementary Notes' situates the impossible decisions of people living through violence in familiar landscapes. Stories like this require those of us living far from war to imagine how we might respond to the impossible choices currently being faced by people around the world. When every new day brings more harrowing true stories, these works of fiction also help us understand that the most awful experiences are still happening to real people, who live whole lives and are more than just the worst thing that ever happened to them.

#Reading #Fiction #Novels #ShortStories

Sunset looking west from Seattle over Elliott Bay on a clear, unseasonably warm February evening

Elliott Bay

Downtown Seattle curves around Elliott Bay, which leads into Puget Sound. If you're so inclined, you can take a boat up the Sound into the Salish Sea, from where you can continue north to Vancouver or west into the Pacific. There are almost always container ships in the Bay, as well as ferries heading out from Seattle to Kitsap County and beyond. Cruise ships to Canada and Alaska also leave from the piers downtown.

From Belltown, where we live, the sun sets west across Puget Sound behind Bainbridge Island: the mountains in the background might be the Olympus mountains, but we haven't ventured out there yet...

#Seattle

The Public Market neon sign on the corner of Pike Place, late on a sunny winter afternoon.

Pike Place Market

The main part of the market is busy with tourists even on a February weekday afternoon, though they're mostly congregated around the fish market watching the fishmongers toss salmon to each other. The rabbit warren of lower levels of shops and the steep staircases between Pike Place and Western Avenue is much quieter – with the exception of the Gum Wall, which is truly horrible and yet inexplicably popular.

The Space Needle, from ground level at the Seattle Center, on a grey February day.

New city, new camera

I'm funemployed for the moment, and I unexpectedly got an honorarium from some volunteer work I did late last year, so I have treated myself to a new fun camera. I've always wanted an instant camera but I'm not a great photographer so I thought it would mean either a lot of wasted film, or would never get used. But someone I follow recently posted about the Instax Mini Evo, which might be the best of both worlds: a small internal memory (~40 shots, I think) and a print on demand function.

You can save digital copies of photos – but only if you've printed them first. I'm hoping that this will make me more conscientious about taking and printing photographs: I get the fun instant photo experience, but I have to commit to a physical copy if I want to share the digital one.

#Seattle #photography