bottom drawer

Apologies for lack of posts. This was not due to anything exciting - rather, the fact that the office has been busy and I had an interim portfolio hand-in on Thursday that caused considerable panic and the use of every free minute in working, if not on actually producing drawings, on rather terrifying sessions of 'architects block' where I realise why I always hated being a student designer. However, hand-in is over and I've given myself a day and a night off. So its soup, wine, the footie on the radio and update blogging for my Saturday night. I'm really, really getting old. Last night was the architect's equivalent of a high-school reunion, being the opening party for the Cambridge Compendium - a backslapping session to 'celebrate' my alma mater, which is sadly but surely sliding down the pan in terms of quality and vision. So much repeating of 'what are you up to these days' and the whole of Cambridge's alumni who are unsuccessful enough to b

I got a reply from Sir Philip Mawer, Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, to my letter about George Galloway. He's not really having any of it. "Although I understand your concern...I am afraid that, on the evidence currently available to me, there is no remedy under the Code." I know that the Code of Conduct for MPs is debatably concerned with issues of this kind - its purpose being basically to deal with financial wrong-doings by MPs. While this is a factor of the Code's history, I do think it should be expanded to contain much more explicit guidance on how MPs should use their time while the House is in session. What they do in their holidays I don't much care, but there should be limits to the activities that an MP can carry out which detract from their official duties in 'termtime'. This is not only about GG's relatively facetious actions, but also the number of non-executive directorships, consultancy jobs etc that MPs can have. I don't

Sunday evenings should be all about digging in the freezer and cupboard and finding tasty things to cook up while lazing around in the pajamas that one still hasn't quite gotten out of. Especially if, like me, you're struggling with having horrible deadlines which are chaining you to your laptop and eating is pretty much the only thing (well, apart from impromptu drinking sessions after your football team wins 7-0 ) that makes life still worth living. So I was really happy to remember that I still had a pheasant in the freezer. Perfect winter Sunday food. Time enough to defrost it, find a whole load of dried wild mushrooms that just needed to be eaten up, three large potatoes in the bottom of the fridge that also required consuming, and thank my domestic instincts for having lots of jars of pulses around. It was a supremely good, simple and satisfying meal. Roasted the pheasant for half an hour, made a good wild mushroom sauce (sauted onion, mushrooms, mushroom juice, seasoning

As with the Labour Party, thus with the Guardian/Observer stable of newspapers. Steadily less exciting, more saleable, more middle-of-the-road, more hypocritical. Getting rid of the old masthead and broadsheet format was a seminal moment, though the signs had been there for some time - the steadily decreasing amount of real content and the increasing number of pull-out sections printed on that horrible glossy paper that makes your fingers feel all funny after you've touched it. Now, I never buy the papers any more. I read it all online, thankful for not having to throw away the 90% of the paper version that I don't want to even have to buy. I held onto the Observer for a bit longer - but now it too has resized as 'Berliner' (what a tempting sounding name for a rather horrible redesign), it's gone the way of the rest. (At least, until the boy comes back and starts buying it again, along with the News of the World, for our Sunday mornings.) And this week they launch t

What more can I say. A perfect day. Thierry Henry hat-trick, Hleb, Senderos, Pires, Gilberto goals. And Man Utd lose! I'm sorry for Middlesbrough's stand-in goalie. Today probably ruined his career for ever. But up in Highbury, we're a happy bunch of gooners.

I'm sure everyone apart from me already knows about this but I just found out that there's someone who has been living in the Oxfordshire woods - really in the woods, with no tent, just a couple of sleeping bags and a rucksack's worth of stuff - for seven months now while holding down a steady job in London. Amazing. Jealousy-making, despite the tales of the cold and wet and thorny. I want to go live in the woods now, sod this hip urban lifestyle thing. People think that my going to live in a big cold tin shed in the middle of redneck Alabama was a weird thing to do and I told them that it was great and really, having no central heating doesn't matter. But my squatting was absolutely nothing compared to this act of marvellous genius. Even Thoreau built himself a house. Anyway, his blog is fantastic, go read. He's doing it all in aid of the Woodland Trust, so you should go sponsor him too.

