Jesse Spencer

It’s interesting that my most recent post has generated more readers than I’ve ever had before – more than doubling my previous ‘best day ever’ in number. And according to wordpress stats, they’re all here for Jesse Spencer!

The Australian hunk has quite the online community – which I applaud I assumed James McAvoy was the bigger star thanks to Narnia and Atonement, but I guess House probably reaches more people on average.

What a hunk. Though now I’m wishing I’d taken a second picture without so much double-chin and frizzy hair from me…

Oh and a word about Wanted: Go see it! It’s high octane thrills that shouldn’t be taken seriously at all but is great fun.

But if you’re weak of stomach then give it a miss, as the blood and ‘ouch’ factor is rather high. There’s a particularly nasty moment involving a knife colliding with a hand that I wish I could erase from my memory. Just thinking about it gives me sympathy pains for the unfortunate character.

A little blessed girl in Los Angeles

I arrived in LA last Saturday and have been so blessed in this one week. I’ve been formally offered the job that I moved over for (I would have stayed in LA if I hadn’t, but life would have been much less stable had it not worked out), found a great apartment with a nice flatmate, and am making friends and settling in.

Though it is 110 degree weather in the Valley this week! I understand the logic of getting to work for 8am and finishing at 5pm – you’re in lovely air-conditioning during the hottest part of the day. My drive to work, through the Malibu Canyons, is exquisite and I cannot believe how blessed I am (why use the word ‘luck’?) to be in the circumstances that I am.

Living with my best friend, who is on her way to becoming a Hollywood writer and working her way up, I’ve made some fantastic connections, and last night, on just my 6th night in LA, one of those connections was kind enough to take me to the Wanted premiere at Mann Theatre, right by UCLA.

Now, I do not yet have a car. The friend I am living with had a high school graduation to attend (her brother was valedictorian), and the new friend I was attending the premiere with works near the premiere and had to stay at work until right before the event, not giving him any time to pick me up from the Valley, obviously. So I had to get a bus to UCLA. It turned out, in the end, that I had to get FOUR buses to UCLA. I made it there within 5 minutes of the cut-off point for picking up reserved tickets. How disappointing it would have been to arrive 5 minutes on the wrong side, after all of that travel.

Anyway, because my friend works in the industry, we attended the after-show party, and here are my celebrity pictures of the evening that I was forced to take! I normally don’t enjoy being the kind of person who asks for a picture, but someone else I was with convinced me to – to prove I was there!

After all, I’m not in the industry, and not looking to be either. So, here follows my pictures. I had a chance to talk to them all, and many other producers and writers too. It was a great night, and just amazing that it was in my first week in Los Angeles.

James McAvoy ‘Wanted’ (you see why, right?) – lovely guy, such a pro

Anne-Marie Duff: amazing British actress and wife to James McAvoy, and lovely to boot

Jesse Spencer: stars in House and for me, as a Brit(ican) it was especially fabulous to meet him as he was in the Australian show Neighbours for years, and as a teenager watching it every day I had a MAJOR crush on him. I’m really pleased he’s made it over in America now, and that he’s a nice bloke.

I also had the pleasure of meeting Terrance Stamp – what a legend!

Arrived!

Here I am, writing a post having moved to Los Angeles. Already I’ve made friends, avoided high-calorie American treats, and been invited to a movie premiere. Amazing things can happen in the city of angels!

Changes are a-happenin’

So anyone who bothers to check nuggetoftruth on a semi-regular basis will assume that I seem to be suffering a form of writers’ block lately. The truth nugget this time is that actually I’ve been immensely busy – I’m moving to Los Angeles next week! So from now on, where before this website was a hodge-podge of articles, links, and opinions, it’s going to become more of a ‘British-girl-in-LA’ type thing. So keep checking back for my observations of life on the west coast, from the POV of a Britican.

Being a dual national, harf and haff, I don’t look at the States through the eyes of a foreigner. BUT, some things will take a bit of getting used to. Like the whole tipping culture – here in Britainland I like to tip if the service has been good and I think they deserve it. But in America you’d better tip, no matter what – or else! To me that’s illogical. A tip should be a reward for good service, not for any service; after all, isn’t that what the bill is for?

And the fact that in the US, what’s on the price sticker isn’t the actual price, but just the price before tax. Seeing as how we’re taxed through the nose here in England (in fact, noses themselves will soon be taxed. Bigger noses taxed more, for environmental reasons. They breathe in more clean air, you see?), I can actually appreciate seeing exactly what the government takes on every purchase. Not like here, where it’s quite easy to forget that we pay more for pretty much everything because of the greedy government – because what it says on the price sticker is what we pay in total. They take the taxing mental arithmatic out of the situation, to tax us more in pennies! Sneaky.

I rather lost my train of thought with that rant. I’m not a big fan of our Labour government, as you may be able to tell. In fact, I’ll be quite glad to be rid of them – by fleeing to America, of course. Now, you may be thinking that I’m viewing the States through rose coloured glasses (not rose colored – I’m going to keep my Englishness. Especially the accent – to entice the hunky hunky Cali men). But I’m sure that once I’m there and I encounter annoyances I’ve not yet dreamed of, I’ll realise that wherever you go there’ll be things that suck. I just can’t imagine it sucking worse than it sucks right now in England. True, I could be living in Zimbabwe, gazing on Mugabe’s gold palace while my stomach churns in hunger. True, I could be stuck in North Korea, with no access to the outside world. I could even be in one of the 100 tribes dotted through the Amazon and South America, never having had any contact with modern conveniences such as pennicillin, electricity, and Clinique.

But you can but work with the life you’ve been given, and I’ve been so blessed to have been born a Britican. And right now, choosing between the two, I’ve got to say that I think Britain is being destroyed from the inside by its greedy, corrupt ruling class, whereas America, while being very far from perfect, has a written constitution to protect the interests of its people, and that constitution is the most valued institution America has.

Viva America! Viva Jamba Juice, and ridiculous tipping, and confusing price stickers!

PS. Check out the new navigation bar at the top called ‘Nugget of Contents’, containing a list of all the posts on this blog.