Welcome to my first weekly LA Diary blog for t5m.com. It’s lovely to have you and I hope that the ramblings of an ambitious British expat in Los Angeles will do nothing less than entertain, amuse and inspire. Failing that maybe I can be the blogger you tut loudly at before turning on the Wii or attempt that tricky Julia Child recipes (I saw the movie Julie & Julia last night and now I just want to eat all of France).

But before I dive into this week’s entry, I thought I’d give you some background on me and my goals for this blog. My manifesto (blogifesto?) so to speak. I’m a journalist by trade and have been living in California for almost two and half years now but – and here’s my own personal punchline – my dream is to become a screen-writer. I’ll admit, that when I was younger, my idea of ‘making it’ was to win an armful of Oscars and bank millions but frankly, these days I’d be grateful if I could just pay the bills with my writing. Getting older: oh how it lowers the bar!

Los Angeles isn’t for everyone but I love it. I mean, really love it. I think first and foremost I love the light, the blue skies and the sunshine. I used to live in London (I was born in south London) but whenever I think about my years there my mind always goes back to how pitch black it was. I know that logically it’s not dark all the time but that’s how it felt to me. Here it’s sunny every day – sometimes relentlessly, annoyingly so – but life looks so much better when its sunny and I like that. I also like the fact that I can see palm trees from my deck, can swim outside every day and that I never have to carry an umbrella.

I thought I’d be over it by now but I’m not. I still have big movie-making dreams and this is definitely the place to be if you want to make movies (you can trip up over a dozen aspiring script-writers before you get to the queue at the post office). The talent out here is scary but that only makes me work harder. I won a film competition three months after arriving here which led me to writing and directing my first movie, Maconie’s List. Last year I made a second short and in two years have written three feature films. My goal this year is to find a manager and sell something.

However, the more pressing news is that my mum is in town. It’s the first time in two years that Babs has made a visit and she’s currently snoozing on the deck. She loves the deck. She actually sits outside and sunbathes which is something I’ve never done here. I usually only venture out at dusk for a medicinal glass of something alcoholic.

Yesterday, I took her on a bespoke sight-seeing trip around the Hollywood hills but all we really saw were other sight-seers in their elongated roofless limos gawping at half-hidden Spanish villas. I showed Babs the Holllywood sign (drive up Beachwood, you get the best view), then we stopped off in Studio City for a Starbucks and rummage through the rails at Crossroads, a cut-above-the-rest second hand clothes store. She bought a Breton striped t-shirt while I tried on shoes that made me look like a transvestite. Great fun was had by all!

I spotted a man in Starbucks working on a set design for a movie. He had a script, a stack of architectural floor plans, some odd-shaped rulers and a green pen. I wanted to ask him what the movie was but he was wearing giant ‘The Fly’ style headphones. The guy on the other side of him was also working on a script. And so was the girl on the table next to him. She had trouble seeing her laptop screen because the sunlight was so bright. It was clearly annoying her, but in my humble opinion that is still far better than flailing around in the darkness.