Dear Dustin: To Mr Hoffman et al, words of sympathy and advice. The correspondent lived for a year or two in Bel Air, an exceptionally well-accoutred area of Los Angeles

Are you all right? Are you safe?

We have been watching the news from Malibu with horror. When we heard that the brush fires had come down the Santa Monica mountains, jumping the Pacific Coast Highway and burning out of control all along the beach-front homes from the Getty Museum to Carbon Beach, Malibu Point, the Colony and beyond Escondido, we turned to each other and said, 'How much more have those poor people got to suffer?'

We've been thinking of you and imagining that Goldie and Bruce and Demi and Sylvester and Cher, Walter and Barbra, Sting and Charlie and Farrah and Ryan and the Rods Stewart and Steiger and so many wonderful people must be feeling that God's got it in for them. Persons of an artistic temperament are prone to think that way, we know; but you've got more reason than most. Nothing like this happens in Hampstead.

Is this the third or the fourth time since 1983 that the Santa Ana winds have blown brush fires your way? I remember you all had to be evacuated in 1985; wasn't that also one of the years when spring rains pushed landslides off the mountains? Then there were floods when the Pacific rose in giant tides which hurricanes blew ashore. Malibu looked almost like Bengal (you'll allow a touch of exaggeration, I know). We considered sending you some woollies and a food parcel.

Then you've got that wretched smog half the year and dank sea mist the other half, pollution in the bay, the stench of endless traffic on Pacific Coast Highway, those regular little earthquakes that shake every Oscar out of the cupboards and every platinum disc off the walls. And the daily terror that the San Andreas fault will let out a mighty exhalation and blow you away in The Big One, which must come one day.

Just because Malibu has a Colony, you shouldn't have to endure a kind of penal servitude. Is any spot on earth more inhospitable, or more of a daily ordeal in which to live? You haven't got a decent restaurant or shop for miles. You have to drive hours to get to the Hollywood studios, if you can get out of your house into a gap in the traffic.

Your beaches are lovely and the sunsets on the bay are divine, when they appear through the mists. But we do sometimes wish you would find somewhere safer. A shanty town on the edge of Lima might be less risky, or even a shotgun shack in Watts or a bedsit in East LA.

It's a good thing you guys don't read anything except scripts, otherwise you might see an Aristotelian or even a Biblical dimension to your miseries. Now there is a consoling thought: a hell of a good movie could come out of this. But who gets top billing, God or Stallone? You could lunch on this for the rest of the century. Here's looking at you.

(Photograph omitted)