Jayne Dowle: Hollywood’s waking from the American dream

This boat, a lovely old steam yacht, once belonged to Dave’s family, and it is now in the Maritime Museum there. He wanted to visit it and show the children something they don’t see every day in Barnsley. We all needed a break. None of us particularly fancied chasing the winter sun in Egypt, so one rainy Saturday afternoon in September I got dangerous with Trip Advisor and the credit card.

Before bedtime, we had booked ourselves eight days, starting in Hollywood, ending up on the Queen Mary in Long Beach. We are Thomas Cook’s worst nightmare. A whole family of independent travellers who sorted it all online and over the phone – to a very helpful lady in India – and managed to survive more than a week abroad without even a tour rep to sell us a single excursion.

And, I have to admit, I just wanted to go out of sheer curiosity. It’s two years since we were last in the States, and that was to Disneyland in Florida, hardly the cutting edge. I can never understand people who say they have no interest in visiting America. How can you not be bothered about one of the biggest democracies in the world, a democracy in trouble, a democracy drowning in trillions of dollars of debt? So I went as a tourist, but with a serious, indeed, cynical, purpose. I loved it on the open-top sightseeing bus we took through Hollywood and Los Angeles to the ocean at Santa Monica. The commentary wittered on about this star living here, and that star shopping there, but what I was really interested in was the number of “for lease” signs on the office buildings we passed. Huge banks stood bereft on the sidewalk. Whole skyscrapers up for rent. Every Borders, the former bookshop chain, had blacked-out windows, a sign that even once-profitable businesses can’t keep up with the march of technology and harsh economic times.

Wandering around, I was struck by how empty the shopping malls were, especially considering that this is “holiday season” that interminable American festival which seems to run from Halloween to New Year.

To be honest, downtown San Diego on a Wednesday afternoon was a ghost town compared to Meadowhall. When you drive up the Pacific Coast Highway from here to Los Angeles, and see the sheer scale of consumerism, all the stores and restaurants and coffee shops, you have to wonder how they can all survive.

If it had been entirely up to me, I would have made a couple of stop-offs in Pittsburgh or Detroit or New Orleans, just to have a look and a further poke about. But with a six-year-old and a nine-year-old in tow, you have to compromise a bit.

Which is why we ended up in Pacific Beach, a surfer hang-out in San Diego. Seaside is seaside to kids. We might as well have been in Cleethorpes, but at least they could swim in the outdoor pool. And I did get to do a little bit of poking about. McDonald’s in Pacific Beach on a Thursday afternoon in November is probably as good an indication of the state of the nation as anywhere on Wall Street.

Three leisure-suited gentlemen in their sixties or seventies, dragging out their cups of coffee to last all afternoon. Two lots of grandparents fussing over under-fives, probably, hopefully, offering free day-care whilst their parents worked. A lady in her fifties in the corner with a young man and a laptop, sorting out her health insurance.

A posse of teenagers in hoodies, attempting to look menacing, but completely thrown by our accents. Were we Scottish? Australian? When we told them we were from Yorkshire, one of them asked if Yorkshire was a country attached to England. Considering it has one of the most advanced educational systems in the world, I am never ceased to be amazed by the American grasp of global geography.

That said, I should mention Richard, the nice man running the T-shirt shop in the amusement park in Pacific Beach. He had travelled to Europe to visit a girlfriend in Switzerland, so had some understanding of international matters. And he was most concerned that we were not to get the wrong impression of America. Were we bothered by the homeless people in San Diego, he asked. Had any of them been aggressive to us?

He explained that people down on their luck are making their way to San Diego because it has a relatively warm climate and a relatively thriving tourist trade. They come to look for something in America. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that they were what I had come to look for too.