bottom drawer

Over dinner two nights ago we came to a mention of the famous case of John Felton , the assassin of the Duke of Buckingham, who, when told that he might be tortured in order to reveal who had put him up to the deed, said "if it must be so he could not tell whom he might nominate in the Extremity of Torture. and if what he should say then must go for Truth, he could not tell whether his Lordship (meaning the Bishop of London) or which of their Lordships he might name, for Torture might draw unexpected Things from him." ( source ) Another source has him pointing the finger more ominously: "if I be put upon the rack, I will accuse you, my Lord of Dorset, and none but yourself." The judges were then consulted and "declared unanimously, to their own honour and the honour of the English law, that no such proceeding was allowable by the laws of England." This was the last time that an English writ for torture was attempted - in 1628. We remarked then that this w

At lunch today my mother made a very traditional japanese New Year's food, which nevertheless I'd never had before. Mochi is a kind of rice cake that you get either fresh or dried - and traditionally is apparently eaten in soups around New Year. The dry stuff, which is what we had, looks like an inedibly rock-hard, dry square of fudge but then you put it in the oven or grill it, and it magically softens and puffs up, becoming something like a gooey ball of cheese with air inside it in texture, but obviously nothing like it in taste, which is a comforting toasted rice taste, a bit like the lovely sticky bits at the bottom of the pan when you burn it accidentally-on-purpose. Altogether it looks quite strange - but is really delicious in soup, when you put it, a bit like a croute, in the bottom of the bowl before the rest of the soup is poured on. It is quite sticky and apparently, every year in the papers you hear about lots of old people who choke on their mochi. Today we had i

Cooking with one's parents is always a difficult task, and for me one of the most taxing things about Christmas. I start off with all good intentions abou being a co-operative, silent helper, but the combination of that parental trait to always treat your offspring as though they are five with my generally bolshy kitchen persona is never a comfortable one. I started off well, replacing any thought of Christmas presents with a basket full of food from London - cheeses from Neal's Yard (where I endured a 20 min long queue - why didn't I order in advance, given my office is literally above the shop?), Pierre Marcolini chocolate from Verde & Co ( Jeanette Winterson's shop), coffee from Monmouth , potted shrimps from the market, oranges, pomegranates and sharon fruit from my local Bangladeshi grocers, and my mother's special request - the small furry potato-like vegetables whose name I know not, but which are common to both Bangladeshi and Japanese cooking. I even

I came down to my parents' house in the country on the 23rd and its been a very quiet Christmas. Although the day itself involved some raucousness at lunch, the growing age of my cousins means that every year it gets to be more and more like a pleasant dinner party and less like the mayhem of my youth. We have also reached, finally, some agreement within my family about no longer needing to give or to be given presents. We've all got more than enough of everything we need, so apart from a stocking full of socks and edible treats, that was, thankfully, about all. I've been arguing this for years but as the child of the family I've always continued to receive vast armfuls of gifts and I'm grateful that this habit is finally wearing off. Today the snow finally arrived - we woke to a light fall glittering in the sun and then in the late morning while we were walking on the beach, we saw a dark cloud race in and suddenly the sky was white with huge flakes, the views alon

It's not, let's face it, the best time to argue about America; around the turkey and booze, with my very left-wing family and myself, whose love affair with the USA has yet to end. I'm not sure how it started but I do know that I came perilously close to thumping my mother for a comment at an inopportune moment. How to defend, as I try to do regularly, a country that many of my fellow British citizens denounce as evil? My problem is chiefly that they are often right in what they say. When the charges of racism come up, for example, I can't say that no, there is none. When they say, vis-a-vis Bush-Kerry 04, that Americans vote on personality not policy, they are right. Anti-gay - tick. Religious in the face of reason - tick. Sometimes, in the thick of one of these arguments, I feel like I need a new AA - America-lovers Anonymous. 'Yes, I know its the most bigoted and stupid country in the world, but I just can't kick the habit'. My problem - and this does not

