A frozen coffee

I was picked up at an ugly hour of the morning for the ninety minute drive to Irvine, south of LA. The day's events were organised by a charming and energetic greek-american lady named Alex from Whale of a Tale bookshop. We dropped into the coffee shop next door to grab a shot of caffeine to go, and I ordered at random from their menu of fancy coffees. What I got was a sort of coffee milkshake that was largely solid, and possessed the strange property of melting from the bottom up. This meant that the cup had to be tipped right up to catch a trickle of cold coffee from under the ice-floe, and righted again before said ice-floe could suddenly detach itself from the cup walls and deal my face a cold slap. There's probably an art to it, but it didn't come with instructions. Or a straw.

There's a game I play with the kids at the school presentations, when time permits. It involves me drawing The Null with markers on a flipchart pad, guided by suggestions from the students. The Null is a monster of unknown provenance who appears early in the first book and who I described as sketchily as possible to allow the reader's imagination to fill in the gory details. Their suggestions usually start with the obvious - one kid will say big red eyes, another will suggest fangs, but once the basics are taken care of the details swiftly veer into left field, and I'm always amazed how completely different are the creatures spawned by the collective imagination of each group.

On this occasion the morning session threw up a creature with bloody fangs, a pig's tail, and a snotty nose, the girls generally outdoing the boys in providing the more repulsive details. By this time my coffee had melted to room temperature, which made it about as warm as any coffee I've been served so far on this side of the Atlantic. The afternoon's monster had a shark's fin and a single foot with a spring underneath, so that it could pogo after its victims. I wish I'd thought of that one myself.

I give out prizes for the best suggestions, and my criterion is normally to reward the most way-out proposals, like foot-springs and 'I love Mom' tattoos. This time I made an exception for a girl who suggested 'sad eyes' for the monster. It was the first time I've ever had that one thrown at me, and it struck me as an unusually sympathetic notion.

After the second school visit there was just time to sign the stock at Whale of a Tale before heading to John Wayne airport for a flight to Seattle. On the way to the airport I asked the driver to stop by an Apple store so I could take advantage of the feeble dollar and pick up some goodies for my kids. The mall where we stopped was awash with money. Some of the men were more orange-tanned and coiffured than their partners, and they strolled around the Apple shop collecting a couple of laptops here and a handful of iPods there, the way you might pick up some veg and a packet of bog rolls at the local Spar.

On the plane I sat next to two Chinese American girls of about nineteen. Each was describing her hairdo and her purchases in great detail on her mobile. When the time came to turn off the phones they continued the conversation with each other, and by the end of the flight they had been talking about shopping for two solid hours without pausing for breath. You have to admire that kind of stamina.