He opens the boot or, in local argot, the trunk and starts to clear some of the fast food and other less identifiable detritus from the front passenger seat. What doesn’t end up in the trunk is piled to one side and I’m invited to sit down, a decision I come to regret only later when checking the state of the backside of my cream coloured Levi’s.

He drives us the 20 minutes it takes to get from LA’s modern art museum to the Elliott Smith tribute wall on West Sunset Boulevard, all the while maintaining a manic commentary on where else we should visit. I know from the Uber app that his name is Sean, and he’s quick to disclose his Irish roots when he learns we’re Scots, but he could be Otto the school bus driver from the Simpsons. Or at least his twin, the back of his hair looking like a wig attached to that blue baseball hat. During Sean’s entertaining if disconcerting monologue, disconcerting because he shows us pictures on his phone while navigating the six-lane freeway, he mentions his stint as a waiter in Dublin and also that he was a Marine. We opt not to inquire further about the details of his military service.

We go to a hipsterish café where most of the 20-something customers toil over laptops. This is America for sure but which America? The Amerika with a K, suitably enough, a place of escape imagined but never visited by Franz Kafka for his first novel? The ‘not happy, not contented, not radiant, not fearless’ America ruefully observed by Henry Miller in his memoir The Air Conditioned Nightmare? Or the America venerated in Alistair Cooke’s letters but one seen to veer between ‘its vitality and its decadence’?

When we arrive at LAX a week earlier, the official at passport control could not be nicer were he offering home-made cookies and a jug of iced tea. He discusses forensic qualifications with my wife and jokes with my youngest child about the length of her fingers. It reminds me of visiting Israel for the first time, between intifadas I probably ought to point out, to watch Celtic play Happel Tel Aviv. I asked the young women behind the glass if she’d mind not stamping my passport and she replied that, as I had asked so nicely, how could she refuse? An unexpected response which might have been helped by the number of guys in front of me asking if she wanted a ticket for the game. I didn’t know the Hebrew word for doll and nor did they but for the record it’s booba. No smirking now.

On our second visit to La La Land, on the train from Ventura to Union Station, the conductor could be Snoop Dog while his colleague on the return leg is decidedly more Deputy Dog. After a less frightening taxi ride, we reached the corner of heaven on Hollywood Boulevard that is Amoeba Music. My middle child chooses a Bob Dylan record before he and the rest of the family depart, gifting me with two more hours in the store. For a store it is. I’m like a diabetic in a sweet shop, or candy store, only this is the largest independent sweet shop / candy store in the world.

Outside, blood sugar metaphor and most of my dollars spent, I have in my head Bobby Womack’s cover of California Dreamin’ because you see I am mostly a literal minded kind of dolt. I check my phone to find if my loved ones have divorced me yet and take a picture of Robert Mitchum’s star on the sidewalk. Yes, Stephen Malkmus, the sidewalk. I walk a block and a half to see the Capital Records building, “the house that Nat built” as it’s known, given how many copies Cole’s Unforgettable LP sold in 1952. It’s also where Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee and the Beach Boys recorded some of their greatest tracks.

A few days on, I sip orange wine in a restaurant under the late afternoon sun, the petals falling from the surrounding coral trees of a colour complementing the contents of my glass. The bartender asks where I’m from. Says he’s a musician, a drummer. No I don’t smirk. He tells me he loves Scottish music and I inquire who his favourite band might be. He says The Jam and I find myself not smirking for a second time. He also mentions the Waterboys and I tell him we used to live in the same tenement – obviously I don’t say tenement – in Abbeyhill where Mike Scott wrote The Whole Of The Moon.

This may or may not be true but America is a land of stories after all and he smiles and tops up my glass.