I thought this was an especially welcome piece of blogging about the sensitive and difficult handling of local distinctiveness in the context of change, which is inexorable and, as Dan Hill says, "must be embraced so as to create an ally rather than an enemy". This is precisely the kind of approach that we constantly advocate and develop at our work here at General Public Agency - a creative approach to characterisation and identity, but founded in a genuine and layered understanding of place, culture (in the broadest sense) and the delicate, unique fingerprint of every area. Dan Hill is on the money, however, when he writes that "if the meaning of Savile Row is not inculcated into the next generations... then how much longer will Savile Row mean anything genuinely useful, even as a prime piece of real estate? It ceases to have 'added value' even to property developers in the long term." This is precisely the conundrum that developers are starting to reali

There's nothing better than the ecstatic euphoria of scoring a goal against Chelsea - the noise, the rush of blood, the realisation that you are on top of the game. There's nothing worse than the deathly hush that descends on the stadium full of home fans when Chelsea scores against you. The Highbury Library indeed. You could have heard a pin drop in the North Bank while at the far end, the small away enclosure was full of figures jumping up and down, yelling to bridge the distance. Unfortunately the euphoria of the goal was an illusory pleasure, as it was disallowed, wrongly, for off-side. And we had to endure two of those dreadful, shivery moments of despair and silence. I'd never heard the stadium so quiet. What to say? Arseblog did, I think, get it entirely right. We needed big performances from the older team members - Sol and Thierry - and they were both quiet. Dennis, when he came on towards the end of the game when it was already too late, added a dash of energy an

I received the Annual Record 2005 from my old college, Trinity , yesterday. The 'austere format' of this volume - the same each year, a pale blue with a monoprint of the college fountain on the cover in navy ink - always prompts both my curiosity and some reflections on my time at Cambridge. Seeing who has died, who has become a Fellow, who has got recognised for some appointment, academic or otherwise, or (in election years like this) been elected as an MP (Oliver Letwin, I see) is a strangely satisfying delve. This year, among other things I note that my old tutor got a Gold Medal from the Bibliographical Society , and that one of my contemporaries (who I knew was writing a novel) has evidently finished it, because she donated a copy to the library. But it also brings back to me the odd connection I have with Trinity. I read about the Annual Gatherings (where alumni from the same matriculation year get back together) and other events and realise how I am barely in touch with

I just realised that I haven't posted a thing on this blog since I returned from the States. Today I just got an urge to write about one little food-related thing and perhaps it is apt, for my first post-USA post, that it should be on American coffee. When I returned to England, I had a coffee soon after and it made me go crazy. I hadn't drunk a coffee that strong (and it was only a good filter coffee, not even an espresso) for so long, I got minor palpitations and felt rather light-headed. No wonder those early explorers were excited to discover this new drug. So I didn't drink any coffee at all for perhaps the first month, instead becoming a very Englihs tea-drinker, with a cup every couple of hours some days. But as my life got busier and I got more tired, I started to consider the amount of caffeine in tea to be a bit inadequate, and began thinking about coffee. I started having the odd filter from the wonderful coffee house just below my office - but they almost always

It was a stunningly beautiful day today, as every Londoner noticed, I'm sure. Time for a proper walk - and while what I really wanted to do was go to Blackheath for a brisk one and a late pub lunch, I had no accomplices amongst my busy friends so instead I set off northeast, aiming to get to the the Lea River. The walk was many stages of parkland and Sunday football. Weavers Fields, my local park, was full of local Bangladeshis having matches in various stages of organisation. Then came the near side of Victoria Park, all beautiful mature trees, canal boats and strollers, with its edge of fine terraced houses that will, I'm sure, rival Holland Park prices in a few years. Crossing over the road, and the other side of the park is plainer, tower blocks on the horizon, with kids' football teams playing in impeccable striped kit and bellowing parents on the sidelines. Get to the other side, cross over the roaring A12 on a deserted cycle bridge and suddenly the land drops away in

It's lovely to be back in the East End. Even while working far too hard over the last few weeks, there are little moments that remind me why I still live here despite the increasing crowds of scarily over-hipster teenagers. The main thing is being able to walk almost everywhere I want to go - to work, to play, to the river. Walking to work, means going over the Thames in the brilliant morning light, battling against the tide of humanity streaming across London Bridge into the City. Walking home again means meandering through the back streets of the City past the Lloyds building and the Gherkin, both lit up magically on these winter nights, strange and beautiful when the streets are empty. And enjoying all those reverberant street names around Aldgate - Jewry, Goodman's Stile, Crosswall. Having St John Bread & Wine as my local restaurant and off-licence is another good thing: bad for the wallet, good for making a happy heart. Last week we were in there for a supper after goi

