bottom drawer

Why is Halloween so huge in the States? I heard it is the biggest holiday in terms of commercial gain, themed sales etc after Christmas. Whatever, it was a great excuse for a costume party at Butch's house, complete with Butch dressed as an astonishingly convincing woman in a sequinned red dress, a few ghouls, a Freudian slip (well done, Miss Mockbee), lots of music and dancing and drinking with an eccentric mix of people at his fantastic house in Seale. Unfortunately, the night's grand guignol was a little more extreme than intended, when at around 2am Butch fell down from the ladder to one of the lofts straight onto his side, and had to be taken to hospital with seven broken ribs, moaning 'Get me out of this girly shit before you take me anywhere', a request that we obliged. We visited him today and he was looking pretty rough hooked up to all sorts of drips and monitors. Send your get-well cards to 41 Poorhouse Road, Seale, Alabama. Another side-effect of the par...

The next step towards me being a fully fledged American driver has been completed! The Frog has landed...I am now the proud owner at the age of 24 of my first ever vehicle - a 1991 Jeep Cherokee in park ranger green. Too cool. Big thanks to the Gay family for allowing me to buy this fantastic jeep for a ridiculously low sum of money.

As an adjunct to that last post, the worst experience of this kind was when I used to cook at egg for the whole staff at lunchtime, and just as the food was ready a huge influx of customers would enter the shop. As I was cooking for £1 per person, it was generally either pasta, risotto, some kind of noodle dish or something equally cheap. I became expert at undercooking pasta and rice so that by the time we had finished serving the customers it would still be edibly al dente.

OK, why does that ALWAYS happen. You are about five minutes away from serving up the meal of your week, when your eating companion suddenly has to do something. Actually, this has several forms: a) As you are putting the plates on the table, someone needs to go to the bathroom. So everyone else has to wait while their food grows cold/overcooked/deflated. For me this is the ultimate rudeness. You were warned ten minutes ago that we were about ready to eat soon, so why didn't you go then? b) You have told your dinner guests to arrive for a certain time, allowed for the fact that they will be half an hour late and then will want to spend half an hour talking before they sit down, yet they STILL arrive late and your timing screwed. c) Today's scenario: your roommate suddenly has to run out and rescue a damsel in distress who is having an allergic reaction to a wasp bite. As in, was on the phone when suddenly the person on the other end starts gasping or something, and so he hurried...

Good to know that London's still got some eccentrics.

Hooray! I'm the proud owner of my first piece of official paperwork from the State of Alabama - a provisional drivers licence. Yes, only just provisional...but given the tortuous bureaucracy involved, this feels like a major achievement. Next week I can take the real thing. I've been talking to several people here about studying in Europe/the UK, and getting an email yesterday from a Cambridge friend saying how dying that school seems now, was pretty sad for me. That a small, unique and well-respected school like Cambridge should have to axe its diploma course, and suffer the inevitable decline that follows, seems to me absolutely ridiculous when viewed on a global scale. The name of Cambridge, and the global reputation of the university offers a unique opportunity for the architecture school to lead on the world scale as a proponent of an alternative credo to the obscuratism and formalism of other schools. It is shaming that both within the department and the university as ...

My first late-ish night working in studio before our review today. I spent most of the afternoon and evening and night listening to BBC Radio 5 via the internet, due to the great sporting events on offer...Arsenal babies in the Carling Cup and the fabulous, exciting, result-of-the-century Red Sox win. It was pretty strange listening to baseball commentary via the BBC, interrupted with the news and travel updates from 3am Britain (flooding on the A28 etc), and then catching the shipping forecast and the first hour of the Today programme, thinking of all my friends who wake up to it in the morning, before going to bed myself at around 3am. It's amazing how the slightest stimulus awakens memories; I could hear the precise sounds of London waking around me, the noise of cars along Cheshire Street and my boiler clicking in the morning, the expected background to John Humphrys' voice. Despite not being homesick at all here, the nostalgia and the sense of 'old England' was ...

