bottom drawer

After the Thanksgiving break, it's back to the proverbial drawing board. We are (although I've been saying this for the last two weeks) going on site any day – or rather, as soon as we can steal the long tape measure and surveying level back from the other teams in order to set out our site. Meanwhile, we discuss all the things of no design significance and major importance to the building process like how to fit the formwork for our foundations into the holes we dig and whether the weather will hold for long enough that the concrete will cure. The second year team have stolen a march on us, which is great as we can go down to their site and see all the things that have gone slightly wrong, hopefully learning from their errors. Meanwhile, we got home tonight to find some kind of animal has been exploring the huge shed we call home. At least, we found its footprints on the countertop and unfortunately also its piss on my housemate's pillow. Possum? Racoon? A search in al...

Eating in NYC was certainly wonderful - decadent, expensive, lovely. Actually, it was probably not more of any of those than a good week in normal London life, but coming from a town with, effectively, no restaurants (Mexican/steak/bbq joints not counting) it was culture shock and a treat. We did the whole Thanksgiving turkey thing, which was cooked, bizarrely, by a friend of our hosts who turned out to also be a mutual acquaintance of mine from Suffolk. He apparently owed them a favour, as he turned up clad in a velvet suit, proceeded to prepare the turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and giblet gravy, put the bird in the oven and then, after a couple of glasses of wine, left to have his Thanksgiving meal elsewhere. It all turned out deliciously, and was finished off with pumpkin pie, which our all-English party had to phone-a-friend to find out whether to serve hot or cold. Then lots of coffee and scotch (no Southern bourbon here) and our expat celebration was complete. The most decad...

Apologies for lack of posts. The big Thanksgiving travel thing where the whole country decamped to somewhere else involving a really long and tortuous journey, ate turkey and then went home again, also swept me up, decamping to New York for what in Europe we call a 'mini-break'. A big culture shock from Alabama. Things to buy, everywhere, a strange and rather illogical thing after the total lack of consumer luxuries in the Black Belt (apart from big trucks). While it was rather wonderful it did also make me feel slightly queasy, the analogy of a kid in a candy store being more than apt and the consumption (or even availability) of quite that much candy giving me literal stomach pains. Bright lights, big city, we walked in Central Park (easily consumable beauty), ate oysters and Guinness for lunch at Grand Central Station, took a lot of yellow taxis (easily consumable transport), went to the new MoMA (the ultimate art candy store - ooh, look at how many Matisses they've got ...

Leaving the Black Belt results in an overflow of food-related moments and the spending of slightly absurd sums of money on eating. Travelling via Atlanta to NYC for Thanksgiving, we haven't even had the turkey extraveganza yet and I'm already feeling overwhelmed by the possibilities for eating, and actually slightly nauseated by the overabundance of food - it's all too accessible, too easily bought rather than made oneself with effort and ingenuity making the unexpected out of the mundane. Shops heave with fresh vegetables, exotic herbs, every conceivable ingredient. I eat roasted duckling in a restaurant where every dish contains at least eight or nine elements, not one or two and some clever seasoning. I eat sushi, which I have been craving for the last months, and it's somehow too normal, ordered by phone and delivered to your door. It's a huge treat but I feel slightly ridiculous making such a big deal out of it. We shop with friends for Thanksgiving trimmings i...

Another major excitement this week was that a kind soul saw my Amazon wishlist item for a decent kitchen knife, my pining for my Global left back in England getting too much but my finances not really stretching to such an extravegant purchase. You know who you are - thank you very much! It's changed my life (or at least my cooking).

Today was not rainy, but misty - beautiful, driving across the gentle undulations of West Alabama in the frog-jeep. The whole of the Rural Studio was away, apart from last years thesis students who are still working frantically on trying to finish their projects. It's true that many of the projects past and present out here are hugely ambitious- projects that in a 'real' architecture firm would easily take over a year to complete. It's testimony to the energy present here, as well as the refreshing absence of bureaucracy, that group fo four or five totally inexperienced students can themselves build these major projects with their bare hands, in so little time. Later on it was over to Marion for my weekly old-time music jam. Wonderful old songs, and slowly my fingers get used to playing blues scales, blue notes and the squashed sliding thirds and fifths of this old music fusing Irish, Scottish, French, African and English melodies. The modal tunes reminiscent of pip...

