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Looking over the balcony of my hotel room, directly beneath me, 12 floors down, is the swimming pool, a patent medicinal blue, not quite kidney-shaped, more spleen with attached gall bladder. There’s a man swimming slow, curvy lengths; it’s 6.30am, around him Los Angeles fades grey and smogged into the distant hill. This little figure is the only sign of life. Nothing stirs; the gridded streets blink silently. I’d been told LA is a city that rises early. It obviously doesn’t get out much; only a few birds called their agents.

The man’s breaststroke has become unsynchronised, his arms and legs contradict. He is disproportionately, fantastically annoying – I have a barely containable desire to drop the television over the railings. George Bush is being courageous and advertising erectile dysfunction from a flaccid leather armchair in the middle of a programme on power aerobics from Hawaii. It would be a good opening shot, follow the box down in slow motion, LA skyline spinning fast, George promising his fellow Americans sustained growth, then crashing into the water pinning the get-fit-get-ahead spaz to the Mexican-style tiles down the deep end. I flick a cigarette instead.

Breakfast is on a trolley; the milk jug has a little cardboard sign beside it that says simply, unequivocally, unarguably “milk”, just in case you thought it might be toothpaste or root beer, or the elixir of life. Or maybe the milk’s just got more clout and can demand top billing. The tea and coffee don’t get a mention and it’s far harder to tell what they are. The Danish has a website – everything here has a website. Cyberspace hangs over us like digital thunder.

LA is not what you expect. Personally I didn’t expect a northern hemisphere version of Johannesburg without the barbed wire. Low, creeping faux family-friendly, built in a vernacular of amateur whim and sentimental detail, patched onto functional boxes with occasional timid touches of eccentricity. Like Johannesburg, God and gardeners lend the major architectural direction. In the steady retirement climate, almost any herbage can be trained up a wall to obscure a building. Very little here has the energy to grow above two storeys, and the overall sense is of a hasty impermanence, a city thrown up on a whim while they thought of something serious to put in its place.

LA is a suburb in search of a city, a ramble of stupid, gullible bricks and plaster that got misdirected. Extraordinarily, there is not a single man-made thing that is a recognisable icon of the place, no Eiffel Tower, no Big Ben, no Empire State Building. It is the only major city in the world that doesn’t have a postcard image, except for that cheap billboard saying “HOLLYWOOD”, like a name tape sewn into a pair of school knickers, as if Los Angelenos might from time to time look up to remind themselves where they are.

Nobody could ever conceivably miss LA, think with pleasure about returning here, want their grandchildren to grow up here, but this is arguably the most important non-capital in the world. Even if you have never been here, this place has touched you – more than that, it has run its smoggy, soft hands all over you. This is where up to 90% of the world’s culture comes from: movies, television, recorded music, pornography, and all their myriad spin-off industries. We may not like to think it, but it is the 20th century’s incarnation of classical Athens, of Rome, Constantinople or Renaissance Florence. For our moment this is the hub of civilisation, and we think so little of it, it thinks so little of itself, it can’t even build a decent fountain.

LA is empty and quiet – not a calm, at-ease quiet but a holding-your-breath-something-bad’s-about-to-happen quiet. You walk about the broad, low-rise streets and feel uncomfortably as if you’ve stepped into an episode of The Twilight Zone, occasional finding collections of daytime shoppers, valley girls thumbing racks, going “Whatever” to each other like dowdy budgerigars. Rodeo Drive is one of the most famous shopping streets in the world and it’s a big disappointment. Gaggles of seriously confused Japanese and out-of-town Americans wander around with the bored, neurotic wives of studio accountants and florists to the stars, who shop in the distracted, therapeutic way of women who have reached a precarious chemical balance and need a mantra of familiar labels to stop them exploding at the psychic seams.