One for the geeks (or wannabes): Deli.cio.us has been taken over by Yahoo . For those who don't know, del.icio.us was one of the biggest innovations online last year and really revolutionised the way many people use the web, blog, read news and many other things. My 'ephemera' sidebar is enabled by deli.cio.us and it has become my essential online filing cabinet . Its had many imitators but its clean, absolutely simple interface has made it the winner in a world where community (i.e. number of users) really does mean success. I wrote about Yahoo vs. Google last year and my frustrations with the design (concept and visual) of Yahoo's service remains. I never use Yahoo to search. I still use Flickr despite its takeover but I use the uploader applet so I never really encounter the interface and its true to say that it hasn't changed that much. But in general, I am rather sad that lovely del.icio.us has given up to the behemoth. My feeling is that Google's design

Apologies for my complete lack of posts recently. Life has been busy. Masses of work for the office and for school, house-redecorating and boyfriend-moving-in have left me with barely time to see a single friend, let alone spend a few well-earned hours typing for y'all's amusement. But now the boy's left for India for two months, I had my crit at LMU and I've finally had a lie-in; life's looking up. I've got the radio tuned to a local station playing Atlanta rap (reminders of Alabama) and a big cup of tea. Several posts to follow!

An amazing London cabbie moment on Saturday evening. I was surprised when he knew exactly where my street is and about the church (St Matthews) that's around the corner. But then he started talking about Arnold Wesker 's plays, and before I knew it, he was onto Ibsen, Chekhov, Voltaire, Pushkin, Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Hesse, Thomas Mann. He had Lermontov's 'A Hero of Our Time' in the glove compartment. Not only did he reel off the names, he talked about them with absolute understanding and intelligence. I read all these books and then promptly forget most of their contents. But this cab driver should have been lecturing at university. Lermontov being compared with Camus, the virtues of Gogol and Gorky's relationship with Stalin. We asked him when he did all this reading. Well, he answered, I like to read in the morning with a cup of tea and a slice of toast. Often I have another slice of toast and I read for an hour and a half. And I always have

We're swamped with work here at General Public Agency . We need new full-time and part-time/freelance people to work with us and we are also looking for interns, who we may be able to support financially a little bit. We don't have much money but we do have a fantastically varied, interesting and ambitious range of work on and offer an environment that's unique for anyone interested in being involved with cutting-edge projects in the built environment, artistic practice, urban development and issues of social and environmental citizenship. General person spec: Energetic, confident, self-motivated and able to work independently with a minimum of supervision. Able to quickly grasp complex briefs and issues, and produce work very fast. Imagination, lateral thinking and ambition are also required. We need: Freelance researchers with a background and interest in any of the following: regeneration and urbanism policy, land use, planning, public art, artist projects, new fields of

It amazes me that, several years on from the emergence of Google as the pre-eminent way of finding out any information, some people still have no idea how to use the results it throws up. Every week at the office, we get one or two phone calls asking us if we are the Thurrock Urban Development Corporation. This is because if you google 'Thurrock Development Corporation' our project is the first item that comes up. Go to the site and find the 'contact' section and you get us. But how is it not possible for these people to realise that our project has quite clearly nothing to do with the workings of the actual UDC , who were neither our client nor have ever endorsed or funded our work (much to our frustration and that of our 'real' clients). It is the sad fact that no government quango would ever have such a beautiful, clear, informative and creative website as that of our project - but you would expect that even if the viewer did not think of this, every literat