I'm not a New Labour fan or voter, but it did amuse me to see the news that today - a week after I started my pledge - Hilary Armstrong, the Labour whip, announced the launch of a petition against George Galloway's continued presence in the Big Brother house. Which is supremely useless, really, as GG won't know that its going on, or how many people have signed up, because he's not allowed any access to the outside world. Whereas, I might say, writing to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards at least has a point to it, however implausible it may be that it will have any effect - to get GG censured in the House (of Commons, not BB) when he returns to the real world, and maybe (if enough of us write) to see further action. In any case, he may get evicted tomorrow, in which case Labour's petition will be very much too late. Whereas I have already got over 100 people to post off their letter to the Commissioner. I'm also wondering whether Labour are being ta

I didn't think this piece in the New York Times was up to much, regarding Ricky and his ideas. This is not to say that Ricky doesn't have good ideas on 'cities'. But to say that the debate around "people, society, architecture" is one that "five years ago might have been a gently heated discussion among colleagues, [but] is now a global flashpoint" is, well, to be a bit five years ago. Burdett's colleague at the LSE, Richard Sennett, has been talking about this for years. Mike Davis's seminal City of Quartz was published over ten years ago. Jane Jacobs first brought it up over 25 years ago. Everyone in the developing nations sector has talked about nothing but the challenges of urbanism and civil society for a long, long time. Even little ol' me, I was talking about the crucial links between urbanism, democracy and social cohesion five years ago, and the debate was pretty live then. Which is really to say that maybe even the NYT doesn&

Why is it that home-made soups are always better than even the most superior restaurant/shop versions? I often get soup for lunch near work and (although it comes from Konditor and Cook) it is distinctly underwhelming almost all the time - too thin and too salty, as if to make up for the lack of substance in it - and also with way too much of whatever herb they decide goes, for the same reason. There is never any texture, which for me is the key thing about soup. Sometimes the soup tastes like it is just salt, pepper and herb. I think they cheat in ways that they would never do with their superb cakes, and use crap out of a tin for the rest, although I have no proof. They should have more pride. Anyway, today I am working at home, so I got to make myself soup for lunch. Ah, how nice. It was so simple, and so good. How can anyone make those leek and potato soups that are all smooth and bland, when a semi-chunky textural one is so much better? and why do people feel the need to load the

I've written the letter to the Parliamentary Commissioner for standards about George Galloway and its available for download here . If anyone else feels like sending it off, please do! The bits in red should be changed to suit the sender. Thanks again to everyone who signed up to the pledge and those who continue to do so. All this campaigning is quite fun!

On the night the 'Respect Agenda' was launched by Tony Blair, I walked home past a classic example of what he's trying to stop. Zooming dangerously down my street came two cars, full of local lads sitting on the edge of the windows, hanging out, standing up on the seats so that they were heads above the roof of the cars. They were yelling at each other - in high-spirited couldn't-care-less competition rather than rage - and waving their arms before coming to a screeching halt at the end of the street. This is, perhaps, the thin end of the 'anti-social behaviour' wedge - but certainly what Blair might describe as 'disrespectful'. I see worse, of course - kids on crack, threatening each other or random strangers, nicking bikes and phones and hitting their girlfriends. But I don't see how any of this behaviour is going to be changed by beating them with the stick of withdrawing their housing benefit, punishing their parents, evicting them from their ho

This thing keeps snowballing. My pledge about George Galloway has passed its target of 100 people, and the numbers keep mounting - if you want to sign up, please do, because the more the merrier! I had my comedy interview for the Late Edition (BBC4, 10.30pm Thursday - I got it wrong before, sorry! ) this morning - if you tune in, I may look like a prat but think charitable thoughts! I'll be writing the letter to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards soon, in between all the other million things I need to do. Hee hee.

I'm sure I'll blog about the Icons project at greater length at due course, because it's an interesting and difficult project that also touches on lots of things I work with, but here's a quickie which starts with a BIG MISTAKE they made. Oh dear - if you go to their atlas page , try to find the 'east of England' area. It's where the East Midlands should be. And vice versa. As an East Anglian, this riles me, and it's unfortunately ironic, symptomatic of the London-centrism of the trendy web designers that invented the whole project to look at 'Englishness'. While we're on the map, I'm not sure how the Isle of Man feels about being part of Cumbria either. And then, when you do go to the East of England page - or, for that matter, any of the other regional pages - there's hardly any items on them. London gets a whole sheaf - but someone's really not been doing their research. Given that one of their first twleve 'icons' is

if you're coming from PledgeBank , as I know many of you are. Normally I don't write at all about Big Brother, or much about politics. Mostly about urban development (and rural stuff too) - architecture, planning, 'community' engagement, sustainability etc - and about what I did at the weekend, what caught my eye on the way into work, a bit of geeky stuff and kooky ephemera, and (if you dig into the archives) what I did for a year in the depths of rural Alabama. Which was the really fun stuff - here's a post , and another one to get you started. It's my online scribble pad - disorganised, but some people seem to like it! Hope you stick around and make it into the 'return visitor' bit of my stats.