As I was writing to my good friend Ben today, I think the main reason for starting this food blog right now is that I am so starved of good food. From London, England to Greensboro [very very small town], Alabama is a long way from decent food shops and plentiful restaurants catering to all price ranges, to the joys of Piggly Wiggly. Basically, I can't stop fantasising about my former local Turkish supermarket, Brick Lane Beigel Bake, Spitalfields and Borough Markets, St John, etc etc... When I manage to find good food here, it comes in a glut. For instance, last week I cooked a mound of organic okra from Willie Nell, a local farmer. The week before, it was aubergines and sweet potato from the vegetable garden at the local girls detention centre where I help out sometimes . It's autumn (sorry, fall) here, but the wonderful bounty that I associate with the season (apples, quinces, pumpkins, squash, the last of the salads, wet walnuts) in England seems strangely absent here, may...

I decided it might be time to do a little research and find out who else blogs in Alabama. Oh my gawd. A lot of people are listed here . A lot of guys just like the ones I see around town, except somehow they got into blogging. Guys, if any of you are reading this, let me know how/why you decided to take your lives online. Its pretty amazing how many people have basically dedicated their blogs to following the election (usually to the purpose of lambasting Kerry ). People have put in a lot of work rehashing stuff from better-known right-wing websites. It's basically a big chain of links with no original material (the vastly long blogrolls testify to that) and one wonders what the natural selection of the blogosphere will do to these blogs. A few Bamablogs that particularly caught my eye are listed now in the sidebars. As I no longer know what's happening in England I've taken off those links.

Alas, poor John Peel . I knew him once...we met last year at Ipswich Town Football Club, who were playing Rotherham and lost. He'd been up till 2am the night before playing at Fabric. What a legend.

It's Monday again, and we did a lot of work in studio which I won't bore you with (foundation details and suchlike joys.) Election fever is definitely hotting up here. Lou's (now open again after their holiday, which I discovered was to a church convention) is the centre of canvassing, not so much for a particular party, but for voter registration. All the students apart from me have been made to register here over the past few weeks, and now we're all being reminded to actually cast our votes. Lou's is a black-owned business with a very (unusually) mixed crowd of customers, and it's always interesting to hear the conversation there. Alabama will certainly go Republican again, but the Black Belt apparently goes Democrat. It's amazing how strongly this shows up on the maps. - a red belt running through the centre of the state. All of which means that the lunch-time scene in Lou's is buzzing with talk, definitely tending towards the radical and with ...

It's Monday again, and we did a lot of work in studio which I won't bore you with (foundation details and suchlike joys.) Election fever is definitely hotting up here. Lou's (now open again after their holiday, which I discovered was to a church convention) is the centre of canvassing, not so much for a particular party, but for voter registration. All the students apart from me have been made to register here over the past few weeks, and now we're all being reminded to actually cast our votes. Lou's is a black-owned business with a very (unusually) mixed crowd of customers, and it's always interesting to hear the conversation there. Alabama will certainly go Republican again, but the Black Belt apparently goes Democrat. It's amazing how strongly this shows up on the maps. - a red belt running through the centre of the state. All of which means that the lunch-time scene in Lou's is buzzing with talk, definitely tending towards the radical and with ...

So, I have a 'normal' blog but I keep realising that what I spend most of my time thinking about is food. I wonder how many of my 'normal' blog readers may ever find this one. Too few people really appreciate what I think is important about food - improvisation, unpretentiousness, the low as well as the high, none of that crap a lot of food bloggers talk about (overcomplicated/over-domesticated/prissy). I was brought up with two incredibly good cooks as parents (check out my dad's great book The Pike in the Basement ) with a healthy disregard for recipe books. We had loads, of course, and we read them avidly, but as for all that 'take two tablespoonfuls of oil' nonsense, who doesn't know how much oil they need for their particular frying-pan?. Another thing I learnt was that 99% of savory recipes start with chopping onions and garlic. So, I love food, I need an outlet for my love (and occasional rage), and this is it. Till I start in earnest tomorrow...

But now, I'm broken-hearted...and following such things long-distance over ball-by-ball updates on the BBC website isn't a good way to do these things. Is it a fitting way to end the record-breaking run, or the saddest reminder of human fallibility? The Red Sox victory somehow doesn't make up for the loss I feel...