Today was not rainy, but misty - beautiful, driving across the gentle undulations of West Alabama in the frog-jeep. The whole of the Rural Studio was away, apart from last years thesis students who are still working frantically on trying to finish their projects. It's true that many of the projects past and present out here are hugely ambitious- projects that in a 'real' architecture firm would easily take over a year to complete. It's testimony to the energy present here, as well as the refreshing absence of bureaucracy, that group fo four or five totally inexperienced students can themselves build these major projects with their bare hands, in so little time. Later on it was over to Marion for my weekly old-time music jam. Wonderful old songs, and slowly my fingers get used to playing blues scales, blue notes and the squashed sliding thirds and fifths of this old music fusing Irish, Scottish, French, African and English melodies. The modal tunes reminiscent of pip...

Another simple, yet satisfying meal courtesy of my trip to DeKalb. The small things I crave here - like the small, hard, sweet pumpkin which I roasted and made into risotto tonight. The only pumpkins here are the hugely swollen, bright orange ones bred solely for carving into jack'o'lanterns and putting on your doorstep. Pumpkin risotto has to be one of the most quintessential autumn foods - its sweetness and texture and colour, the chunks of pumpkin melting in your mouth and the slight bite of the rice. I make mine with chopped rosemary added at the beginning of the process, sauted along with the onions and garlic. Somehow pumpkin and rosemary go really well together and again, rosemary is a very autumnal taste - warming, fragrant, dark. With a green salad as a contrast to the sweet richness of the risotto, it's a simple meal that does everything I want from a home supper.

It's suddenly got very rainy here. Yesterday, last night and today it poured down, clattering on the tin roof of my warehouse home, in through some holes in the roof, gushing down the street like a river and turning front lawns into swamps. Everyone here thinks that England is rainy, but it's nothing compared to the downpours we have here. It's very annoying as we were hoping to pour our foundations on Monday or Tuesday, but it'll now have to wait until after Thanksgiving. Virtually everyone left on Friday for the holiday, so the Rural Studio is deserted. Touring round with a visiting English friend to show him the sights of West Alabama, we trudged through puddles, red clay sticking to our feet And then the inevitable happened: my poor little frog-jeep got irretrievably stuck in a huge muddy rut out at Perry Lakes Park. And it doesn't have four-wheel drive. So we had to walk the mile and a half to the nearest house and beg to borrow a phone, and call the irrepla...

My first brush with the Greensboro police department! for that most American of offenses, the 'open container law'. Which basically means that you must not carry an open container of alcohol in the street or in your vehicle. So a late night, tipsy walk to the gas station to buy toilet paper, of all things, with two of us clutching our cups of bourbon, means that we attract the attention of the one bored copper circling round town. Being English, he blames my American friends for 'letting' me walk around town breaking the law. We look suitably contrite and he gets his small kick from telling us off, sending us on our way with a warning not to walk around town at all. 'Three good-looking gals and you two guys, there's guys round here that might notice you and I'm not sayin' you can't fight, but I'm not sure you two guys could hold off four or five guys'. Like, where on earth is this fear of crime coming from? We are literally two blocks from ho...

The seeming lull in cooking activity is deceptive. The most exciting food event of the last two weeks was my visit in Atlanta to the De Kalb Farmers Market , my excuse being to pick up my boyfriend from the airport. It's a strange place. For the English among you, this is nothing like the Borough Markets of the world. It's a huge supermarket, flying in food from all around the world, hidden in a massive anonymous-looking warehouse in an Atlanta suburb. Endless aisles of exotic vegetables, a huge fish and meat section, and shelves stacked high with the trademarks goods of the foodie middle classes - extra-virgin olive oil, couscous, tofu, spices, dried pulses, red wine. And also the mundane - boring red peppers, rather washed-out tomatoes, large white onions. They don't have free-range chicken, only 'farm raised, all natural' which as we all know is a euphemism and if you were in any doubt, the pallid white skin on the beasts betrayed their upbringing. It made me un...

We finally, after many long and tortuous arguments, made our decision on for whom and where to build. The lucky recipient of our first house is going to be Elizabeth Phillips who featured in an earlier post. We went round to tell her. Of course, she was very pleased. But boy, this lady has standards. We told her it was going to be a two bedroom house. 'Can't it be three bedrooms?' was her response, despite the fact that she lives alone and no-one ever comes to stay with her, apart from her daughter very occasionally. But despite these quibbles, when we told her that she was going to get a house, her eyes lifted and her beautiful face, still unlined at 86, showed pure relief. She had just been telling us how she was going to have to have a pacemaker fitted next week. She praised the Lord and clasped her hands.