Walking in Hollywood is an unnatural occupation and immediately marks you out as a non-player, one of the little people, a bum in search of a seat. Actually it’s like being on safari, because as a result of begetting the Lion King share of our culture, this is the Serengeti of celebrity. We all keep a weather eye out for big-game stars. I catch sight of my first in a shopping mall early one morning. There, is she, shyly stepping though the shadows, poised as if for flight, Audrey Hepburn. Unmistakable, razor-thin in a Givenchy evening dress, hair in the characteristic chignon, a discreet little tiara and the big black Roman holiday glasses. In her evening-gloved hands she’s clasping a small blue box from Tiffany’s, of course. I tick her off in my I-Spy book and walk round the corner and, would you credit it, there’s another Audrey Hepburn, identical down to the blue box. And then another, and another – I can barely believe my luck. I’ve come across the annual migration of Audreys. Very few people have ever seen these shy, utterly beguiling creatures on their immemorial trek.

I know that the more literal of you will want to point out that Audrey Hepburn is, in fact, dead. Well, I knew that. But I also know that (as the deific biopics say) stars never die: they glitter for ever in the celluloid hearts of their fans. I’ve seen a dozen Mickey Mice, and on Sunset Boulevard a lone Charlie Chaplin shouting into a mobile phone. In Hollywood it comes as no surprise to see the dead walk, because frankly none of the natives look 100% alive anyway, not life as we know it, Jim.

Perhaps the point of LA is that it isn’t a real place: it’s a cowboy-town frontpage, a back lot, a sound stage waiting for a Leonardo da Spielberg to apply the SFX and the soundtrack. Perhaps the big, bland, blue sky is really a mat on which the computer graphics will be masked in post-production. It’s a place that’s not supposed to be visited, it’s supposed to visit you. This is, as they endlessly say, a dream factory, and like most dreams it’s better if you’re not awake and you forget it once you are.

As well as rising early, LA goes to bed early. By 9pm the restaurants are emptying, by 10pm they’ve stopped serving. The streets are deserted again; only the visiting rap stars’ stretch limo circle slowly, like great nocturnal beetles, their variegated fairy lights winking a secret amorous semaphore. I expect to find a couple mating in a parking lot. Ask anyone who lives here what the best thing about LA is and the answer is invariably valet parking. And that tells you just about everything you need to know about LA.

Never was it so true of a place that the best thing to come out of it was the road north. But then the road north of LA would be the best thing to come out of almost anywhere, and I’ve wanted to travel it since I sat in the dormitory at school and listened to the Grateful Dead and read On the Road. Route 1 is one of the great journeys in the world, a winding highway that hugs the Pacific coast up to San Francisco. The other great thing about this journey is that you’re allowed to smoke. The main reason I haven’t been to California before is their impertinent, nannyish tobacco fatwa. This is the only place on earth where smoking can kill you stone dead in seconds: you get so frothingly angry at the temperate health fascists, your head might explode. Cigarettes in California should carry warnings saying: “Prohibiting smoking can cause fatal heart attacks, strokes and spontaneous miscarriages.”

Everywhere else in the world, smoking is done inside; in California you do it in the street. All the coolest people are posing on street corners looking like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Restaurants will let you smoke if they have a garden or open area, and they just love it if you do: it adds a rakish, bohemian, devil-may-care atmosphere that the locals are too fearfully self-obsessed to provide. I asked in one place if they had somewhere I could light up, and the waiter beamed, “Hold on a moment, sir, “ pushed a button, and the roof slid off.

Back on the road in the open Mustang, we sashay out of LA through Santa Monica towards the sea, along Venice Beach, a Blackpool-like strech of oscillating buttocks being leered at by gang-bangers in risibly baggy shorts. Muscle Beach is a lounge of thick-necked men with blurred blue prison tattoos, looking bored, all in stark contrast to the surburban-lawned Santa Monica. This place is noticeably ethnic, black and Hispanic. A group of radical Muslims dressed up in uniforms, like extras from a silent version of The Lives of a Bengal Lancer with Ray-Ban product placement, shout separatism to a rubbish-strewn strip of grass.

