Does kiddy fun rule out a grown-up good time?
Top of her list of complaints seemed to be linguistic ones: she couldn’t stand the word “atop”, as in “fried egg served atop a toasted breakfast muffin”. Worse still was “kittycorner”, meaning, for some inexplicable reason, diagonally opposite, as in “Stephen is facing Jane, but Georgia is kittycorner to Tom”. These word things happen in England, too, I told her: I have recently had to cancel all our newspapers for fear of seeing one more instance of the word “iconic”. Anyway, my wife and I stayed at Shutters on the Beach hotel, near the pier in Santa Monica. It is a charming hotel (even if that is close to being an oxymoron in my book); there was a comfortable bed, friendly service, plenty of space, and our room had a “full ocean view” of the Pacific and the end of the pier. We pulled back the balcony doors to enjoy it, but quickly closed them again to cut out the noise from the building opposite. It was the kitchen block, the room-service guy told us, but why it roared all night like