I got the rest of my Amazon test-drive food deliveries yesterday evening, after I'd finished dinner, so tonight was their testing ground. Sadly I got them all a bit late due to the parcel-delivering customs in deepest Alabama. These are that when we are not home (which is all of the delivery hours), the UPS man knows to deliver our parcels to Barnette Furniture down the road from where we sometimes get a phone call or, as last night, the owner dropping by to inform us rather than that little piece of card in the mailbox. All very well but unfortunately this time I was informed rather late and my leg of lamb which I was so looking forward to definitely did not benefit from the wait despite its careful packing in insulative foam, cold gel bags and so forth. Nevertheless, it was still edible, roasted simply, and the real brown rice that I also ordered (good rice being one of my most insistent food rules) was just what I wanted - nutty, crunchy, especially when I accidentally-on-purpos...

I still struggle, either here or in my letters and emails to friends, to really describe what the Black Belt of Alabama is like. I think that the longer I am here the more mundane and ordinary I make it sound, when in fact it is so strange, wonderful and worrying in equal measure. I suppose I have got used to G.B's Mercantile Store selling Stage Planks and Fig Newtons and bacon cut to order, and the battered trucks pulled up outside it; the fact that my 'studio' is an old barn clad in rusting steel which is freezing in winter and boiling in summer, and leaks when it rains; that my 'home' is a car repair garage, a huge, naked, abandoned space; that the 'downtown' of Greensboro contains no inhabitants other than the Rural Studio students who live in palatial lofts above shuttered stores; that the local nightlife consists either of the black bar or the white bar, and at the former I do feel uncomfortable; that most people live in second-hand mobile homes and wo...

Reading more of 'Let us now praise famous men' is like one sharp intake of breath after another. Not only because of the acuity which Agee brings to bear on what he observes, but because of the precision of his language, the direct, unapologetic, honesty with which he describes his own feelings and the forcefulness with which he does not pull his punches. More brutal yet lyric than any contemporary writing, his prose reminding me alternately of John Clare's tender yet savage descriptions of the English countryside and others like Cobbett or Thomas Paine, interspersed with the naked sensuality of Joyce or parts of early TS Eliot. No doubt Agee knows his influences and his conscious endeavour at a form of truthful realism, harnessing all the powers of language yet not letting them guide his purpose, is painful yet all the more gripping and stark for this pain. And some parts in particular do not age at all. Particularly, reading the section on 'Education', especial...

Having my memory jogged by making Nuccia's tomato sauce, and by hearing stories of gnocchi being eaten in London, today I made gnocchi with the left-over mash from last night (another good thing about cooking for one is that there's always plenty of leftovers). Having probably not made these for over a year, I wondered whether I might have forgotten how, but Nuccia's teachings were obviously deeply ingrained because they turned out perfectly, even if I do say so myself. This is one of those recipes that is impossible to give quantities for. Break an egg or two into a pile of mashed potatoes (I made enough for two and used one egg) and mix up gently with a fork. Start gradually folding in flour, keeping a light touch. I couldn't possibly tell you how much flour goes in, except that when you've used enough the dough should be silky and hang together in a ball so that you can knead it very gently by hand. The silky feeling is what you want; too much flour and the doug...

Everyone always says how they hate cooking for one. For me cooking a really good meal just for me is one of life's greatest luxuries, as eating in a restaurant by oneself also now is, though the latter used to make me uncomfortable. I am home alone tonight and cooked just for me exactly what I wanted to eat, a proper meal (not just a quick pasta) and sat down and ate it properly with a glass of wine and a glass of water, salt and pepper on the table in front of me, and, in lieu of conversation, a good book to stop me from eating too fast. Once I remember planning for myself a three-course meal because I knew my flatmates were going to be out. Jerusalem artichoke soup as a starter, if I remember right, then lamb chops, and as a dessert I think I had biscotti and poached apricots. It was the greatest treat - not to worry about pleasing everyone's tastes, not to have to have everything done on time or to have to wait for someone who was late for dinner - a sensation of sheer luxur...