We slowly leave the LA ‘burbs behind and hit Route 1 proper. Apart from anything else, this road is an impressive feat of engineering, cutting through the cliffs that mark the end of the continental United States. This is the boundary road of the great itchy trek west, the 200-year journey that was Europe’s last great adventure, which started with the precipitous, dour landing on Plymouth Rock and finished with the migration of Okies to pick oranges and lettuce. It’s a cliché that the story of America is a journey, or a series of journeys, but like a surprising number of clichés it’s surprisingly true. Migration is at the heart of America. On average, Americans move every three years.

Route 1 was built when America’s journey had stalled, become a desperate shuffling queue for a hand-out. It was one of the monumental engineering projects instigated by Roosevelt to turn the Depression, built at a cost that made it mile for mile about as expensive as getting to the moon, and it was essentially unnecessary. There is no great need to concert LA to San Francisco: they’ve never had much to say to each other. This road was an act of faith, and a perfect example of the hope that the trek is more important than the destination.

Our first stop is Santa Barbara, a Spanish-ish residential town of quaint prettiness. Santa Barbara is very nice indeed, they’re nice people here, and so they should be: they’ve spent a lot of money making themselves nice. There’s a sense that the whole place has been constructed as a perfect, smug example of small-town America, a heart-warming show town. There’s no industry here except service industry and slothful self-love. The shops are twee and cute and sell a million varieties of soap; you could browse for a lifetime upgrading your T-shirt collection. In a dozen little cafes they sit under a rich man’s sun and read the New York Times literary review.

If California claimed independence it would immediately be one of the half-dozen richest countries in the world, and Santa Barbara is one of its richest spots. Here you can see what the collected dreams and collated wishes of uncountable wealth come up with as a nice place to live: an intellectually undemanding, cinnamon-flavoured, provincial, lethargic Pleasantville that’s both strangely alluring and creepily repellent. Is this really what’s at the top of the pyramid? Is this really the last square on the Monopoly board?

I suppose it is. Santa Barbara with its brain in neutral, comfy-fit, easy listening, easy eating, easy streets. Even the beggars here have a laid-back insouciance. A healthy, semi-comatose young man sits in the shade with a tin cup and a cardboard sign that reads: “Why lie, I’ll spend it on beer.” I badly want to kick his head in.

In the big bookshop with a café, naturally, there’s a master class on how to become a writer, and I take a seat with four aspiring would-be romantic novelists and a man who I’m sure has a penchant for bondage erotica. The lecturer is a professional writing teacher who spends the first 20 minutes telling us how well qualified he is to teach us how to write. His CV seems to be strangely bereft of any published work except the book he’s now selling on how to write books, called Let the Crazy Child Write. “You’re three people,“ he enthuses, “a head editor, a head writer and a crazy child, like in Freud, the unconscious. Crazy Child says, imagine a three-legged dog, okay? Now imagine a three-legged dog running!” he beams a smug Freudian beam. “You can’t. Isn’t that great? You can’t imagine a three-legged dog running, can you?” Well, yes, actually, I can. Thank God I never learnt how to write. There is some great metaphor or symbol in this but for the life of me I can’t imagine it – this man talking about how everything that ever happened to you is inscribed in every atom of your body, and you have to tune out to tune in, and that he’d once met Allen Ginsberg so he knows about feelings.

But I walk out of the bookshop with an armful of things to read, some of the most disciplined, technically brilliant, head and heart literature of the 20th century: Fitzgerald, West, Chandler. Kerouac and Steinbeck, who produced the greatest Californian story of all, The Grapes of Wrath. This stretch of coast has given us some of the best books of the century, and they go some way to mitigating for Baywatch and Star Wars.

Next door is a chaotic record shop. Every journey needs its soundtrack, and among the CDs I buy for the car is The Best of the Byrds, which I haven’t heard since school. The old knit-yourself-into-a-gonk bloke at the till says: “If you’re interested in Roger McGuinn, he’s playing here tomorrow.”

