bottom drawer

  Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”   “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” This well-known quote from Alice in Wonderland captures the importance of stretching one's idea of the possible. If you practice imagining impossible futures, they will become more possible. It's just like yoga. The other day I was at a dinner with my old friend Ben Yeoh and he asked everyone an 'intractable' policy idea as a conversation starter. The idea of what is tractable and intractable in policy terms - the Overton window as policy geeks refer to it - and how to stretch or move the window - is much discussed. Most efforts are focused at the margins of the window - trying to stretch it ever so slightly - or in posing something that's deliberately so far beyond the wind...

Above: backyard development behind an existing historic home in Austin TX. By my friends at Thoughtbarn . There’s been talk this week, following the FT reporting that cities can’t deliver to the government’s proposed ‘urban uplift’ housing targets , about whether this is a genuine complaint or simply a lack of imagination. Some pointed to the potential to intensify existing urban areas with low-density homes as a way to provide plenty of new homes without needing either brownfield or greenfield land. And it’s true that we have lots of areas that were once suburbs but are now central in towns and cities, with great access to jobs, transport and local services, still formed of individual homes on big plots. If we want to avoid unnecessary greenfield development and to reduce car use, it's perverse to say that these areas should remain unchanged. Intensification, in some forms, is common practice. People buy bungalows or small homes in good locations and rebuild th...

  All the festivals happen this weekend. Passover, Vaisakhi, Easter, and we are in the middle of Ramadan too. My most precious Easter memories are from childhood, when we would frequently go to stay with Italian friends in their small Tuscan village. On Easter day, we would go to church and then wait outside in the tiny piazza as the priest put a taper to the backside of a papier-mache dove which then shot along a wire rigged between the church and a house on the other side of the square  and back again. Firework-powered, this spectacle was some rising of the Holy Spirit indeed. Afterwards we would go back to the house and feast on spring lamb cooked with potatoes and artichokes and mint. Utterly delicious. This year I thought we'd look into a Passover feast for tonight, the second evening of Pesah. Consulting Claudia Roden of course, we cooked up Sephardi Jewish dishes that somewhat echo - or testify to the dialogue with - the Christian Mediterranean...

One part of #cookingtheyear that I am learning a lot about, are the many different calendars used across the globe. The sun, moon and stars may shine equally and predictably, moving only a tiny amount over the millenia [although - as I discovered when reading about Makar Sakranti - enough to matter in some calendars] but there are multiple different ways to use them in deriving the staging-posts of the year. The first new moon after the spring equinox is a conjunction of lunar and solar calendars that is the start of the New Year in several cultures. It is observed as Ugadi or Gudhi Padwa in many parts of south India; as Cheti Chand among the Sidhi people who originate from a region that is now in Pakistan; among the followers of Sanamahism , an animistic religion that probably predates Hindu practices. But it is by no means the only or even primary 'New Year' for the subcontinent - Vaisakhi is coming up, which seems to be more widely celebrated. The diversity of cultures ...