It's not only GG who is getting his moment in the spotlight on TV, being laughed at by the rest of the country. It might happen to me too. Yes, dear readers, the BBC emailed me as a result of my pledge and you may be able to get a glimpse of me on the Late Edition on Thursday, being made a fool of by some comedian type. Me, on the British equivalent of the Daily Show ! Being interviewed in Bethnal Green tomorrow. The excitement is killing me. [Update] I thought it worth pointing out that the excitement is not, in fact, killing me. The problems of irony in electronic media. In case Je's comment was taking me more seriously than I intended!!

This article both mentions my pledge and quotes one of Galloway's important supporters in the Muslim community expressing dismay at his appearance in Big Brother. I'm already over half way to my target for people to sign up, which has taken me by surprise. Sign up here if you haven't already...this could start getting fun soon!

I'm proud. Checking my site stats today (not very impressive) I nevertheless found out that if you google Marble Halls Highbury I'm the first website that comes up. Other wasy to find me - muddy kit fetish , is Harry Redknapp Jewish [there's obviously a football thing going on] and "fake urbanism" /. Its Sunday. Forgive the inane posting. I'm getting dangerously obsessed by Celebrity Big Brother . As I don't have a TV and the live online feed isn't available for Macs, I'm reduced to following it via the forums - which, as a friend of mine pointed out, is rather like what happens during cricket season, when one endlessly presses 'refresh' to follow the over by over commentary , and thus no work is done...

My Sunday morning was made much more interesting by the discovery of this new website which has found all the unprotected CCTV camera streams from all around the world and mapped them onto a GoogleMap. Absolutely enthralling stuff. I've spied on ski slopes in the Alps, a Portugese cafe at breakfast time, a cast aquarium with what looks like dolphins swimming lazily around, and some extraordinary square in South Russia (I know not where) - snow-filled, vast, with some incredible architecture. If you look at the map, its the middle marker of the three in that area. An amazing way of seeing your way around the globe at this moment in time, from the sleeping USA to the super-activity of the Swiss Alps in January. The images open if you click on the markers - you don't have to go to the 'link' - just give it a little time as it can be a bit slow. Thanks to Google Maps Mania blog for the tip!

My pledge to write to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards about George Galloway is doing pretty well, with a third of the number signed up already after two days. If you haven't signed up, please do so! The Guardian has an article today on how impossible it is for a constituent to get hold of anyone in Galloway's office in case of a problem. This is really, to me, a serious dereliction of duty and while I'm sure there may be other MPs who are also less-than-perfect in this respect, the fact that Galloway has no party structure keeping a check on his behaviour must be responsible. You can't imagine the Labour Party allowing any of its MPs to do without a decent telephone answering service in their office, for example.

Went to ippr yesterday for an update from their Centre for Cities and bumped into an old college-mate of mine who's now working there and is partly responsible for this report of findings from various focus groups of existing residents in the Gateway and the kind of social groups who are being targeted to move into the new developments there. No real surprises, I'm afraid - pretty obvious conclusions about the lack of meaningful engagement with existing communities - and, although I'm not a statistician, I'm not really sure how a focus group of only 56 people can produce fully meaningful results, especially the focus groups of existing low-income residents in Tilbury and Sittingbourne - eight people in each town. But none the less it's useful to highlight the lack of engagement and produce a few 'shock statements' that might make policy-makers and the UDCs think a little bit more about the need to really take the public seriously. It's a very serious

Sod it - I made a pledge. If 100 other people will do it with me, I'll write to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards and complain about George Galloway appearing on Celebrity Big Brother. It'll get nowhere but at least it's fun to exercise by democratic rights from time to time. Please help me by signing up here ! and spread the word.