In a nice Spanish hacienda-style theatre, McGuinn walks onto the stage dressed in black. He looks like a good-natured liberal studies lecturer with a 12-string guitar, unrecognisable from the helmet-haired, trippy-spectacled dude on the record cover. He does a little light chat: “So Dylan wrote this line on a napkin and said, sing this, and I did, and this is how it goes,” He did all the old ones, “Mr Tambourine Man”; “All I Really Want to Do”, and when he started “The Ballad of Easy Rider”, the damnedest thing happened: I began to cry. For a moment I couldn’t think why, but then of course I did know why. I was just unprepared. Nothing, but nothing – no image, no taste, no scent of cabbage and floor polish – can whisk you back like the popular music from the time when popular music was written just for you. The 1960s were my formative years, and I was back on the iron bed in boarding school in flat, grey, clagged-clay Hertfordshire, turning the volume up on the Dansette, pictures of Don McCullin’s war and Martin Luther King sellotaped to the wall behind me, with everything else before me and this image of California in bright Day-Glo hippie colour, the coolest, most energising place in the world.

California was the filament in the light bulb whose hot, bright ideas lit up the darkness of post-war, post-empire, short-back-and-sides Britain. Whatever I have become, those years between 14 and 19 made me; I was a sponge for ideas and beliefs and hope, I’m marked indelibly as a child of the 1960s, tattooed by peaceful protest and women’s lib and civil rights and ban the bomb. Being here, finally, in this laid-back, reverential hall felt like a secret reunion of ex-heretics. All around were men and women of about my age, their hair now faded grey to bald, dressed in paunchy jeans and Gap T-shirts, still wearing secret talismans of an earlier, wilder life. The string of love-beads, a turquoise and silver bracelet, the Joan Baez hair framing faces that no longer looked like Ali MacGraw. It was touching and it was sad and more than a bit pathetic. What had we all become? Computer programmers, muffin shop tycoons, writers, parents, mortgage holders, decaflatte drinkers, ex-smokers, early risers, neighbourhood watch co-ordinators.

We got stiffly to our feet and clapped the encores, applauded and cheered the memory of what we once believed and wanted to be. And then he ruined it all by inviting us back to the folk den on his website. On every face I saw a frisson of regret and guilt – it wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Next day I saw a matinee of the new Austin Powers movie and it annoyed me; I didn’t laugh. Current America has ridiculed and buried the 1960s, and everything it stood for, so deeply. The rational Right has broken the butterfly on the wheel so comprehensively that now, to most American kids, the 1960s is something that happened only in England, all dolly birds and moptops and funny old David Bailey types, Carnaby Street and innocent sex. It’s easy to dismiss with a sneer, but at the time, for us, the energy and the momentum of 1960s were not in Liverpool or London but here in America, and it was much harder, more political, more purposeful. The names come back: Mayor Daley, Lieutenant Calley, the Minutemen, the Soledad brothers, Abbie Hoffman and Kent State. How come we swapped the Whole Earth catalogue for LL Bean’s catalogue, and when did Ralph Nader morph into Bill Gates?

Of course my morbid reverie could have something to do with the fact that it would be my birthday in two days and I’d be 45, closer to being a pensioner than a teenager. I have never regretted getting a year older, experience older, experience has always seemed to be a fair swap for youth, but I do regret some of the things I left behind. And I wanted to see if this road that once seemed as impossibly romantic as Xanadu or Shangri-La was where I had left them.

Out of Santa Barbara, with its gated residential ghetto, Hope Ranch, so exclusive it’s invisible behind walls of greenery, past the golf courses where you can catch sight of the staggeringly rich children of the 1960s who’ve swapped Harleys for electric golf buggies. One of the odd things about California is that everyone over the age of 40 seems to have retired or at least is starting out on a relaxed, home-bound second career. The day-to-day business of the state is left entirely in the hands of children. Everyone you come across doing a job is still at school, and they go about business with an exaggerated politeness and prematurely furrowed brows. I bought some chewing gum, the chewing gum had a website. What could there possibly be on a chewing gum’s home page? When you’ve finished with it, does it stick to the bottom of your screen?

Lompoc, ugly name, ugly place, another dull, sprawling municipality with fantastically wide streets. American towns that can’t be bothered to build anything over three storeys often do this, as if calling them boulevards is going to fool anyone into thinking they’re the Vienna of the Wild West. There are millions of towns like Lompoc, spread from California to Maine, with the same concession shops and fast-food restaurants and illuminated signs on poles. They are where the vast majority of Americans exist and they’re a reminder that, on the whole, despite the money and the power and the glory, you’d rather live in a tent than in provincial USA.

