Saturday. San Francisco.

I’m staying with my darling A’s older sister lovely L whilst I am in San Francisco. She & B, (away with their daughter for Spring Break), live in beautiful Noe Valley on the south side of the city, full of Victorian clapboard and pastel painted houses. It’s lovely to get a chance to spend time with L, whom I have always liked very much on her visits to England, and I’m thrilled to get a chance to hang with her properly.

We can barely speak on Saturday morning after the shenanigans of the night before, so L’s friend T drives us to Sunset for Vietnamese as stage one of the old people’s recovery programme. This is a good start but I am still feeling distinctly ropey. L opts for a chiropractic session, and T drops me off in Golden Gate Park at Herzog & De Meuron’s glorious De Young museum so that I can catch the final weekend of the Yves Saint Laurent retrospective.

I can’t say I particularly feel like battling through Saturday afternoon crowds of gawping museum goers, but I feel that my fashion editor credibility would be strongly impaired if I failed to see the exhibit while I had the opportunity. I’m glad I made the effort: the clothes are extraordinary and I suddenly realise from whence the influence came for my mother’s staggeringly chic Seventies and Eighties wardrobe.

It's just a shame that the show is badly muddled and there is barely any signage or captioning#. I presume that many of the embroideries are by Lesage, but there's no information beyond the barest details. They might just as well have plonked the mannequins in any old order and dumped the captioning for all the sense the show made as a uniform whole.

I’m very happy to leave fashion behind and go back to Noe Valley for a restorative nap. Later, along with D, our (female) partner in crime from the night before, we do manage to drag our sorry asses into town for the Battle of the Bay stand-up quarter-finals to see their friend Sheila wipe the floor with her competitors. We eschew the after-party and crawl home (not before I manage to mislay the valet parking ticket).