Its hit really cold here, suddenly. Beautiful and crisp, with the slanting sun seemingly permanently shining into your eyes, but so freezing that this weekend, wandering around the city with a visiting friend from abroad, we had to stop every hour for a pint or a cup of tea. Apologies for not yet blogging about the London Met conference that was last week - very interesting, but I need to set aside an hour to write it up - and everything else. Having visitors tends to do that to one, it being generally more interesting to talk to someone who you never normally see than to sit in front of a computer for a couple of hours. In the mean time, here was our weekend: Wonderful exhibition installation by Francis Alys in Portman Square (if you missed it, tough...it ended yesterday) including the now-famous video of a fox running wild in the National Portrait Gallery, and the amazing piece 'Guards', where 64 Coldstream Guards march around the City of London in a strange and suspenseful

Not enough time to blog about the stuff that I've been up to. But here are some things I've been reading that maybe y'all might enjoy in the mean time. I love this tale of a floating island in, of all places, Massachusetts. Mysterious, provoking rather wonderful dreams of a world of more such eccentric yet possible things. Vito Acconci and Robert Smithson , you have nothing against the strage fantasies of nature. This American island seems to be somewhere between a whale-island with a mind of its own and the mysterious shifting swamps of the Louisiana bayou. This project - Herve Biele's innovative re-use of old Communist pre-fab concrete panels - is all over the archi-blogs today after being featured in the Guardian. Did no-one clock it in the Biennale last year or this year at the V&A ? This article about the response of ordinary Pakistanis to the earthquake reminds me a lot of the response of Americans to Katrina - everyone driving down south to try and hel

In response to Robie's comment to my post yesterday , its all very well to talk about the radical-ness of a means of representation in theory but it is a lot more tricky when dealing with a real client (in this case a local council) with a very low level of visual literacy (or should that be, a level of literacy that most non-architects have?) We are producing documents that are being asked to do the impossible: be all things to all people, not to produce architectural representation for architects to fawn over. Archigram's images were certainly representing their ideas extremely well, but they were also doing the design, whereas we are in the position of trying to produce design guidance to forestall the worst tendencies of commercial development, and prod them into having to be more creative and characterful. We are not advocating a single aesthetic. We are also working in a time-frame that makes a more interesting process of experimentation about how exactly we do represent

"I seem to be a dangerous commodity in certain circles and receiving such awards is a relatively novel experience for me," said Prince Charles when he received a Scully Award (previous winners: Jane Jacobs and the Aga Khan) the other day. I also have found myself defending our prince rather a lot over the last few days, much to my surprise. I guess I feel rather sorry for him. Bless him for trying to raise a debate and he's not all nonsense and Poundbury horror - his heart is definitely in the right place. It must be so tough being surrounded by sycophants all the time. I just wish the damn New Urbanists hadn't got their teeth into him - now there's not the slightest chance of weaning him back from the dark side, alas. [Speaking of which I found this scary thread on Cyburbia. How can people express such admiration without irony?] More strange things: A Christian evangelist theme park is going to be built in Israel. What strange post-post-modernism is this? It&

We're working on rather a lot of 'design guidance' at the moment in the office. Documents that will be given to evil (and not-so-evil) developers and their architects to encourage and inspire them to produce pieces of urbanism that work in their context and that meet the desires and needs of the client and the community. It's the kind of thing that is crucially important to get right but really easy to get wrong, even when you are intelligent, radical and progressive like us(!) We're not talking watercolours of neo-Georgian crap here - we're talking contemporary design that is nevertheless sensitive and thoughtful without losing its character and becoming another bland glass-and-render-with-a-bit-of wood apartment block. One knows good design when one sees it, but how the hell does one represent such a thing on paper? I've had this struggle so many times. Precedent images - well, fine, but you don't always really know what you're looking at, its diff

Housepainting (walls) Lunch Football (live) Dinner (in, with friends) Bed Housepainting (floor) Lunch Football (TV) Dinner (out, without friends) Bed

After Friday afternoon filing and emails, finally I have half an hour to write, more fully, about my time in India last week. General impressions: I expected India to be huge, chaotic and poor, but it was vastly more of all of these than I had imagined. I couldn't really believe how the country manages to function as one of the world's largest economies. Somehow, perhaps, all the news that features here about the IT industry, call-centres, Bollywood stars and new luxury resorts on the beach had made me imagine that there was beginning to be a semblance of order and organisation about the country, and a growing middle-class. I'm sure these things are happening, but the appearance of everything we saw, from the headquarters of a major fabric mill making all Levi's jeans, through to the Delhi Secretariat, was exactly as you might imagine from the mid 1960s - terribly shabby offices, erratic electricity, extraordinary flunkeys, whirring overhead fans and broken lifts being