Lompoc is a service town: there’s a huge air base here and rusting nuclear silos. Just to the east is Los Alamos, where they discovered what you can do with a well-split atom. Even though California has irredeemably dumbed down the world’s culture, it could have been worse – they could have dumbed it off altogether. We stopped here because they promised a flower festival. Intercontinental ballistic missiles and cut flowers are the town’s two industries, that and the wearing of bellicose baseball caps. The festival is a ragged parade of high-school bands, firemen, the Asian Immigrants’ Association, and hairy rednecks in an army-surplus Jeep with a heavy machine gun mounted on it calling for a holy war against drugs through a megaphone: “Do you love Jesus?” Nobody replies, because they’re so far away from the sidewalk they can’t hear.

On up the coast. Every other building seems to be a U-Lock storage warehouse or an animal hospital. The number of vets and pet parlours gets disturbing; either Californians are the worst, most dysfunctional animal lovers in the world or all the Ihasa apsos are screaming neurotic hypochondriacs. Probably both.

San Luis Obispo is the home of the barbecue. Well, I suppose somewhere has to be. Barbecuing here, says the guidebook, is a religion. Don’t so many religions end up as barbecues? Every restaurant advertises special old-time barbecue be anything but ancient old-time? How can a barbeque be anything but ancient old-time? Chucking meat onto an open fire is prehistoric. I see a fleeting sign for a Museum of Barbecuing. Well, I think, we just have to go – but then I change my mind. It will never be as good as I can imagine it. Some things are best left tantalisingly unexplored. I can fondly fantasise about rooms of barbecue, a briquette from Custer’s last barbecue, a Ku Klux Klan hot cross barbecue, the tongs Buzz Aldrin took to the moon, the John F Kennedy memorial barbecue flame . . . Barbecues are to cooking what Stonehenge is to architecture: a start.

We went to what was billed as the best in town and, by implication, the whole damn world. It was hellish auto-da-fé in a car park, stoked by a greasy, sweating yob who poked seared carcasses with the malevolence of a Hades work experience student. Everything for 20 yards was treacly with gritty black fat. We got given two ribs on a paper plate and a Styrofoam cup of mushy baked beans and a side of slaw (Side of Slaw ought to be a minor character from Beowulf). In the shade of a pick-up truck, the ribs tasted of cow dung and creosote, shards of flesh had been welded to the vast hacked bone and had to be gnawed until they resembled oily sacking. It was one of the foulest and most dentally challenging eating experiences I can remember. This doesn’t taste remotely like beef, I said. “No, it wouldn’t, it’s pork.” Christ, the pig must have been the size of a rhino.

Entertaining and energetic though barbecue culture was, it wasn’t the real point of San Luis Obispo: that is the Madonna Inn. Set right on the motorway, the Madonna Inn is one of the wonders of California – no, it’s one of the great wonders of the world. If you stay in only one hotel in the whole of our life, it just has to be the Madonna Inn. The rooms are all unique and called things like Romance, Hearts and Flowers, and Caveman. It is a huge rambling jumble of gaudy decoration and riotous colour. Let the Crazy Child cater. Nothing to do with the singer or indeed the mother of Jesus. It was conceived 30 years ago by a road builder called Madonna and his wife, Mrs Madonna, one of the great surnames of history. The Madonna Inn is the Vatican of kitsch: it has an obsessive, slavering attention to doll’s-house detail with an equally complete disregard for form or structure, which is the true mark of great kitsch.

You could sneer at the Madonna Inn but it wouldn’t care, it would be like spitting at Niagara. It’s constructed on such a clichéd sensual scale that the sneers just bounce off, irony sidles away defeated. The Madonna Inn is as close as I’ll probably ever get to seeing heaven, because in heaven if we are relieved of earthly burdens and physical desires, so surely we must also finally be able to lay down the handbag of good taste.