I bought a great new skillet today, fed up of using the thin-bottomed telfon-coated frying pans that 'came with the property', as they say. In the flea market here you can buy ancient very heavy cast-iron skillets for 10 bucks, already well-used and worn in with decades of frying chicken, bacon, pork chops and beans. This one will definitely push me over the airline weight limit but it's with me for life now. I'm also happy because I've just made a big pan of tomato sauce to put in small containers and freeze, so when I come back starving from studio on a cold night I know I've got something to eat. Again, it's an inherited recipe that my mother learnt from Nuccia, the fantastic chain-smoking cook at Castello di Volpaia , a beautiful estate in Tuscany making wonderful Chianti and probably the best olive oil and wine vinegar. The owners became our friends when my father fell ill there while on a wine-buying trip about 20 years ago, and was nursed back to heal...

I've finally (thank you Aunt Min!) got my own copy of 'Let us now praise famous men', the Walker Evans/James Agee classic exposé of the poverty in rural Alabama in the 1930s and written about precisely the area where I now live. It is almost de rigeur to say that nothing has changed here, save the replacement of cotton with catfish. But reading that stark, intensely detailed prose, coloured by the pointed discomfort of Agee's relatively privileged background of which he is acutely self-aware, it still makes me draw breath to read the comparisons. Of course, conditions here are better than they were then - only 3% of houses now lack plumbing - but the gap in living conditions between this area and the rest of the nation is as wide now as it was then - this statistic is five times the national average. 53% of single mothers live in poverty, which means an income of less than $12,000 for a family of two. It is a book that also struggles vividly and unashamedly with the...

In need of warming, comforting and tasty food after a hard day's work, I made the above - one of my favorite pasta dishes, and one that falls into the all-important category of 'sauce takes as long to make as pasta takes to cook'. I've streamlined the making of this dish into an extremely efficient process. Chop an onion and plenty of garlic, put in a frying pan with olive oil and a pinch of oregano to soften. Put a couple of bags/big bunches of spinach [this makes enough for 3/4 but the sauce keeps well in the fridge for a couple of days and I've even frozen it before] into the pasta pan with a little water on high heat, steam quickly, then remove and put the pasta water onto boil. Drain a can of chickpeas and rinse. Put the spaghetti in to boil and stir the chickpeas in with the onions. Chop the spinach roughly. At about the time when you are impatient enough to test the pasta, although it quite clearly isn't done yet, add the spinach to the chickpea mixture a...

More good breakfast things today - a late one to celebrate finally getting my driving licence here. The Waysider in Tuscaloosa is definitely going to have a return visit. The best biscuits - fluffy and crisp on the outside and my first real grits. They're kinda weird to have with eggs and ham, as they remind me of pudding, but I got used to them by thinking of Japanese rice porridge which is also a savory dish. But the clientele in the Waysider on this Friday around 10.30am was a real pull. Incongruously groomed old ladies meeting for a gossip over their grits, old couples having a double date: the combination of hearty, inelegant food and twin-sets with Southern accents, with a scattering of the check-shirted working men that you would expect to find in such a place. Sort of like a really old-school London chop house, with that East End gentility bordering on roughness - a kind of Lyons Corner House of America. You could imagine having a great date there at a corner table, with a ...

Hooray!! I'm a fully legal licensed Alabama driver...finally...after the world's easiest driving test. My examiner (who had a fondness for the English Royal Family) actually told me how to do every manoeuvre. 'Now I'd like you to back up straight here, and remember, look out of the back window when you back up, don't rely on your mirrors.' 'Now I'd like you to turn left at the stop sign and remember, a stop sign means come to a complete stop.' No, really? So now the Frog and I are free to roam as we like over Alabama (not that we weren't already, seeing as there are no policemen around here to stop me).

Another great evening yesterday, practising with the Kudzu String Band , clustered round a big woodburning stove in the lakeside pavilion on the farm of one of the members. Staples of the bluegrass/old time music repertoire such as Foggy Mountain Breakdown are now within my grasp, along with some fantastic old modal tunes. After a long and intense day in the studio, it was just what I needed - three hours not thinking about architecture at all.

Eggs in the USA: For the first time here I ordered eggs. How do you want them? I was asked. 'Fried, please' I answered. Blank look. So no-one here talks about fried eggs! and scrambled eggs aren't really scrambled eggs, they're sort-of 'vaguely-stirred-around-while-being-cooked' eggs. And you can't buy free-range eggs anywhere in the Black Belt. I might have to get my own chickens. Though even with the artificially-coloured piggly-wiggly-eggs, last night I did manage to make a pretty good mushroom omelette, all runny in the middle...

