bottom drawer

Came over from Butch's back to my Rural Studio haunts today - Greensboro and Newbern. The sun poked out for a little while en route, but we emerged from lunch into the most enormous downpour. Now I'm off to the baseball game, so more later. Everyone's been asking me for more photos of the finished house that I built. I finally picked up some photos today from CVS so I can reveal a few views of the house since Miss Phillips moved in! If you click on the photos you will get to see bigger versions, etc. Let me know what y'all think...

Slowly (Southern speed) moving from finishing a batch of work to planning my route up north. It's been an uncharacteristically grey week here, a fair amount of rain and heavy clouds, but only a slight let-up in the heat. Last night we went out in Columbus, GA, which was pretty amusing...ending up dancing to house music c.1999, which is something that my arms and legs have actually forgotten how to respond to. For your amusement, I'll pass on this item - well, it asks for the bad pun of 'black humour'. Apparently Iranian censors black out women's skin in magazines with marker pens before they can be sold (I never saw this while I was there, but then I didn't try to buy any Western magazines). Which, in the case of a Marie Claire feature on little black dresses, becomes a pretty funny spread. Click on the pic for a bigger version. (via Stay Free Magazine and Sensory Impact )

I should stop hitting on Demos, I know. Actually, I narrowly stopped myself having a mini-rant about them yesterday in relation to their 'work' on the Olympic legacy. Today's post on the Greenhouse is about Pret-A-Manger's customer service and what public services may or may not be able to learn from them . Frankly, I'm scared by anything public having anything to do with Pret. Has everyone forgotten how Pret is basically owned by McDonalds? and even before that, how we all hated the amount of mayonnaise on all their sandwiches? am I the only dinosaur who still refuses to eat from Pret, or in my absence, has everyone gone back to their sticky crawfish-and-rocket sarnies? The Demos post refers to Pret as having a "massive culture of loyalty, respect and satisfaction from their customers". Well, maybe it does. But isn't the important difference between a private company and a public service that a private company's customers choose to use it. Pret...

It's the first anniversary of my blog! A year of some patient people reading my long-winded ramblings and diary of thoughts and actions in Alabama and elsewhere. Thanks for reading. Tell your friends. Add me to your linklog/deli.cio.us list. And please leave me a comment to let me know what you have liked/hated about my first foray into blogging. Over the next two months I'm going to be doing a major road trip round the States so please keep reading and send me suggestions of places to go/people to see/things to eat!

This campaign to stop architects working on prison designs (via Design Observer ) seems rather inconsistent to me. OK, so prison might not work very well and for sure there are too many people locked up. But I would bet a lot of money that the kind of architects that would sign up to this boycott have never been asked to design a prison in their lives, and I am sure there will be no shortage of people willing to sign off drawings for new prisons, given that I can't see clients starting to boycott architects who design prisons. Hell, there are probably architects who only design prisons. Surely we should be actually looking for better prison designs. Will Alsop has, I have seen, being working on precisely that, with prisoners themselves. Isn't this a more intelligent and clever way to turn the prison paradigm around into something positive, using the power of good design to make an environment that allows prisoners to see some hope, experience some creativity and be stimulated ...

After a rather horrendous journey I arrived back in Alabama very late last night, but safe and sound, my jeep still intact and no incidents to report. Am now hiding out at Butch's to try to finish writing up my stuff for the book before setting out cross-country. It's got incredibly hot and humid here since I left - Philadelphia was 33ºC at 7 in the evening and Atlanta at midnight didn't feel much different. But out in the country the air feels lovely nonetheless...