Another action-packed Saturday. A catfish fry in Mason's Bend, a small community that is becoming known as the Rural Studio Village due to the number of projects that have been built there. The reason for the get-together was to spend time with some clients for houses this year, the communtiy matriach Willie Bell Harris and her family (her daughter Christine, currently homeless, is also getting a house). It was really fun, lots of eating and talking to real people which is always refreshing after a week in studio glued to the drawing board. A community group from Uniontown was visiting some RS projects and joined in the lunch, and I spent quite a lot of the lunch talking to three sisters. Further to yesterday's entry, I asked them what they thought of the RS houses and how they might feel about having houses like that. They loved them - 'I want a cardboard house in my back yard so I can escape from my kids' and 'If I ever can redo my roof I want to make it lik...

For some reason this week has been particularly exhausting. Today we had a review with Dan Wheeler, a Chicago architect who is buzzing with enthusiasm and very much an architect's architect, obsessive about detailing and the small corners that one sometimes feels that no-one else notices. Last night he gave a talk about some of his work which was like a mirage of architectural pornography to us money-starved students, hemmed in by tight budgets, lack of craft skill and our own expectations of what we are meant to be achieving here, which is certainly in my case not million-dollar windowframes and the miraculously unsupported concrete box that he has designed for Penny Pritzker (yes, the Pritzker Prize one)(and the secret is in post-tensioning through two slender walls down 100 feet into the bedrock). I loved it, but it made me feel slightly guilty, a cross between revealing that you are a secret computer geek and coveting absurd dresses in the window of Chanel. Today reviewing o...

Breaking news...the firestation crew (unfinished thesis project from last year) have finally put up their huge trussed columns...just before the most dramatic thunderstorm broke over Newbern. And finally we have wireless networking up in the studio. Joy. Apart from that, today has been the day of visiting local people and potential clients for the $20,000 house. These spanned the extremes - from 86 year old Elizabeth Phillips, whose house is falling down around her but which she still keeps immaculately clean and tidy, her rag dolls and ornaments arranged on lace doilies, to schizophrenic Dinah, whose house is literally full of rubbish, leaving a 4ft square space in which she can stand, and who makes burial mounds for deceased household objects in her garden, covered in branches, brushwood and tarpaulins. These have a strange beauty and power; as does the entrance-way to her house (which you have to enter by crawling) covered in branches and flowers. She has no bathroom, and as a ...

We spent all afternoon today tramping round Lowe's looking at materials, getting more and more weary and depressed at being surrounded by unending dross. It was only relieved by a visit to Dairy Queen on the way back for icecream.

My lovely sunny weekend: Early morning bread making with Cara Mae and general cookfest, cooking up all the excess detention centre produce for freezing... Lunch in the back yard before heading off to the Kentuck arts festival... ...involving my first ride in an American school bus... ...and more eating, before heading off to a free food-and-drink after-party with Butch, Cynthia (an ex-outreacher) and Jessie (another Auburn student), ending up with us collapsing into an oversized bed in the Hampton Inn. (don't worry, no naughtiness occurred) Today:more hanging out at Kentuck with various artists of good and bad varieties -some fantastic, some charlatans, as befits the scene. And now, back at home about to cook a Real Sunday Dinner.

It was my birthday today, and last night we had a party in Beacon Street. It was fun, I had a surprise cake, lots of beer was drunk, and the best present was definitely a mug from a local farmer, Laird Cole, with a small cow in the bottom. You probably have to see it. In the middle of the party it was somehow decided that we had to go and 'roll' the house of one of the students who wasn't there. Another aspect of that strange American college culture, which involves lots of wasted toilet roll thrown into the trees and around the bushes in someone's yard. It was actually strangely beautiful in effect, if one forgets the college humour aspect. Its turned chilly over the last few days - jumpers are a necessity, which takes some getting used to after the sweltering heat. But every morning now there is a sharp nip in the air, and at night you need to wrap up. The dark is closing in, too, and the other morning I woke up to thick fog. The last couple of days I've...

Another week, another review, this time with the legendary John Forney, a former Outreach Studio professor. He was gratifyingly a bit harder on all of us than our previous critics, though still to my ears pretty gentle. Our group is still somewhat divided between those who think that the prototype house should be made entirely of things that you can buy from Lowes (an American cross between Travis Perkins and B&Q) and those who think it should be made of straw/bamboo/small roundwood/sheeps wool insulation. Actually, I am probably the only true member of the first group. The other option might well result in a more interesting building, but to satisfy the criteria of being an easily reproducible prototype, for me it needs to be made using absolutely standard materials and technology. Otherwise without our zeal to carry it forward, I can't truly see anyone ever bothering to reproduce it, and if you live in poverty you will still be living in a third-hand trailer home. The que...