What is it about the ribs from Mustang Oil that is so much more glorious than the ribs from any other heart-stopping artery-clogging Southern diner? How soft and melting yet crisp and chewy, not too much sauce, those melt-in-your-mouth layers of fat around the knuckles...And accompanied by the best slaw - fresh, crunchy, easy on the mayo, green with flecks of orange carrot and red cabbage, and those inimitable cajun fries. This is how dream-food tastes. Today we hit Mustang Oil at just the right moment, early on, when the fries have just been cooked in preparation for the lunchtime rush and only a scattering of folk sit at the formica tables. Just after we sat down and started to eat, the place filled up with redneck men in grubby jeans, steel-toed boots and baseball caps, from the local metal fabricating company, the John Deere tractor centre, and a few farms and building sites. This place lives at the edge of glorious and worrying in its perpetuation of the stereotypes of Southern li...

I never thought I would ever be such an architect. Remembering that I adamantly told my interviewer at Cambridge that I had not intention of becoming an architect...remembering that I was told I might fail my first year...remembering the first time I tried to draw a construction detail...and how a former colleague of mine asked me curiously 'Did you ever like making models at school?" when I patched another bodged cut in a presentation model... But here I am, finger-wagging at my poor teammates who forget to think about the wall thickness in a model, who don't consider how a window-sill works...where did I get all this from? I thought I still couldn't do this architecture stuff! Architecture, as my interviewer at Cambridge warned, sucks you in. It creeps up on you and before you know it, well you're well and truly nerdish on the matter of window details, paving slabs and concrete finishes. One of my fellow outreach students remarked, coming back from New Orl...

Call me slow, but I only just noticed that Amazon has started a new section (currently beta-testing) selling food. It's utterly amazing. Not just dried/smoked/bottled things, but fresh meat, fish and vegetables. And what's more peculiar is that the price of their fresh vegetables, such as onions, tomatoes, pototoes or peppers, are actually cheaper than Piggly Wiggly . Admittedly, this is without the shipping charge, but nevertheless, I'm astounded. I'm not sure whether its wonderful or terrible that I could have vegetables delivered by UPS in 1-2 business days. What's even weirder is that half the stuff is from mainstream brands - Dole lettuce, Green Giant, Birds Eye. Does anyone really buy frozen Bird's Eye peas from Amazon rather than their local grocery store? (unless you live in the middle of Alaska, sure...) Certainly, given my starved-of-produce state here, fresh meat and fish by mail is something I'm definitely going to be trying out - pictures of le...

The last couple of days have been pretty good on the food front. Last night I even managed to have two dinners - I'd already cooked and eaten a spaghetti with fresh tomato sauce, when Cara-Mae turned up to bake bread and make herself (and me as it turned out) a sort of cassoulet for supper. And today Cara-Mae and I had a lovely peaceful lunch on the porch of a tiny catfish diner near Mason's Bend - the typical soup from round here (chicken with small broad beans, green beans, corn and a tomato base with a little chilli heat), freshly fried catfish, hush puppies and fries. Catfish when freshly cooked like this is absolutely fantastic despite its ubiquity and simplicity and the hush puppies were fluffy and grainy. We sat and ate, with our sweet tea, while chatting to the owner-cook - a woman by the wonderful name of Willie Pearl, who started the diner in January after deciding to retire from Magnolia, one of the big catfish plants nearby. Before that, she told us she used to cook...

My frog-jeep got a lot of action today, under a crisp clear blue sky, exactly how autumn should be. It was warm, too, t-shirt weather despite the chill last night. In the morning we went visiting some RS projects that I still hadn't managed to get time to see, and getting pleasantly semi-lost in the back roads of Hale County along the way. This place can be the most astonishingly beautiful - breathtaking quiet in the woods and gently rolling hollows, and the odd expansive view across a shallow valley. And after lunch it was off to the grounds of Kenan's Mill in Selma, where a small bluegrass festival was taking place, for learning more old-time fiddle tunes and jamming until the sun went down and our fingers got cold. Playing this music with a group of people, even with my meagre skill and lack of knowledge ('You don't know Dixie?' a woman asked in disbelief) makes me smile so much. Picking up the chords and rhythms, especially the old modal tunes, feels like th...

Meanwhile, better late than never, here is Butch before and after his fall.