My MP, the extremely un-gorgeous George Galloway, is going to spend up to the next three weeks locked inside the Celebrity Big Brother house rather than attending to any of the affairs of our constituency. Oh, and I'm sure that cavorting around with Faria Alam and Jodie Marsh, who I'm sure will get their breasts out asap, will endear him to the Muslim brotherhood whose support he canvassed so heavily. So if for any reason I, or any of my neighbours, have a problem we'll have to find someone else to talk to. Well, seeing as he managed to speak in all of 4 debates since his election, and attend a measly 15% of all votes (634th out of 645 MPs) I suppose it won't make much of a difference. I only hope that it backfires so severely on him that he gets slung out of the Commons for bringing the House into disrepute, or something similar. You can read a surprisingly interesting discussion thread here if you want an insight into how ardent Big Brother fans actually make for r

This old chestnut reared its head again today as the Equal Opportunities Commission reported that, surprise surprise, women are still decades away from achieving equality in the workplace. And some incredibly stupid man from Civitas says that this is because "women prefer to start families". In case he wasn't listening in school, it takes two to start a family. For every woman who makes a conscious decision to have kids, there's a man out there who's also making that decision (let's leave out spurious anecdotes about sperm donors for now, hey?). And so why on earth that should mean that women are the only ones who need to make compromises between work and family life, by going part-time, worksharing or whatever, I don't know. I am extremely proud to work in a firm headed by two extremely ambitious and dedicated working mothers - one with four children under ten. They both work full-time but it is a part of our weekly routine that some days, they pick up

Willie Nelson's new biodiesel venture is in the New York Times today . I'm quite scared that Willie is already 72. But the biodiesel sounds interesting, although I do buy the point that to grow the fuel you have to do multiple passes over the field in diesel-powered engines, so what benefit you really get from all of that I'm not quite sure. But I trust that someone's done the maths and it must add up because otherwise how does anyone make a profit on all this? And his filling tanks have a pretty cool retro-futuristic design, I think...

It's been interesting reading over at WorldChanging about people's New Year's snapshots of their work. Today I particularly appreciated Zaid's honesty about the dilemmas his day job gives him. We all, of course, have days where we wake up and wonder whether what we are doing has any importance at all in the scheme of the world. That is, those of us who don't do something really obviously necessary, like being a postman or a farmer (my personal pet fantasy). Zaid's dilemma about whether trying to achieve change in institutions and systems that are so huge and slow that it's like pushing the proverbial ocean liner is a worthwhile way to spend time or carbon dioxide rings true to me also, in some ways. Admittedly, I don't deal with problems anywhere near the scale of 100 million children - but still, the effort we put into trying to work with people and institutions that are often so inimical to imagination, new ideas or even the acceptance of old truth

Christmas debauchery I never got round to, at the time, blogging the most extravegant meal that occurred over the Christmas break. It was a fantastic mixture of the rustic and the astronomically decadent - and what more does one really want from a meal? I have to admit to not having actually read any food blogs for a while (lack of time, whatever) and having a browse this evening I was struck by how fussy so many people are with their home cooking. It's home, guys, not a restaurant! why not cook the kind of stuff you never eat in a restaurant rather than create over-the-top confections that will never be as good as the real thing in whatever fancy joint you are imitating. I'm not going to name names (or, in the way of blogging, link links) as that would be mean, but I'm sure y'all know what I mean... So, our rustic-decadent feast. What can you say to a meal where you start off with half a pound of two different kinds of caviar. Yes, that's one whole pound of caviar

Back after the traditional Christmas over-eating and New Year's debauchery, it's a pleasure to get back to homely winter food. This soup is one of my favorites, but in the way of these things I'd somewhat forgotten about it until I was at my parents' house over the holiday and my mother made it. It's a recipe from Claudia Roden's book of Jewish food - a fantastic volume of ethnography as much as cuisine, delving into the history and myths of Jewish cooking from all over the world, each recipe accompanied by wonderful and scholarly notes. This soup is, apparently, a traditional Sephardic New Year's soup - appropriate perhaps for this time of year, although obviously the Jewish New Year is in October not January. It is traditional to eat sweet things to wish in a sweet new year - honey, tzimmes, apples - and this soup is sweet and fragrant, warming and comforting, and festive to look at too. It's an easy dish to make. Simply saute some onion, garlic, fres

Happy New Year to you all and I hope 2006 brings you good things and new experiences. I saw the New Year in down at a friend's house in Devon; much champagne was drunk and much dancing ensued. To commemorate the passing of time (or something) I have a new flickr set . It memorialises some of the items that I have owned, loved, Hanified and finally buried in 2005. I've blogged about this before here , here and here . I find it hard to say goodbye to a favorite pair of trainers or indeed any much-loved item that reaches a point of uselessness. I've been known to wear items that any reasonable person would long ago have consigned to the dustbin. Throwing things away is not my strong point, so I keep trying to find new ways of recycling, memorialising or prolonging the death throes of obsolescent objects. The flickr set also serves as tribute to my own slapstick clumsiness and lack of respect for precious objects (another crucial element of Hanification - the more expensive, t