What a time to be trapped in LA. This was the Golden Age of Stupid, and Hollywood was peaking: 2003-06 in Los Angeles was 1966-69 in London, without cool music, cool movies or people who did anything. We had a few years to go before the recession, high fuel prices and the decline of LA into full-blown mental illness, so for now it was all snort, f*** and buy another chihuahua, a dog you’d surely only buy when blind drunk or on drugs. Logically, this moment in history chose the It kids to represent it; people who simply were. When you met the It girls, Nicole Richie was warm, sharp and funny; Lindsay Lohan was wide-eyed and sweet, but worryingly surrounded by Eurotoffs; and Paris Hilton dutifully kept up the “sexy” thing by being rude, which made you wonder how you’d bored her and how you’d struggle harder for her love. They were all smart, but boy had they inspired a million Queens of Stupid.

The It girls continued to hit the headlines, suffering tragically from confusion. Nicole pulled the wrong way onto the freeway. Britney got married for less than three days, while Paris explained her arrest on suspicion of driving under

the influence with: “Maybe I was speeding a little bit... I was just really hungry and wanted an In-N-Out Burger.” All of this was overseen not by their parents, but by their baffled, boggly-eyed pets.

The Golden Age of Stupid exploded as a newsless pheno­menon that the media found amazing news. My job: to

pretend this nothing was something. Something great.

I was summoned to spend a day in the life of Nicole Richie for a women’s magazine. The angle: look how nice and thin Nicole is now. The summer story was “Swimwear”, gearing up for the winter story, “Stop Eating All That Food or You’ll Never Get Into Your Swimwear”. It had been raining all spring, and palm fronds and trash littered the road as though there’d been a riot. When it rains, this most uptight of cities collapses, gibbering, Chevrolets weaving across the freeway, stilt houses panicking and falling down the hills. That day, the city felt more unhinged than usual. I drove along Hollywood Boulevard, past a man cycling with a parrot on his handlebars. A gold tramp in a gold suit jacket jitterbugged down the sidewalk. Oh, and there’s Spider-Man, strolling in his blue and red Lycra... Christ...

The sun was climbing and the non-air-conditioned population was hot. So hot, I was using a tea towel to hold the steering wheel. I wondered why actresses never had sweat patches, and remembered the insect-like surgeon I’d interviewed who said that in the run-up to the Oscars he injected 16 doses of Botox into actresses’ armpits to paralyse their sweat glands. Probably with his proboscis. Today, 32 injections seemed like a fair trade.

I knew I had no right to criticise any of this. I had no qualifications except A-level art. Maybe if I’d gone to a different school, maybe if I hadn’t chosen physics, maybe if I’d done any revision at all, instead of eating Kit Kats in the ­Parliament Hill San Siro cafe for two years, then maybe I might not be on my way to the Tracey Ross boutique on Sunset Boulevard to write about how great it is to wear a bikini.

Tracey Ross’s boutique was hipper than hip, a place where a young starlet could lose pounds of ugly money by buying lime-green snakeskin passport covers, bracelets reading ASK FOR WISDOM and brooches that looked for all the world to me like diamanté Iron Crosses. I picked up a bracelet made from old string.

“It’s adorable,” said the assistant quickly, a warning I should buy it.

“Doesn’t look very hard-wearing,” I said even quicker, a warning I wouldn’t.

“It’s designed to break,” she explained patiently, “so whoever finds it gets whatever you put into it. It’s a pay-forward bracelet.” My phone rang.

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