After another 12 hour day in the studio I'm unwinding in front of the, er, computer screen. It's a pretty intense process and absolutely fantastic how many ideas can be posited, explored, discarded or adopted within one day. Especially when all we're really dealing with is a very small box and a couple of porches. But with only $10,000 to spend on materials, every single decision has huge ramifications. Today we met with a local contractor, Mike Thomas, who is a long-standing friend and helper to the Rural Studio. He's a pretty interesting guy, having started his own construction firm after working mainly in electrical and mechanical installation and with a great and encouraging interest in exploring unconventional materials and construction techniques. He built a rammed earth house designed by Steve Hoffman, a former Rural Studio tutor, and today was trying to persuade us that staw bale was the way forward. I'm not convinced, mainly because if this is to be a tr...

Yesterday I went with Pam Dorr, an outreacher from last year who is staying on this year doing housing work, on her weekly visit to the girls detention centre, where she has been making a vegetable garden for the last year. Great fun pulling sweet potatoes and other produce, the last of the year before it is ploughed up for winter crops. The girls are fun and boisterous, and nicknamed me 'Miss England'. It's a non-secure centre where they are sent for good behaviour but their crimes range from grand theft larceny downwards. One said she had been thrown out of every school in her home county. The day before, three girls had tried to run away, despite one being only a week away from her release, and they had been sent back to the lock-down prison. We took home masses of sweet potato and aubergine (sorry, eggplant) which made a really good dinner... Afterwards, we went for beers at the Shack, a redneck bar outside Marion. Very redneck: cans of Budweiser and peanut shel...

Meanwhile, I've downloaded my Arizona photos...here's one. I felt that seeing the huge empty desert was maybe more extraordinary than the Grand Canyon.

Well, after all the crit went pretty well. The powerpoint got tidied up and the rest of the presentation went fine. It surprises me how easy the crits are here. No-one is devastatingly rude about projects or deliberately provocative as in England. You get clapped at the end of your presentation and then they say nice things, even for projects where there really hasn't been that much progress or where the group has clear problems. Altogether not as tough and in fact slightly disconcerting; although it is nice that you don't get demolished, in fact it is more useful to have criticism, however harsh, than the gentle words we get. I almost wished that we were told that we hadn't done enough work or were barking up the wrong tree. Another cultural difference, I am told.

After amazing Arizona it's back to the grindstone. We've got a crit tomorrow so I'm up with my computer tonight. This is again testing my not-exactly-perfect people skills, trying to get the best out of our architecturally inexperienced team without over-directing them to do things as I might do. This means that often the end result is something that I am embarrassed to present, because it's not up to what I consider to be an appropriate standard. It's things like the graphic design of a powerpoint presentation; it makes me wince to see deliberately mixed font sizes in a single sentence and cheesy excel graphs. The regular students' architectural backgrounds stand them in good stead here, with their graphics if not always their ideas - I'm jealous. I really want to say 'look, I'll do it all' but when I've already over-committed myself to drawing all the other things that no-one else knows how to do, this isn't a good idea. And I don...

Apologies to all for not posting all week. We've been on a 4000-mile road trip to Arizona and back, ostensibly as rent-a-mob for the RS's exhibition opening, really to have our minds blown open by that great big desert. What can I say: huge skies, pink rocks, valleys fifty miles wide, plateaus, endless forests of green pine and golden aspen, no people, a mountain lion, driving all night across Texas seeing radio towers blinking in a hundred-mile array. America's absolutely the most beautiful country on earth. I can't understand why it's inhabitants aren't the most eco-conscious do-no-harm types ever. Why do they keep fucking it all up? Though there is also a guilty and luxuriant pleasure in the fact that they dare to make cities 70 miles wide, great curving empty freeways and endless abundant sprawl of garish strip-malls full of cheap pleasures, spreading like kudzu. But I also felt a huge sadness seeing the depopulated plains while watching Westerns on t...