The boy and I just escaped for another weekend in an unlikely holiday destination: east Kent. The Romney marshes, a room above a pub in Hythe. I guess we're quite strange in our choice of romantic hideaway. But it was utterly wonderful, and I'm going to just try to list the things we did and saw, so as not to forget. 12 year olds smoking in the carpark of the Aldi's supermarket. Deserted, beautiful seafront with nine cars full of old ladies eating soft-scoop icecream and sandwiches, watching the sea through the drizzle on their car windscreens. A couple with their grandchildren, making sandcastles in the rather surreal steely light, straight out of Martin Parr. The Imperial Hotel and its golf course, also well-populated by old ladies, despite the soft rain. A very beautiful and rather large, French-feeling cliff of a church where a small string band is rehearsing Tchaikovsky, and lovely little walled lanes running up and down the hill. Some nice old pubs with lots of WW2 me...

Events pile up so fast and in such a strange juxtaposition. The start of the Ashes series finds me clutching a prized ticket to the first day at Lords, sitting up in the Warner Stand with an old family friend, the kind provider. A fantastic two sessions of cricket, leaving the England crowd glowing with hope and pride and a little tipsy in celebration, are followed by the ruthless wicket-taking of Glenn McGrath, stormingly authoritative, accurate and utterly destroying our hopes. We bump into Harrisson Birtwhistle at lunch, who has a tenner bet on England batting before the close of play. But half way through England's successful spell, those members of the crowd who are tuned in to the radio commentary through their taped-together headsets start telling us that there have been reports of more bombs, two weeks to the day after the attacks that killed 56 on 7/7. We are a little perplexed but the radio is inconclusive. We spy a police helicopter over Warren Street, near the ground. B...

Yesterday I spent a lot of the day sitting in the National Theatre watching Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 . And the other day I spent an hour or so in Sadler's Wells watching the much-acclaimed new collaboration between Akram Khan, Anthony Gormley, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Nitin Sawnhey . Now, as someone who hasn't been to the theatre for a year but who previously went at least once a month, often much more, and had a real passion, nay evangelism, about the performing arts, my reaction to these shows was quite surprising. I really found myself spectacularly unmoved. It was all quite nice, but the joy and love, and quite visceral sense of empathy and catharsis, that I usually get from really good theatre (and almost always from Shakespeare, no matter how badly performed, due to the quality of the language) was totally missing. The Akram Khan piece was fun enough - certainly I appreciated the skill of the performers - but ultimately I didn't really understand its message if there ...

After the Serpentine, we went to see Jeremy Deller's Folk Archive at the Barbican. What a fantastic, life-affirming and inspiring show. At a time when we are talking so much about British culture and identity, here is a celebration of the most wonderful, most strange and sometimes unsettling parts of our culture - none of the cliches about Britishness, but all of the forgotten rituals, folk art, odd regional crafts, inventive oddities and contemporary regalia (from motorcycle customisations to embroidered wrestling knickers) that exists and flourishes in all corners of our country. This has nothing to do with imperial history, dead Victorians or Tudor castles - and everything to do with a peculiar anarchy and an irrepressible, ebullient self-expression. Coming from Alabama, where there is a huge interest in 'folk' art although sometimes a commercialisation of this that diminishes its reputation, it was so fantastic to see items from Britain, where it sometimes seems that ...

Went to the new Serpentine Pavilion yesterday, which was really fantastic. Lovely to see, in contrast to last year's concrete extraveganza, something that responds to the idea of 'pavilion' - lightweight, using undisguised, humble and simple materials (wood and plastic) and touching the ground lightly with a feeling of its impermanence. Siza's reference in the accompanying book to 'Arte Povera' struck a chord, and there certainly was something Rural Studio-ish about it. I loved the feeling that you could almost make one yourself, with all the elements of a manageable size to be lifted by hand, and its construction method simple and clear to the eye. The Serpentine missed a trick by not making a little wooden scale model that you could put together yourself, with all the dovetail joints, which would have been a huge seller for their shop and maybe really inspirational and fun for kids...

Hey, I'm honoured to be on things magazine today. For those of you not in the know, this is definitely one of the best London-ish weblogs around - a fantastic daily compendium of oddities and important stuff. While I'm on links, do also check out this photoset of someone's mother's recipes - beautiful.