After election night tacos and post-election nothingness, tonight it's back to cooking, thank god. Risotto, one of my most loved foods, though this one has been a long time coming. First, it was impossible to find risotto rice, even in Super Target in Tuscaloosa where they sell that despicable pre-mixed dried rice and mushrooms, but not the rice by itself. After a birthday night conversation with fellow food fascist Frank, the German second year tutor, a packet of very good arborio was dropped in my lap one day in the computer room. Where he got it from I have no idea. Next, stock: it took some time to summon up the courage to buy and cook one of the dubious battery-farmed chickens from Piggly WIggly who swim in their plastic bags in a mixture of blood and water. But I took the plunge and was rewarded by some decent home-made stock. Last, the ingredients to flavour the thing - and I had to fall back on tight button mushrooms which after half an hour of simmering managed to grow som...

Life post-election is predictably, yet strangely, normal. Those of my fellow students who voted Kerry (by my estimate about two-thirds) show no visible signs of distress, and those that voted Bush finished gloating quickly. Speaking to Anne Bailey, an admirably liberal white woman, she expresses doubts in hushed tones about Bush's effect on the Supreme Court, but for everyone else it's just another day. It's suddenly got cold today. Beacon Street is chilly, though warmed by a good dinner, a bottle of mediocre red wine and an unexpected indulgence in poetry reading (Keat's Ode to Autumn and William Blake). My hands are covered in paint from helping Johnny Parker paint a fence. The $20,000 house is another step nearer to being on site (hopefully next week). Lou's at lunch today was subdued. We listen to the speeches of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X on my friend's iPod as we drive into Newbern, and wonder what happened to those heady days. And I've di...

OK, so if you're right-leaning it's all over and Kerry should graciosuly concede, if you're a hard-bitten liberal its time to fight for those provisional ballots and absentee votes to be counted properly. Fact is, once again these tactics probably won't manage to unseat a president-elect who has got the greatest proportion of the popular vote in history. We don't want a reversal of Bush/Gore. But to the folks back home whose black despair at having to deal with this moron for another four years has my empathy, keep up the good fight. It makes it all the more important to take positive action on whatever small or great level. And in America, I can't help but feel that the most necessary action is urgently to educate - so this kind of politics becomes unacceptable not just to 'people like us' but to the population at large.

I'm logging off to follow the rest on NPR as I fall asleep. But for my two cents, when I wake up I reckon Kerry will be challenging Ohio in the courts.

The liberal Daily Kos continues to be optimistic even about states like Florida, where apparently 1m absentee votes remain to be counted, and Ohio, where similarly large numbers won't be counted for several days under state law. I can't really allow myself to share his hopes, although how Fox can call Ohio before people have even finished voting I don't know. It's weird enough that they 'call' the states before all the votes have been counted, as they do in every state. I miss the certainty of that UK election experience of the broadcast cutting out to the reading out of the vote numbers with that very particular town hall echo, followed by an incoherent acceptance speech by the MP accompanied by the drunken cheers of his supporters. Another weird election snake-with-tail-in-mouth is in Colorado, where the ballot includes an amendment to change the electoral college system to proportional representation, thus changing the outcome of the presidential election...

Florida to Bush. Vodkapundit has most of the other swing states trending Bush. Although we all like to be optimistic, it looks like I could go to bed and wake up to the same old depressing government. In talking to people here, and reading the web, the biggest single reason for this, which is hard for a European to come to terms with, is that people here vote not on politics, but on morality - as the most important issue poll shows. Devout Christians who disagree with Bush on every other issue will vote for him on the basis of the abortion issue alone. People frequently say they will vote for Bush because he is a Christian, so he will uphold the morality of the nation. It has absolutely nothing to do with Iraq, domestic policy, or any sort of policy at all. And absolutely nothing will change their minds on this. You only have to look at the vast swathes of red on the map , covering the Mid-West and the South, to see how much of the country (and it is the country, the rural area...

The Guardian experiment seems to have been a turn-off: Bush leads by five points in Clark County, Ohio . Meanwhile California and Washington have been called for Kerry (no surprise) meaning it's painfully close again with all the focus on the swing states.

One of the more fantastic things is the huge voter turnout which means that polling stations in many areas are having to stay open long past their official closing time. Though early intimations of a major increase in the numbers of young voters have turned out to be unfounded. Meanwhile it's still horribly close. The early exit polls have inevitably been shown to be hopelessly optimistic in favour of Kerry, but so many key states have yet to declare. Though Florida, sadly, is almost certainly gone to Bush.

