bottom drawer

Keeping up my resolution to blog more frequently, today was a somewhat sleepy day for me doing mindless and soothing tasks like digging a small trench for a water pipe and painting the inside of our house. I'm still not sure what timezone I'm in. But being back in Alabama is beautiful - the warm weather, the wildflowers spreading like crazy (vetch growing up the walls, the huge purple thistles everywhere, evening primroses in the verges) and more approaching fun things - tomorrow up to north Alabama for a bluegrass festival on the mountain at Horsepens , and of course, pig roast fast approaching...

Another week, another tool to make Google even more invaluable and to advance the trade of 'internet researcher' over 'librarian' - Google Print . Much as I love and depend on these things, and they do make my life infinitely easier and open up possibilities for inquiry that would be unthinkable otherwise, I do rather lament the increasing decline of real books and real libraries. If you have Google Print, will anyone ever buy an academic book again? One wonders what the publishers who are partnering this venture think. Or will the best of these tools become subscriber-only? For me, I'm old-fashioned and there still will be no replacement for sitting in the reading room of the London Library . But I feel that increasingly I won't be sitting there because of the books I can find in the stacks around me, but because it provides somewhere quiet, dignified and uplifting to do my work, or spend a couple of leisure hours. The LL has always been a cousin to the gentlem...

Why when I go to an airport, do I always eat something really wrong and random? I perpetually seem unable to make a rational decision in those circumstances. When leaving Alabama I'm always craving something I haven't eaten for a long time, and for some reason, the last couple of trips this has meant eating Chinese food in the airport, which is a really bad idea. Both times it has been disgusting. Why do I continue to do this to myself? and on the way back this time, I chose the worst possible sandwich from a range that contained some perfectly reasonable options. Why, oh why, did I go for the 'Cuban pork loin'? in this case, pork loin was simulated by ham+ chicken (I think) and some seasoning, which apparently was meant to evade my notice and trick my tastebuds into believing that it really was the loin of a pig. Other eating adventures...getting to eat at the River Cafe twice in London, which had me cursing my damn jetlag/lack of sleep as it meant that my stomach felt...

Long time no blog, as many of my readers have been pointing out to me...and for this, sincere apologies! There are several bad reasons for this: After the Canadian visit of last week, I promptly came down with some kind of bug and lay in bed for a couple of days. I didn't want to blog about this as I knew my mother would worry unnecessarily and really, it wouldn't have been that interesting for y'all to hear about how I lay in bed, tried to go to the doctor, etc. The only new thing I learnt was how convoluted the American healthcare system is. I mean, asking someone who feels like death to ring up all sorts of people and check whether there is a doctor within 30 miles who falls under your healthcare plan? It puts you off going to the doctor at all. Oh, for the NHS... Then, I had an exciting Saturday of errands in the morning followed by many hours of playing bluegrass at Chip's annual big party down by his pond. Lovely, as always, to jam and listen to others playing. We...

Having Canadians around is so funny. 'Listen to this. This song is about Winnipeg. IT'S SO AWESOME!!!!!' [jumps up and down in a pretty tame way in his nice checked shirt] and...'I like the Weakerthans a lot. Actually a lot of their songs are about cities and urbanism, which is pretty cool.' Erm, yeah, that's exactly why I listen to rock music. Bless those lovely Canucks and their friendly social consciences.

Ah joy...I find myself with a spare half-hour to blog. This hasn't happened for a while - due to visitors, book research (now 'handed in' - hooray!) and all the stuff I'm meant to be doing here, ie build a house. Which, by the way, is coming along fine. The drywall guys started today at 6am and are proceeding mighty fast. We're midway through putting up our siding (asphalt shingles. This was a long debate but actually, I'm pleased about how they look - kinda cheap Adjaye Dirty House effect without the fancy windows). And now, I've only got my spare half-hour because I'm bunking off work - having been doing some car mechanics (yes, really, me) with Johnny Parker, I figured there wasn't enough time to make it worthwhile heading back to site so I'm hanging out at Beacon Street with Peter Macleod , who's visiting from Canada, before we head out to meet Andrew and interview him for an article Peter's writing for Azure on the RS. I guess I nee...

I have played the violin/fiddle since I was four. In the twenty years since then I singularly failed to win any prizes (well, apart from the Suffolk Festival). I never got past the first round of the Young Musican of the Year. But tonight, glory came. I won the first prize in the oldest fiddlers contest in Alabama, in Frankville. And the band won best band. In the words of the bluegrass classic, we're sitting on top of the world. Frankville fiddlers contest was started in 1926 to inaugurate the new schoolhouse they had built, and it has happened every year since in the same venue - a beautiful building, white clapboard outside and peeling beadboard inside, classic Southern architecture. We turned up on a sunny afternoon, outsiders to LA (Lower Alabama) as most of the musicians and events we go to are further north, and we are proud as hell that not only did we evidently impress the judges, the locals took us to heart. Days don't get too much better than sitting in a schoolhouse...

