Celebrated New Year in Astoria, Oregon - the quaint, hippie hometown of The Goonies, the follow-up to The Ring Cycle and any number of sea lions. We were the villagers, you understand; drunk and merry for the most part, sure. And we needed to uncover the werewolves in our midst, with the help of an unnamed seer, before the sun went down again and one more of us found themselves torn to shreds. At midnight, we went out with party blowers that sounded like a demented Coltrane, and pots and pans that sounded like Ringo Starr falling upstairs, and explosive poppers, and made a right old racket for two minutes. A boy raced away down the hill in front of us as we turned to go inside.

Charlotte bought a painting of some whimsical owls: I bought 99c Osbourne family nodding head pens and a Peanuts baseball field scenario: we ate far too many chocolate covered espresso beans from the Godfather bookstore, home of the free-thinking North Coast Times Eagle whose clarity of design and sharp, grainy political cartoons almost put CTCL to shame. Later, waiting for the Amtrak train at Kelso, huddled in the car against the bitter cold, Charlotte had near hysterics at Rich’s phone battle against an automated train schedule and a second-hand store named ‘Not Too Shabby’. (What? So it was just shabby enough?)

We rushed towards the station building that looked cosy, brightly-lit and warm, only to find it locked. It wasn’t too shabby a deal, though. Outside, on a quilt cover resting on a table, was our consolation prize; a mass of out-of-date candy.

I flew a glider from the column overlooking Astoria that circled the field several times; avoiding pockets of mist that lingered spookily round trees; missing parking lots and warmly wrapped heads; turning tail, lifting, dipping free; and it seemed to carry us all the way down to distant shores in Washington state parks, across Wile E Coyote bridges and expanses of water that glistened a brilliant blue in the sunset, past homely theatres with sofas left out from the previous day’s marathon screening of Lord Of The Rings, past the Pig N’ Pancake outlets and food co-ops and streets festooned with Christmas lights and nodding reindeer, back to our double futon bed, sleep enlivened by the shouts of drunken hipsters. Heidi drove us to a Subway’s, where they asked if we wanted white or yellow cheese.

The first evening there, both Alicia and Heidi referred to me as “an author”. Really?

The second night, we watched Donnie Darko. It seemed oddly apposite.