The Milk-God pedalled a broken old Raleigh bike around the streets of Samode. It was painted in brilliant white and had a rusty cart attached to the seat-post. The bicycle was a cast-off from England, donated by a charity of some kind. The cart had come from who knew where. Most people reasoned that the Milk-God must have built it himself.

He distributed his product — the one we named him for — to the village, and occasionally to bewildered tourists from the Palace-turned-hotel which overlooked the streets from the top of the hill.
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“I’m a mermaid” she said through the bedraggled tangles of her salt-bleached hair, but the track-marks on her arms suggested otherwise.

The legs where a tail should have been were a dead give-away too.

She was just lying there on Malibu Beach, covered in wet sand and gasping in the late-afternoon sun, her fair shoulders turning slowly pink as they burned.

I sat down next to her, curious.

“And what are you doing here?”

She offered one word, “banished”, and then fell silent.
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There’s a flipside to my decision to move to SF, a sacrifice which I don’t absolutely have to make, but probably should.

That sacrifice is my car.

I fell in love with her, and for some reason coined the name “Betsie”, the instant I saw her on the lot almost exactly a week after I landed in San Francisco. I’ve always had a thing for Jeep Wranglers - they just look so effortlessly confident and yet somehow quaint… almost cute.

And given that I’d moved here to experience America, what better way than in an all-American car?

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