For weeks there has been little talk of anything else. For a few months now San Francisco has been oddly sunny and warm, 21 and 27 degrees. You might think that’s normal in California, but in San Francisco it is not. “Karl the Fog” has its own account on X. As the T-shirt says: “You’ll be Cold Later”.
But not in recent months. The St Patrick’s Day parade in mid-March basked in 28-degree sunshine.
A “No Kings” rally attracted about 50,000 people to Market Street in an explosion of sunshine, colour, protest and creativity. At 29 degrees, some protesters carried parasols, but No Ice thank you. It was all in stark contrast to the windchilled scenes of the Minnesota and New York rallies.
When I look down at the city I see neighbourhoods of flat-roofed Victorian houses all with glorious sunny open sky aspects. And I can easily count the solar panels because there are so few. Over a sunny lunch, I mention the fuel shortages in Europe and the protests in Ireland. My friend looks at me quizzically. She is smart, tuned in and worried about climate change. Yet.
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“Is that something to do with that Strait of Hormuz?” she wonders. Well, yes. “What are they protesting about? Is it America?”
Well, yes, but no.
Gas in pricey California has “surged” to almost $7 for a US gallon. Yes, folks, that’s about €5.95 in our money (or about €1.57 a litre).
The triple-spanned Bay Bridge links San Francisco with Oakland. Traditionally the plainer sister of the two local landmark bridges, it was built in 1936, six months before its glorious attention-grabbing golden sibling.
These days, the Bay Bridge is showing off its tresses with a nightly display of moving light patterns of 50,000 LEDs. The all-night every-night show is funded privately to the tune of $11 million. Expensive all-year Christmas lights.
For many the glittering Bay Bridge looks great in the night. Some think it tacky and over the top. It is another of the many successful initiatives taken by the mayor over the last year to revive San Francisco to its former position as one of the great cities of the world. At almost 3km, that’s quite a bit of bridge to light. It does make you think of the Eiffel Tower’s “five-minutes-every-hour sparkling less-is-more” spectacle. There is one consistent protester to the Bay Bridge lights. He walks along the Embarcadero waterfront, the bridge high and majestic overhead, with his home-made sign saying: “Bay Lights 360-degree pollution”.
Since December, there have been frequent power outages in San Francisco.
Just before Christmas, more than 100,000 citizens were affected by a massive power cut, resulting in chaos as self-driving taxis, Waymos, stopped dead in the middle of streets on the busiest shopping day of the year. Recently, thousands more residents were affected by what was described by the utility company as “an unplanned power outage moving quickly through the city” in 32-degree spring heat.
War? What war? Apart from that explosion of emotion on No Kings day, there is little talk about it. One smart US friend prefers to avoid watching it on the TV news as it is all so awful; and what one channel describes a United States victory the other calls a humiliation.
In the sea-swimming club, I ask Era, from Tehran, how things are at home in Iran. “They’re fine, they’re all fine. It’s Palestine we have forgotten about,” she says.
Over on Telegraph Hill there’s an Iranian flag flying outside a house. It’s the Shah version of the flag.
Most days a few fighter-jets zoom low over the city back to Travis Base on the east side of the bay.
There’s another enormous plane that flies quite low with a bulbous shape on the fuselage. It has been seen flying over California in recent weeks.
Media reports call it a “Doomsday Plane”, basically a flying nuclear control station. That’s war, not power.
“Just a training exercise,” they say.
I think I saw it while swimming in the bay, which they say is warm, too warm for this time of year at 17 degrees.
And there’s no sign of anything cooling off yet.