The only place around here that really attempts to champion local food is the Thomaston Rural Heritage Centre , where the Rural Studio has, over the last three years, been building a fantastic new base for them. Their most famous products are their amazing, world-beating barbeque and their pepper jelly, which is made from green peppers grown in their own garden. The Rural Studio project for them includes a state-of-the-art new kitchen to make all these things in, as well as a cafe space where they hope to both feed the community and provide classes in cooking healthy, locally available produce. Last night was the 'grand opening' of the new building (despite the fact that, in true RS style, it's not quite finished yet) and we were treated to a feast of not-very-Alabama food cooked under the supervision of the wonderful Mrs Kardous, mother of a student on the team and so devoted to the project that she has driven down from North Carolina every weekend for the last few months...

The spring here has just burst out and almost overnight, it seems, the 'green fuse' has been lit and everything is covered in shooting leaves. The most wonderful and unexpected part of the spring for me has been the wisteria which grows wild and crazy in the woods, climbing up the pines and dogwoods and covering them in flowers cascading down. Driving with your windows down, every few hundred feet on the county roads you get a dizzying blast of their scent. There are also wild white irises growing by the roadside, huge deep burgundy thistles, ditches full of buttercups and pale blue bugles, vetch, wild sorrel (reminding me of Suffolk) and wild dogroses. The field in front of our site, on which our client grows turnips, greens and onions but which she hasn't ploughed up yet this year, amazes me with the wild flowers that grow on it. The whole field shimmers with their colours - sorrel, buttercups, bugles, some white flowers which I don't know the name of, and deep red cl...

I've realised I should really have a) been blogging more recently (you know it's getting bad when American Family Radio aka the voice of the Southern Baptist church starts commenting onthe importance of blogging daily) and b) been blogging about this whole book research shebang that I've been spending the hours between 7pm and midnight on for the last 2 months. It might even be interesting to those architectural/design/activist types among you. Basically, it's been an incredibly interesting but hard slog through the internet to try and find really outstanding case studies of multi-disciplinary, socially and/or environmentally engaged architecture/planning/artistic practice. The premise being that in recent years there have been a growing number of projects, often initiated by practitioners as opposed to the usual client bureaucrats, that have addressed severe social and environmental problems and urban and rural renewal in creative, characterful, and ultimately more su...

YES!!! YES!!! YES!!! Chelsea-Birmingham 1-1 Middlesbrough-Arsenal 0-1 And I check in to the BBC just in time to catch Norwich-Man Utd 2-0. Sweet. They keep saying that they're not declining, but really, to fail to beat the bottom team in the Premiership? And Birmingham drawing away to Chelsea? It's a sunny day in Alabama. Some strange events today - a bagpiper in full Scottish regalia playing at the crossroads of 14 and 69, apparently something to do with a bikeathon (I hadn't realised that the trend for men wearing lycra on hot summer days had spread even to here), and a rather dramatic car wreck just in front of him at the precise moment we had stepped out of our cars to gawp at his glowing cheeks. Yesterday was the first night of the first annual Greensboro Rodeo, which was also pretty good fun and quite surreal. I hadn't really realised that rodeos here are like fairgrounds, with a coterie of 18 year old cowboys who follow them from town to town, hoping to make a fe...

I've been eating rather well over the last week as a result of the influx of European visitors with refined tastes to redneck West Alabama. A trip to Atlanta airport with Quentin inevitably turned into an excuse to eat at a real, good restaurant with real wine, and then a trip to DeKalb Farmers Market in order to stock up on food for the parents, who I knew would not be content with eating at the Mexican and Buck's but would require cooking for in some way. Then they arrived laden with food from California - real cheese with oatcakes to eat it with, herbs, sourdough bread, organic salads, and best of all, a gift of half a dozen bottles of Ridge Wine from their previous hosts in the US of A. (These are the times I thank my lucky stars that my father is in the wine business.) So we had real meals with more than one course, including that precious commodity of lamb (impossible to buy in this state), and real wine and real cheese and real chocolate with our coffee afterwards. Actua...

It's been, again, an eventful few days, and again, I've been too busy to blog. In brief: lots of driving, showing my parents as much of the culture of West Alabama as possible...huge and dramatic thunderstorms...going to York to see the new Municipal Workshop project, going over for a blissful half day to Butch's , back for the christening party of my bandmate Ted's twins (really an excuse for drinking Bloody Marys and torturing a captive audience with lots of old time music) and now back to work on the house again. We're putting up the porch, which is pretty exciting. If you want some visuals, have a look at Quentin's pictures from his stay here...