Last night we went to see the latest Michael Clark show at the Barbican. The first half was classic Clark punk-rock, booming Iggy Pop and graphic black-and-white costumes. Clark himself danced a few short sections, as always absolutely mesmerising in the way he moves - controlled yet loose and lithe. As so many times with his (and some others') pieces to music like this, I always wonder whether I really want to be in a theatre to watch them. I'd rather be in the 333 perhaps, beer in hand and grimy black wall behind me, hearing Iggy blast out of the sound system over the noise of the crowd and watching the precisely controlled, haughty yet intimate movements like a vision of perfection above the Hoxton hipsters. The second half, the much-discussed new version of Stravinsky's Apollo, was extraordinary. Thrilling, spine-tinglingly wonderful. It had a lightness of touch and an absolute boldness in being so simple and so direct in its classicism - unafraid to be pure and uncom

Another announcement: this fantastic conference being held by the architecture dept at London Metropolitan University in a couple of weeks. It's featuring a whole host of great speakers from international universities that are running live projects through outreach programmes ('projects offices') - whether design-build architecture, community/urban planning, humanitarian design in developing nations, and so on. Speakers include people from the Rural Studio, the Technical University of Berlin, Hong Kong, Russia, Parsons and the Pratt Institute in New York, and so on. If you are either a student wanting to know more about how they might be able to get involved with live projects through their studies, or an educator wanting to know how to set up a projects office in their institution, or a community group/local government group wanting to know how to collaborate with universities to help with their planning or design issues, the conference should be fantastic! It's over

I'd just like to draw your attention to the Sheila McKechnie Foundation's recently announced call for applications for their fantastic new awards scheme. For those of you who might not know, the SMF was set up to help the next generation of campaigners get their voices heard and create real change. It's based on a belief in the importance of active campaigners like McKechnie to our society, to fight against injustice and for progressive thinking, action and tangible change. The award winners will get an amazing package of support including the opportunity for one-on-one mentoring, the shadowing of people in positions of influence and networking. The charity's patron is Gordon Brown and there are several equally high-profile people involved so the winners will really be able to access an amazing network of political power and lobbying opportunities. So get the word out and apply!

Last night I had the inestimable honour of sitting in the front row of the directors' box at Highbury watching the mighty Arsenal thoroughly trounce Sparta Prague. Despite my jetlag and a rather late bout of Delhi belly meaning that my consumption of the buffet dinner and drinks in the boardroom was rather limited, it was a rather ridiculously exciting experience. One enters the stadium through the crowd control barriers at the point marked 'VIPs only'! Walking in the marble halls and up the stairs to the oak-panelled boardroom, past amazing pieces of memorabilia, including an extraordinary photograph of the first flood-lit match at the ground in 1951, when of course the whole ground was still terraces (holding at least twice as many spectators as now) and the lights reveal this mass of North London humanity in moody, misty black and white, like some kind of political rally. Then up, past rather classically obsequious cockney stewards (alright, guv!) in their old-school un

We were not in Delhi when the bombs went off yesterday - having arrived in Ahmedabad the day before. But it's quite awful that it has happened at this incredible holiday season, when all the streets we've seen are full of people shopping and looking forward to the 'Indian Christmas' - think bombs going off on Oxford Street on Christmas Eve and you might get the feeling. This is a strange time to blog from India and I'll write in more detail in due course. But suffice to say, we've had some absolutely incredible experiences - the people we've met, the places we've seen, the projects and so on - inspiring and moving, and giving me lots of ideas. It's pretty humbling to see what some incredibly committed people (whether the schoolkids in Delhi that we visited, or the wonderful engineer Himanshu Parikh whose work we've been seeing here in Ahmedabad) can achieve, with such intelligence and sophistication in this chaotic country.