On up Route 1 to San Simeon, we pass a truck bearing the sign “Culver City Meat, you can’t beat our meat”. San Simeon is famous for one thing, Hearst Castle, a gloomy robber press baron’s palace on top of a hill. American’s often say they don’t have any history – they say it to us as a sort of polite apology, because we obviously have so much and because they think we don have any hot water or dentist, and so history is a consolation. It’s nonsense, of course, America has as much history as anywhere else. What Americans mean is they don’t build history, their past is nomadic. Only a very few have taken the time and effort to plant bricks and mortar for posterity, and even if they have, someone else will come along and rip it all up. America is addicted to new deals and starting afresh. So when they do come across something like San Simeon they don’t really know what to do with it. In Europe you buy a ticket from an old lady in a kiosk and a catalogue written in 1962 and wander round. Here you have to book in advance, check into a sort of airport lounge, take a bus from a specially designed terminal, and then be herded by a guide through a quarter of it. You’d need to go four times to see all of San Simeon, which, frankly, is not much more than a gross memorial to a man who was comprehensively ripped off by every sharp art dealer in New York. His favourite period of heavy European gothic is particularly unsuited to the Californian coast.

Hearst Castle is the Madonna Inn with pretensions and nothing like as much fun or honesty. Its pretensions still posthumously rankle; Citizen Kane the movie is what made Hearst and his joyless mausoleum famous, but it hates Orson Welles with a passion. “You’ve seen the film?” says the guide, like a teacher asking the guilty party to confess or we’ll all be kept behind. “Good movie, bad history,” he says sternly, but incorrectly. Kane is a good movie but Hearst Castle is still bad history.

There’s something about coasts that inspires flights of tastelessness. Everywhere in the world, seaside towns are tacky, jolly places that don’t seem to care, and so it is here. Strands of trailer parks and cheaply cheerful motels and gift shops selling nude women made out of shells, and restaurants with carved sharks on the roofs. But there is also the shore and the huge Pacific’s chilly fists beating on the white sand, with the pale dune grass bent into the prevailing wind. This is not a coast for paddling and lilos. It’s the point where the immovable object of the richest continent in the world meets the unstoppable force of the biggest ocean in the world. These are beaches for walking and composing, for deep breaths and thoughts of God. Only the elephant seals can insouciantly sunbathe like visiting Germans.

The road twists and turns through the cliffs, occasionally revealing vistas of heart-stopping beauty. Parts remind you of the western Highlands, their steep passes covered in wild flowers and gale-contorted pines. It’s a landscape that seems to accommodate, even welcome, the curling man-made ribbon of Tarmac as a natural part of itself. The great American journey is also part of this nature’s story. It’s easy to imagine the staggering awe of Núñez de Balboa and Lewis and Clark and the refugee Okies in the Model T Fords when they finally saw it, journey’s end.

On north, and Big Sur. I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting from Big Sur but I expected something. Actually there’s nothing, or as close to nothing as makes no difference. You see the sign, go, “Oh, hey, Big Sur,” and it’s all over. A roadside shop, a couple of clapboard of buildings, the Henry Miller Library, and that’s it. A population of under a thousand, hidden away up winding tracks and down secret gullies. Big Sur was a name that you conjured with in the 1960s. It embodied all the Easy Rider alternative magic, and actually I know what I was expecting here: ridiculously, preposterously, I was expecting Kate Healy.

I remember the term she came to school as a boarder, tall and rangy and blonde with blue eyes and freckled high cheekbones, that smiley white American look that seemed to belong to the next rung of natural selection to us scrawny, dark, whey-faced, woollen-flannel English boys. She was Californian. Californian from Big Sur. She wore Indian jewellery and had a plaited hippie headband and Day-Glo felt-tip pens that she used to make psychedelic native rune patterns on all her exercise books and the back of my hand. Most of all I remember her breasts. Very white and very exciting, lying on a chilly Hertfordshire golf course. For one night, we shared a bottle of cider and a lot of saliva. I’ve never forgotten it, it was my brief taste of Big Sur and the big picture out there, the revolution that was happening to young people and the world that I could only hear between bells and bedtime on a tinny record player and in magazines. A part of me expected to see her just standing on the side of the road, still sixteen, those fabulous breasts in a flower-power vest, her hair tied back with a plaited band, bare feet and bell-bottom jeans.