On the subject of more mediocre architecture, I rode the bus through most of Hackney today on my way down to the Docklands for lunch. I saw the new Hackney Empire finally finished (when I left it was still partially shrouded in scaffolding). It's not a bad building, by any means, and I can see what Tim Ronalds was trying to do. It was also a really horrendously managed process for which I am sure much blame must lie with the client, and this inevitably had a negative effect on the design. But somewhere in the process, some rather strange decisions were made - the way they used terracotta on the new portion of the facade (to blend in with the old?) is quite strange and really a bit naff, and the decision to clad the fly tower in Reglit over what presumably is some kind of solid panel underneath - why use Reglit when you don't need to let light in? If it was to make the bulk of the tower less imposing, it doesn't really work (although I could see that there might have be...

I always thought that Transport for London's Journey Planner was a bit crap. But today I am completely converted (my excuse is it must have improved while I've been away). It not only gave me a fabulous and uncomplicated bus route, I discoverd that it will tailor-make you a cycle route to go to anywhere you want, with a pdf map showing every single twist and turn that you could print out and take with you. Isn't this amazing?

I visited the East End today for the first time since I got into the country. It was much as I left it - more boutiques, more impossibly trendy 16 year olds on the streets making me feel ancient, etc - but the most - well, not shocking, I suppose, as I knew it woudl be thus, but certainly depressing - change was to see Norman Foster's monstrosity at Bishop's Square nearly finished, and some equally monstrous things being built inside Spitalfields Market. I am, like most people, a big fan of much of Foster's work - the Gherkin, his earlier stuff at Stansted and the Sainsbury Centre - and I've been in meetings with him and found him extremely observant, attentive and intelligent. But I find it both inexplicable and scandalous that he allows his office to produce buildings like Bishop's Square. There is no aspect of it that is remotely acceptable. The urban design, the building design, its attitude to both its historical context and the innovation that is always meant...

I found my first white hair yesterday. Needless to say, I pulled it out.

Pretty scary news today that the bombers are almost certainly suicide bombers. I took my first public transport yesterday and I must admit to some nervousness. It is difficult to absorb the news that London - Londoners - have been attacked and may be again, especially because we don't see any evidence of the attacks as we go around the city. And everyone keeps acting as normal (and so do I) in the mean time. It could almost have been a bad dream - yet the discovery of explosives in Yorkshire and the conclusive CCTV footage assures us that it is all very real and very close to home. I hate feeling suspicious and wary in this city where the multi-cultural scene has always been something that I have loved. Living, as I did before I left for America, in the largely Muslim East End, I prided myself on being often more relaxed than my friends about the cultural friction that was undeniably present when hipsters get drunk in trendy bars while women outside wear full hijab. I haven't b...

My father always used to tease me because whenever we had cold leftover roast lamb I would always eat it with mustard. He used to say 'Mustard with mutton is the sign of a glutton'. Well, I am still a glutton. Yesterday the boy cooked a most marvellously delicious leg of lamb for dinner (us and a couple of friends. He's the one who is good at cooking roast things, I'm useless at it.) Today I am mooching around the flat trying to work and eating cold lamb for lunch with Coleman's mustard, just like in my childhood. Heavenly.

In other news: I was quite surprised to get such a vitriolic comment from Demos on my one-para, clearly signed as flippant, blogpost on their new report. I may write more about the report when I get time but as I am horribly behind with work it may have to wait. But for what it's worth (not much) I tried out the points that I made in that post, however flippantly, with friends over the weekend (and ones who quite regularly tell me to shut up when I'm wrong) and everyone cringed pretty badly at the "Hoody Two-shoes" title that I criticised, and those who had read the comment agreed with me that it was a bit of a bizarre overreaction. The slightly more important point is that I don't want to have to censor the way I write about things for fear of being left off Demos' invite list (not that I'm on it anyway, but I used to regularly set foot in there for various things when my friend Peter worked there). They should be big enough to take the criticism and r...