Amazing - a survey has found that 75% of the British public want the railways re-nationalised, including 61% of Tory voters. Which is another interesting piece fo trivia to add to my growing file on the railways, tied into my emerging project for London Metropollitan about the architecture of rural services and community buildings (railways being a particularly interesting part of this, at least to me). Another piece of this puzzle is this fascinating post on what happens to churches now they're not so useful for worship any more. Apparently old cinemas are being converted into churches for the evangelical masses, and churches are becoming everything from nail bars to climbing walls. And another rural-themed report from We Make Money Not Art about the invention of self-milking machines for cows. I happen to know that a certain former-head of a big regeneration agency in town (no prizes for guessing) who spends most of her real energy on her organic farm, has been planning exactl

Yesterday we went on an outing to the Middle Farm Apple Festival near Lewes, Sussex, held to coincide with Common Ground's National Apple Day . I'd found out about it through (nerd that I am) a website about American old-time music gigs . Because yes, banjos were present. But more than that, it was the mention of chicken-racing that made me really want to go. There were chicken races. And real proper old-fashioned fairground rides. And an amazing Mousetown (how much fun must it be to live as a mouse in a real model town, crawling up and down stairs, in and out of windows, sitting in the pub or disappearing into the manhole covers?). Many, many more varieties of cider than I knew could exist - and they were pretty tasty. Cows, ducks, geese, pigs, morris dancers and lots of apples. All really lovely fun and made me, again, nostalgic for the countryside life. [Though I must admit, it being near-ish to Brighton, there were a few too many yummy mummys/novelty wellie boots wandering

I am all for open-source. Blogs, the power of millions of people sharing, a decentralised knowledge base, f*** Microsoft, let's all hack around with Linux and GoogleMaps . It's so much easier and more fun not to have to know everything and then try to guard it - all you need is a great network of other people who know stuff, and then we can all share! But when it come to my everyday work, I get very inconsistent. A large part of my work involves research into a very new and constantly shifting field of practice, which is globally scattered, and involves a network of fantastic practitioners who are, in effect, our 'open-source' collaborators. Which is all fine, but this 'creative capital' - our in-house knowledge, expertise, and our social and professional networks - are what we need to make money from. We're not after pots of gold, but we would like to keep ourselves in shoes and stockings. In addition, a lot of other people (in our view) don't really

I've been meaning to post about this for a while, but like many other topics it's been languishing behind a pile of other work. Recent work by the government's Neighbourhoods Unit proposes five ways to measure so-called community strength, which is meant to be one of those 'good things' although no-one really understand what it means. So here they are: 1. Governance - percentage of residents who feel that they can influence decisions affecting their local area 2. Cohesion and inclusion - percentage of residents who feel that their local area is a place where people from different backgrounds can get on well together 3. Volunteering - percentage of residents who affirm that they carried out voluntary work in an organisation once a month or more in the past year 4. Voluntary and community sector - percentage of VCS groups and organisations affirming growth in activity over the past year in terms of (i) financial turnover and (ii) volunteering 5. Services - Proportion

Allow me a moment to praise my wonderful boyfriend, whose first major (£2.5m) building opened last night. The Egg, the new children's theatre run by the Theatre Royal Bath , is not only critically acclaimed and utterly beautiful, but that miracle of a well-run project - on time and under budget! You can see some pictures on the architects website in their photo dumpster . The boy crawled home late last night after all the boozing and backslapping at the opening. But for me the biggest praise for him as the project architect came from the contractor who built the thing. 'Tom' he apparently said, 'you're the only architect I've ever worked with who knows about building.' Knowing what contractors generally think of architects (scum of the earth), that's not bad praise! Congratulations to the whole team - including the boy's poor underlings who've put up with his occasionally foul moods for the last two years...