I’m pleased there was nothing here, no strip of taco restaurants and pet parlours. Big Sur remains a place that geographically is a spot high in the pine forest of the California coast but really, actually, exists in a moonlit bunker on the outskirts of Letchworth.

On to Carmel, another morbidly cute seaside town with a manicured main street. We stop for lunch. On the table of the café is a little paper sachet that a teabag came in: “Tazo, a calm herbal infusion. Ingredients: camomile blossom, hibiscus flowers, spearmint, rose petals, blackberry leaves, peppermint, safflower, lemon balm, lemon grass, natural flavours and the mumbled chantings of a certified tea shaman.” And a website. Time to move on. On through Monterey, and the final leg to San Francisco.

I love San Francisco. We drove in on an uncharacteristically bright, hot day; the endemic mist that rolls in across the Golden Gate Bridge was absent. This is a real city with a heart and a soul and a story. Pretty architecture trundles up the vertiginous hills, which are the only reason I couldn’t live here (well, I could live here, but I wouldn’t live for long). San Francisco has a liberal, humane feel, a diverse population and good food. I particularly wanted to see Haight-Ashbury, another name that’s heady and exciting with vibrations from my youth. It’s just a crossroads, but here at last I found the 1960s that I’d left behind, that I’d so ardently yearned after for 30 years, and pretty sad it was. Haight Street is Carnaby Street, where tourists can buy Grateful Dead posters and bongs and hippie-dippy paraphernalia. I got a tie-dyed T-shirt that I shan’t ever wear, because in one of the monumental rows I had with my father as a teenager he shouted in wholly justified exasperation that if I didn’t get out of bloody bed I’d end up selling tie-dyed T-shirts in Haight-Ashbury.

Unlike Carnaby Street, which is now populated by Scandinavian tourists and crocodiles of underage French shoplifters, Haight Street still has real hippies, looking completely authentic. Bearded men playing guitars, kids selling dope, teenage runaways with bedrolls looking for enlightenment and sex. It’s a pitiful, muted place, a colonial Williamsburg experience, drop-out culture that dropped off. It doesn’t want to grasp the future, just endlessly rewind the past.

The 1960s were a crossroads – we had the moment and we chose to go by another route, all of us. This trip stirred a lot of things: beliefs, hope, optimism and innocence, stuff that I’d chosen to pack away because time and experience told me they wouldn’t be needed on the journey. But I miss them. I regret their gaucheness and their passing. And it also seems to me that the restless journey of America has stalled in another depression – of wealth. There is an apocryphal story of a monk who’s a counsellor here is California. “Which would you rather talk to,” asks a reporter, “rich miserable people or poor miserable ones?”

“Oh, no question,” says the monk, “rich ones. The rich already know that money isn’t going to fix them.“

In California the rich are still trying to buy a homespun humility. They’ve exchanged the childlike for the childish. The faux hippie geeks of the microchip revolution would like us to believe that they’ve got another electric new deal, built another Route1, an information highway that’s moved into the ether, and that the great adventure is still out there on the Web with Gandalf and herbal tea and bubblegum, an armchair nirvana. But it isn’t so, it’s just a toy, a babbled diversion, it’s instead of, not as well as, real life. At the heart of the ridiculed 1960s was the fundamental belief that money couldn’t, wouldn’t, buy what was really worthwhile, but that the pursuit of wealth would prevent us gaining what we really desperately needed, but we all more or less chose the pursuit anyway.

We can’t go back to the 1960s, but we need to find another crossroads, another way through the woods, and at 45 one of the Byrds’ lyrics still runs round and round my head. “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

More articles about food:
Cafe Addiction in Paris, by Brian Johnston
Food for Life in Tuscany, by Marc Zakian
Well-Oiled in Puglia, by Simon Busch
Bite the Rotten Shark in Reykjavik, by Norman Miller