Well, I safely arrived over the Atlantic and back to the mother city. Given what Tom Coates quite aptly called 'the week that never ends' there's a fair bit to report. Having been really in quite a lot of shock and distress over the bombings while I was in America, I was rather disconcerted and even more shocked when I spoke to my boy and family on the phone to check their continued presence on the planet and they all sounded incredibly blase. Having got back here, London has obviously had the same effect on me because any trace of fear, worry, anxiety etc has disappeared from my mind. I spoke to one friend yesterday to catch up and when I said something about the 'terrible events' she said 'what terrible events?' - and it is absolutely true that the whole city seems to be living as normal - drinking, eating, partying, moaning about small things. I tried to think why this is - why the city stayed so calm in the immediate aftermath and even, why the evacuati...

I'm in shock. Was woken at 7.15 this morning by a phone call from a friend asking if I'd seen the news. I managed to get hold of my parents but not the boy. Please if any of my friends read this, can you leave me a comment to let me know that you are OK? I'm tremendously worried and shocked - the city that I love, so close to home - and I'm meant to be flying back tomorrow. All incredibly surreal for a beautiful sunny Alabama morning, everyone going about their business as usual.

Just to let you all know, that my good friend and long-time fellow food adventurer Ben Yeoh and I have started a new blog, reviewing restaurants, food shops and other things in London (mostly). It's called Food & Life . Please check it out - it doesn't look very pretty yet, but it will do when I get a bit of time to do some designing on it! but there's already some content and much more coming soon.

Just to let you all know, that my good friend and long-time fellow food adventurer Ben Yeoh and I have started a new blog, reviewing restaurants, food shops and other things in London (mostly). It's called Food & Life . Please check it out - it doesn't look very pretty yet but it will do when I get a bit of time to do some designing on it! but there's already some content and much more coming soon. This blog will still continue (yes, even though I've been useless recently) with my home cooking and the rants and raves that I can't pretend are part of a review...

Oh my. Us design-types have a secure employment future, thanks to London's winning the 1012 Olympics . Having been involved with much of the behind-the-scenes stuff on this before I came to Alabama, I think I'm pleased...but hope desperately that we don't do another very British f***-up. But at least architects and, erm, consultants like me (how I hate that term! I'm going to do a Hilary Cottam and call myself a designer!) will have plenty of work around to divvy up or fight over... More seriously, I hope this starts a real push for good design in the Thames Gateway - and forces us to produce a quality that might not otherwise happen. After all, it would be embarrassing to house the world's top athletes in Wimpy homes. And I hope it doesn't have the opposite effect - that of holding local authorities over a barrel, so desperate to complete everything that needs to happen in time that they accept any old crap from the housebuilders.

I've been a bit lax on the church slogan front, but here's a great one for y'all... IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE WAY YOU WERE BORN, TRY BEING BORN AGAIN A quiet (for me) Independence Day was followed, today, by a fairly quiet day as well - not that it should have been, as I'm meant to be working hard at the book ( I have a copy deadline in a week and a half.) But somehow after the holiday there were a lot of things that I needed to get sorted, bills to pay, my car's licence tag to renew, emails to read and reply to...so very little got done. But I did cook dinner for Bill Walthall, the Rural Studio's drug rehab project (joking, Bill!!! well, not entirely joking, he is that, but so much more too) and we spent a very pleasant hour and a half talking about Greensboro and the state of the world. Bill brought fresh blueberries that his sister had picked, and fantastic fresh, tender sweetcorn from his neighbour's garden - a real treat. This one's for my mother - ...

I got my first comment spam today. And no, it wasn't bot-generated adverts for viagra or porn, it was religious messages from a fellow Blogger user. Yes - long, long religious messages. I've deleted them. Mr James Fletcher Baxter , no matter how proud you are of your theology, I don't want to hear it.