It's close. It's very close. I am trying hard not to get optimistic about the posted on Wonkette especially as the early high margins in favour of Kerry have been getting narrower as the evening goes on. We don't have TV at our house so I'm relying (again) on live TV streaming from the BBC and endless prodding of the refresh button on many blogs and websites. Behind in Ohio and Florida in the precinct results so far, way ahead in Pennsylvania ...it's still on a knifeedge, with legal challenges coming in from all directions in the swing states. Today our 'critical reading' class turned, inevitably, into a discussion about the election and American political process. I was really surprised by the prevailing belief among all the class that the people and the state had no connection to one another - that the state was run by a political and social elite, bent on self-preservation rather than the common good, which none of them entertained any hope of ev...

Voting in Newbern, Alabama, in the old bank down from the Red Barn, is a strangely moving scene, full of a significance which I can't quite put into words. The building is not used for anything else all year.

The polls have closed in a tiny hamlet in New Hampshire. Last time, they went to Bush. This time, the candidates are exactly neck and neck. The suspense continues...

This election is a page-turner, but I can't skip till the end of the book to find out what happens. All I can do is come home from work and obsessively read Wonkette , the Drudge Report , and the endlessly fascinating rising and falling links page at Technorati . Amazing how shocked the US public, and even the super-cynical and sharp bloggers are at Osama's latest press release. I'm always amazed how coherent and well-informed he is. Good joke about Sweden, too. For me, the way he speaks about why he does what he does is so obviously close to the evangelical crusading of GWB. "Is defending oneself and punishing the aggressor in kind, objectionable terrorism? If it is such, then it is unavoidable for us." Could have come straight from a speech to the UN about pre-emptive strikes. Instead, many bloggers prefer to compare him to Michael Moore. Meanwhile, we all watch and wait. But those bloggers who think that they change the course of history, be aware I...

Alabama is top of the obesity tables , I'm unsurprised to hear. The diet here is appalling, and the total lack of opportunities for exercise in the course of one's daily life is staggering. Walk? Cycle? I took a walk today - five minutes down the street from a classmate's house rather than being dropped off at home - and it was probably the longest walk I'll take all week. The dispersed pattern of settlement means that driving is the only option. I get funny looks if I walk to the supermarket. My former landlady said that she never walked anywhere after dark and tried to drive me to a friends house three doors down. (She needn't have said that; she never walked anywhere anyway.) And everyone lives in a one-storey home - no huffing and puffing up the stairs. Even I have put on weight since being here, I think. In London I would walk to work every day, then walk to go out to a bar or restaurant, walk home, or cycle around town. So much for the countryside being a h...

Today I didn't have any lunch. My so-called team mates all went off for their separate lunches with their secret lovers/inseparable best friends, while I was ensconced in the computer lab oblivious to their whereabouts until my gurgling stomach alerted me to the fact that...I didn't have a ride into town for lunch. G.B's store only has a limited range of edible things and a packet of cookies really doesn't suffice. It put me in a pretty ratty mood, I must say, though luckily no-one was on the receiving end of it because, well, no-one was there. Bastards. So it was good to get home and dig out some real hot food, suiting the dark evening (winter drawing in). Noodles in a sort of Mittel-Europa soup are my only exception to the al dente pasta rule. Sloppy and soupy suits them best. This one was a bit of a cheat, made with frozen borlotti bean soup that I made about a month ago, and left-over beef, but somehow all the better for it in the way that left-over meals can be. Ta...

How does this country manage to mangle its food so? Today's lunch was an especially appalling example - starving, stopping at a chain restaurant off the interstate which I was assured by my travelling companions was 'pretty alright' (though I thought it looked terrible) for 'Italian' food bearing so little resemblance to anything coming from Italy and tasting disgusting into the bargain. Breadsticks: just so you guys at Olive Garden know, breadsticks are crisp and crunchy, and long and thin, not doughy, soft, lightly elongated versions of hotdog rolls covered in a slick of not-olive oil and salt. 'Italian dressing': what the hell is that about? No salad dressing in Italy has dried flakes of oregano and basil in it, or whatever weird stuff they put in there to make it semi-creamy. And no salad in Italy contains jalapeno peppers, grated cheese, croutons, shredded carrot or iceberg lettuce. Bruschetta does not come as a do-it-yourself plate of toast and minute...