Learning the language in San Francisco

I first fell for San Francisco as a teenager holed up in my north London bedroom, reading my mum’s tattered copies of the Tales of the City series. Author Armistead Maupin depicts the city’s eccentrics in the 1970s: gay men dressed as nuns who roller-skated down the steep hills, a marijuana-toting landlady who turned out to be a tenant’s father and a cannibalistic cult hidden in the cathedral.

When I arrived in San Francisco three years ago, it was no longer a permissive haven for exiles from prim provinces. Instead, it had become heaven for developers living by their oft-repeated promise to “change the world” with software. Entrepreneurs on electric skateboards replaced the skating nuns, start-ups delivered marijuana to anyone with an (easily obtainable) medical card and young professionals gathered in the cathedral for yoga on Tuesday nights.

An unusual foray into memoir for me, as I try to capture my life in San Francisco for the front cover of the FT's House and Home supplement. Read more here.