Yesterday I had to get up far too early to go and get the visas for myself and our photographer to go to India in a week. Quite an adventure - a sort of weirdly chaotic order of far too many people in the room, a supposedly quite strict and efficient system that actually broke down rather a lot and then resurrected itself in quite a human form when you least expected it. I eventually emerged triumphantly - five hours, two faxes, two couriered letters, and many phone calls back to the office later. Then it was time for a couple of hours in the office before I went off to have my jabs at the BA travel clinic - a rather surreally efficient process whereby I was in, injected and out again before I'd barely had time to catch my breath. Back in the office for a few hours and then, off to see the original Godzilla movie, in the original Japanese and black and white. It was quite an astonishing film - not only for how terrifying it manages to be despite the primitive special effects, and

My first weekend down at my parents' house (where I grew up) since I got back from the States, for my birthday. A quarter-century didn't seem like a time I particularly wanted to celebrate in any elaborate way, for some reason, and was spent peacefully in my old birthday rituals, somehow reaffirming a connection to my homeplace. The weather was, as is traditional, beautiful - an Indian summer, eating birthday lunch outside with sunhats, it was so warm. We picked quinces and pumpkins, as we always do, and ate a lamb tagine with quinces. A lovely walk over the marshes and picking huge, soft, pinkish beige parasol mushrooms, beaded with dew, in the morning for breakfast. Pints in the Nelson in Southwold with friends and scrabble before bed (I won, which was precisely as it should be!) Good food and delicious wine, and the most fantastic present of a life membership to the London Library - an incredible, wonderful luxury - thank you, parents! It capped off a week that saw my life

On my continuing mission to find myself more jam sessions to feed my addiction to old-time American music, Sunday night found me drinking in the Harlequin pub just behind Sadlers Wells theatre . A real gem of a pub, named after the clown Grimaldi who performed at the old Sadlers Wells (which itself has a fascinating history ) - tiny, real beer, perfect, and at the back there were two banjos, a guitar, three fiddles and an autoharp playing real old-time mountain music. Ah, my ears were sated - although I love bluegrass, old-time is another thing altogether and I happily ensconced myself with a couple of friends. No Sunday night blues when you've got a banjo ringing in your ears. Two of the musicians were also at the Hemingford Arms the other night when I went there, and I saw them again yesterday, when I finally took out my fiddle and played my first jam session in London. I went back up to the Hemingford and played with the old guys for three happy hours. It felt so good to be pl

Another London weekend has passed by, with many typical London activities. Yesterday, after getting up late (the boy meanwhile doing his errands of recycling, shopping at the local grocers, butchers and Italian deli) it was off to the Tate Modern to meet a friend. We drank coffee watching the steely London autumn light and the wind blowing the birch trees, then wandered around a bit of 'art'. I rather enjoyed the little display of Beyond Painting - Piero Manzoni, Fontana and Burri, the latter's sackcloth works being intriguing and quite rich. Then it was off for a pint and then tapas on the Cut, to Meson Don Felipe, where I hadn't eaten for a long time. The Young Vic redevelopment, which I helped design in the competition and scheme design stages, is well uner way on site and it was astonishing for me to see something that I'd made endless models of, and drawn countless permutations, actually take shape in reality. Almost enough to make me want to be a 'real&

I realised that I forgot to chronicle my first success in searching out men with banjos in London town...which actually took place on Monday night. Which goes to show how, already, in London life, the concerns of the moment (work, etc) so rapidly eclipse experiences that one has had even a short time before. But in brief, I was hugely excited to go to the Hemingford Arms in Barnsbury, where I had read that there was an old-time/bluegrass jam every Monday night, and find that indeed, inside there were old men, banjos, mandolins and other assorted and appropriate instruments, playing that unmistakeable twanging sound... I was wearing my Tannehill Opry top as a little signal just in case anyone might recognise it...and sure enough, although no closet Alabamian embraced me as a long-lost sister, the opry-word did attract the attention of one of the players, who came over to talk to me. It was quite strange to hear a broad cockney accent issue from the mouth of someone who was playing son

I've started to work on my design and research project with London Metropolitan University in conjunction with the company I work for, General Public Agency . Broadly speaking it's on the spatial (planning and architectural) challenges faced by rural areas. It will start with some general research on current pressures and demands on differently located and sized rural communities and then focus in quite quickly on the potential for intervention/direct action in a few chosen places. This might range from working with a community group or parish council on a small building project, through to formulating a masterplan for new development or regeneration. A range of these projects (hopefully fairly radical, based in real places but seen also as 'prototypes' for other communities facing similar issues) would be worked up in outline form, in collaboration with local groups/agencies. One of them will ideally reach some sort of fruition by the end of the year - either being bu