Happy Independence Day! It's very quiet here. Everyone's gone to the beach, or having a family reunion, or something. I'm on English schedule, so I'm working, answering emails, etc... So from the world of English politics, two mini-rants. How can Demos be so crass? Hoodie Two-shoes? do they know how patronising and naff that sounds? I'm afraid that, if you need to know why young people feel left out of political discourse, look no further. I've read the report, too...and I'm not overly impressed. It's a good start, but I feel that the fact they were funded by the Big Lottery Fund shows - there are masses of case studies out there that are more enlightening and interesting than the five they chose. Plus, some international context would have been interesting, especially of the USA where the culture of community groups/non-profits is so different. But I'm getting on my high horse as I've spent the last six months researching international preceden...

The other night I was sitting, as I do, in my kitchen with the doors open to the street and a friend passed by and dropped in - a young black guy who works at the recycling and scrap yard down the road. We got onto the subject of Greensboro, what its problems were and what to do about it, which was interesting and depressing. He's a smart guy, but he couldn't really see the value in trying to give the town any help. He didn't like the incestuous claustrophobia of the town (the same points as I made here ) and he was of the view that it was impossible to change anything about the people here, their beliefs (however irrational) and the way they act, or don't. He said that Greensboro should have a new mall - and when I threw up my hands in horror at this, he suggested instead a decent club or a new library, somewhere to hang out - that familiar request of the 'youth'. But really, he was pessimistic and, like young people in rural areas everywhere, just wanted to ge...

It seems that, as I approach the end of my stay in Alabama, I've come full circle. I started off living in a house where parrots would attack me every time I came through the screened door to the porch, landing on my shoulder and pecking at my fingers. And yesterday, out of the blue, my lovely little chicken suddenly decided to run towards me at an alarming pace and settle on my left arm. I have morphed into a crazy Alabama bird-lady. It has belatedly dawned on me that in a week, there will be no more Beacon Street living. Although I'm going to be back in the States at the end of the month and won't leave until mid-September, when I return I'm going to be a homeless nomad in my green jeep travelling around as much as I can, and certainly not greeting each morning by drinking coffee in my kitchen with the doors open wide to the street. Yesterday my band and I played a gig in Tuscaloosa (a wedding) and again, although it's not the last gig I'll play with them (we ...

On poverty Well, it's July, and I suppose it means that I should finally get on my soapbox about the G8, Live 8, etc. Yawn. In brief, I'm on the side of those who think the whole Live 8 thing and Make Poverty History is a feel-good waste of time for everyone to slap themselves on the back about. Personally I'm more worried about/interested in the climate change negotiations. (And just so you know, no-one here cares about the G8. And everyone thought that Tony Blair looked really daft when he came to Washington DC to ask Bush to join in with the whole debt deal and Bush basically told him to f*** off. 'What was he doing? Weren't y'all embarrassed? He looked like an idiot.') I see the problems with how to 'end' poverty here daily. Political stability and maturity is key - and this takes time, not money - it cannot be hurried along. In Alabama, which has had nowhere near the extreme problems of sub-Saharan Africa, things are still not right here 40 year...

I know nameless people who don't like linklogs, but who did like Charles Clarke singing about ID cards. However, I've been saving up bits of web ephemera of varying degrees of seriousness, and tomorrow is Friday, so here are some things to happily waste your time with: David Lynch reads the weather . Yes, that David Lynch. And he does it daily. Amazing. A dictionary of imaginary places . Video clip of Allen Ginsberg reading his seminal antiwar poem Hum Bom . London's tube disruptions as a rather wonderful animation How to make an Enigma machine out of paper . I really want to do this but I don't have a printer... and, silliest of all, but really a work of genius, this complaint letter about sitting next to the toilet on an airplane. If you want more serious reading matter, visit my del.icio.us page .