What nobody tells you about San Francisco

What a month or so. Before back to work, before homemade pulled pork and New Year's Day walks, before my first trip to the Royal Opera House for a festive Nutcracker, before the week of lying in front of the fire in rainy Gloucestershire for Christmas and even before all the mulled wine outings the week before work finished, I went to San Francisco and Zurich in the same week for work. Lucky, eh?

That's me (in my new sample sale Orla Kiely emerald crepe coat) at my work's enormous campus an hour away from the city. One of my favourite friends went to university in San Francisco. That, plus perhaps a little too much Armistead Maupin and I had the city set in my mind as a montage of trams going past candy-coloured houses inhabited by jolly homosexuals who'd been together since the Sixties. 

And it was like that, a little. Apart from when I looked out of my hotel window (right opposite SF's MOMA, Yerba Buena gardens and the spooktacular, beautiful Martin Luther King memorial, below) in Downtown, and realised that I'd never heard anyone mention what a huge problem homelessness is.

My guilt led me straight to a standing order to Shelter on my return.

In the way of work trips, I had three hours on my last day to explore so crammed a few essentials in, like taking a creaking cable car that takes you, lurching, up the steepest roads. I kept sliding up and down on the wooden benches.

The must-sees my friend gave me were the famous beat bookstore, City Lights, and the Beat Museum for a whistlestop tour of the counterculture, from typewriters to first editions.

Then I headed to the Mission for an obligatory burrito and to sample the area's excellent secondhand shopping. Wish I'd bought this enormous light-up "S" at Therapy. Narcissistic, me?

I really couldn't get a handle on the place in just a few days. Hopefully, I'll go back soon (and know that green sauce isn't always guacamole this time).

And Zurich, in contrast? It's pure Switzerland, an exquisite snowy toytown surrounded by grinding suburbs and an airport with a cigar lounge and Swarovski shop. I'd take San Francisco any day.