So Bush nominates Harriet Miers, a close friend and utterly undistinguished lawyer to be a Supreme Court Justice. Her only previous judicial appointments have been ones that she was appointed to by, erm, Bush. And now, the liberal blogs are so up-their-own arses that they are actually happy about this nomination because, of all things, the fact that she's an unknown quantity appears to be getting the right-wingers up in arms as they don't know for sure whether she'll vote anti-abortion. I.e., the Democrats (including Senate minority leader Harry Reid) are happy about this ultimate stealth appointment who will agree like a lapdog with anything Bush asks her to, because of some ridiculous points-scoring off the rabid Republicans. How about kicking up a fight about nepotism? No, instead, we'll have "great fun watching conservatives go after Bush" while any tradition of judicial independence goes up in smoke. Guys, look outside your own petty Beltway posturing

The English autumn is a very melancholy season. Even its most pleasant parts - a quiet, delicious Saturday lunch in Medcalf , the clean, warm sunshine slanting down the side streets - are tinged. Especially when tomorrow a delicious year of freedom ends and I start back at work and school , let alone when Chelsea thrash Liverpool at Anfield. There is something so inherently romantic and melancholy about Liverpool anyway - the passion in the face of adversity, the tears on the faces of hard Northern men, 'You'll Never Walk Alone" and the constant memory of a lost golden age - that makes me somewhat wish to have been born a Scouser just so I could have that in my inheritance. But instead, I get a return to Highbury to see us beat a 10-man Birmingham not nearly as easily as we should have. Which is, indeed a great pleasure - the North Bank in the sun, the crowd and chants, the little rituals, the stress of watching the match and its battles, and Bloody Marys afterwards in t

In my quest for a worksafe wardrobe I have, over the last week, shopped the whole of Zone 1 London. I've shopped from Topshop to Selfridges, from Beyond Retro to Browns Focus. It's quite an interesting and at times depressing experiment - to take the pulse of the capital's fashion zeitgeist after a year away of living in cut-off shorts and t-shirts from the 50 cent rack in the thrift store, and still looking reasonably well-dressed. Fashion, right now, is pretty dull. Topshop famously produces instant copies of everything that appears in the high-end stores, but the depressing thing is that you might expect the quality to be far inferior but in fact, the Marc Jacobs top that's appearing in the basement of Oxford Street isn't really that much better designed or, to me, desirable, than its cheap rip-off. Too many frills, buttons, 'frayed' edges, cropped jackets, full skirts, 'military' jackets that look no more authentic when done by Stella McCartney t

The errands pile up and get dealt with: buying clothes, taking my violin to the shop to get a new bridge (the old one being completely warped by a year of Alabamian humidity), ordering a new credit card (they didn't automatically replace my old one because I spent too little money on it, can you believe!), going through a stack of mail, finally getting my super-long jeans taken up. Punctuated by some very nice eating and friend-seeing - St John Bread and Wine, Kulu Kulu sushi - and a long and interesting conversation about the nature of religion with a visiting fellow-blogger in Bar Italia to the background of the Inter-Rangers game. The conversation originated from, of all things, talking about the Internet: the parallel being the interconnectedness of everything made apparent by the linking world of the web, and that this is, of course, what religion is all about as well, at least if you are into mystical Kabbalah. So apparently I can forget about all the God stuff and still be

[Note: I was tickled to read Tom Coates on how he hasn't had time to blog about the things he really wants to write about. This post has been 'in progress for several days: it's rough and incomplete but I decided I should post it up anyway, otherwise I'd never get it out...so forgive any excess bluntness!] Race, due to Trevor Phillips recent comments, due to the disaster of Katrina, and the bombings in London, is high on the agenda. I've just lived for a year in an area where racism is popularly supposed to be the worst in the States, coming from the area of London that it is famous for being the 'melting-pot' of immigrants, with a white minority. I can only comment with any authority on the relationship of race to physical space - the much-used word 'ghetto', and the place of physical 'pepperpotting' of ethnic families in neighbourhoods. West Alabama is somewhere where de-segregation has happened legally regarding jobs, voting and services,