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 ...

Today is the spring equinox and I feel that of all the New Year dates we are celebrating, this is the one that resonates most with me. Tipping the scales from darkness to light, such an ancient and unmissable moment in the year.  No wonder #Nowruz - the Iranian and central Asian New Year, which is on the equinox - can be traced back to ancient Babylonian times. I can't imagine a culture that didn't mark this day, and just about every tradition has a festival or significant calendar moment that is on, or calculated from, the vernal equinox. The next few weeks are busy ones for #cookingtheyear! I made Sabzi Polo Mahi, and a meat-free Gormeh Sabzi (with kidney beans and black eyed beans, I can't forget that the latter are a good luck New Year food in the southern US and elsewhere, probably originatingfrom Africa) for the vegetarian. A whole fish is essential for New Year in so many traditions. Claudia Roden gives some interesting tidbits of magical lore about fish ...

Wow, it's been a while since I wrote a proper blog post. There are half a dozen in draft but it's been busy, what can I say. Plus it feels flippant to write about food or planning policy or public projects here when the world is so full of sadness and horror. But I started this little project and I want to keep a record of what and how and when. If you want a little glimpse of a couple of festive meals - from the Deep South and from Japan - that we made in the last couple of weeks, have a look at my instagram . Today I thought I would jot down a few longer notes about today's #cookingtheyear festive foods, which draw on the work of Claudia Roden and start our exploration of Jewish holiday foods - of which there will be many more over the coming weeks. Today is Purim - a Jewish holiday which - as I have been reading - has a lot to do with food, particular sweets and pastries. When my daughter mentioned it to a friend of hers who is of Jewish heritage, he described it as th...

Yesterday felt a little like a reminiscence day for the regeneration sector. Remember Regional Development Agencies ? English Partnerships , the OG brownfield regeneration agency, before it became all about housing delivery and ended up, after several interim acronyms, as Homes England? What about Sure Start ? Isn't rural proofing reviving the 2000s approach of the Commission for Rural Communities ? The 90s and 00s revival has spread to politics as Michael Gove's long awaited Levelling Up White Paper looks to a future with a lot of old ideas brought back into play. After an idiotic introduction (someone tell Andy Haldane that Renaissance Florence was a slave-owning society, and the Industrial Revolution hardly reduced inequality), when you delve into the detail it's almost like a junior civil servant at DLUHC found an old filing cabinet full of John Prescott's briefings, and had an epiphany. The news release came out at 9am but the full White Paper wasn't published...

We’ve been cooking more and more Chinese food over the last few years – partly because all members of the family love it, and partly because we have a growing number of great Asian shops in Colchester, due partly to the influx of far Eastern students to the University of Essex, as well as the growing ‘settled’ Asian community, so it’s easy to find ingredients and tempting to spend longer than intended browsing the shelves of unfamiliar packages, picking up odd things on spec. Some of these have been well-used and become store cupboard staples, while others have, admittedly, languished – if anyone has a good way to use dried lotus seeds, please let me know. Growing up I never ate any Chinese food – my background is half Japanese, and to my mother Chinese food was something like the enemy as a result, while my father’s famously omnivorous appetite gets as far east as India before, puzzlingly, running out of enthusiasm. I can’t help thinking that the lack of good Chin...

One of the most important festivals for the Indian subcontinent took place over the last four days. Makar Sakranti comes in a whole variety of regional names and variants, known as Pongal in Tamil Nadu, Uttarayan in Gujarat, and many variants besides. The importance of the day is that the sun moves into Capricorn, and starts to move northwards in the sky, so while Hindus have mapped their system of deities onto the date, making it a time to honour Surya, the sun god, I can't help thinking it must be a far more ancient moment marked in the calendar - the turn of the year. One of the most curious things about the tropical solar calendar - how the sun moves relative to the earth, measured from equinox to equinox - is that it gradually shifts out of sync with the (also solar) sidereal calendar  measured by how the sun moves relative to the stars. So once upon a time, the turn of the year at the solstice and the turn of the sun northwards into Capricorn, coincided - in 272...

Last week started with Bodhi Day on Monday - the day when Buddha ( Gautama Siddhartha ) reached enlightenment after meditating under the bodhi tree  for 49 days. This came after many years of asceticism, including severely limiting how much he ate, so much that he was emaciated, and when he decided that the 'Middle Way' between extreme self-indulgence and self-mortification was the path to enlightenment. It is said that he ended his se⁹ven years of asceticism by accepting  milk-rice from a farmer's wife, Sujarta , when he started meditating under the Bodhi tree, and in some versions that this gave him the strength to achieve enlightenment. So it seemed clear we should be breaking our fast with milk-rice too. But what was, or is, milk-rice, and what is the history of this food? This took a bunch of reading up on, and as always I'd be glad to be put right. With a wide range of subcontinental variants on cooking rice in milk, broadly speaking it seemed that most interpret ...

My friends and family know that what I really love more than anything is food and cooking. The holiday period was a time to cook away at all sorts of meals for different occasions, plus I was given three cookbooks for Christmas. Two of these were Claudia Roden's classics - her Book of Middle Eastern Food and the Book of Jewish Food - which, as well as being full of wonderful recipes to try - are also cultural histories of those food traditions, interpreting centuries of change, trade, repression, poverty and wealth through spices, techniques, food combinations and food stories. I read these books a long time ago, when my parents got them, and I was so glad to have my own copies and to immerse myself again in Roden's wonderful scholarship, and her love for how food reflects and shapes culture. Reading about the foods associated with important moments in the year - festivals, anniversaries, seasons - I made mental notes to try out some of these recipes at the appropriate moments....

Its quite surreal to leave a job over Teams. After 3.5 years, I left the Greater Cambridge Planning Service at Christmas, which was quite a wrench as well as the right thing to do. When I joined the service as part of the inaugural cohort of the brilliant Public Practice initiative I had no idea where that journey would take me, how long I'd feel driven to stay in the team, and the opportunities it would give me to contribute to the public good. What have I learnt from this stint in the public sector? A few moments stand out to me. Passing through a new neighbourhood, which the developers call Great Kneighton but which everyone else calls Trumpington, at school-leaving time and finding the streets filled with kids of all ages freewheeling around on their bikes, not a moving car to be seen. This shouldn't feel unusual but, for a new-build district in this country, is unheard of. And later, at the Clay Farm Community Centre at the centre of the district, speaking to a number of p...

Last night I started to write a post with reflections on working in local government, on the occasion of moving on from my role at the Greater Cambridge planning service. This morning I checked my phone to find the news that Richard Rogers had died, prompting a host of other reflections on what public service means for an architect.  When I was looking for Part 1 jobs in the early 2000s, people were starting to talk about this unit that had been set up in the new Greater London Authority - run by Richard Rogers, no less. The Architecture + Urbanism Unit, or A+UU, was suddenly the place to be. The most talented of my graduating cohort, Emily Greeves , got a job there, and over after-work pints we would hear exciting stories of how they were radically changing the city from their messy studio in City Hall.  The A+UU made working for the public sector aspirational - something that hadn't occurred to me before. But apart from the A+UU itself (I wasn't brilli...

Everyone in the planning and architecture world has been trying to desperately get some insight into the approach that new Secretary of State, Michael Gove, might take to the vexed question of planning reform. There has been plenty of speculation and few actual pronouncements, but this week his comment that the idea of Street Votes - as proposed by the Policy Exchange , a thinktank - was a ' cracking idea ', gave commentators something to grab hold of. The concept of Street Votes is that residents of a street could band together to develop a 'street plan' which, if approved by a supermajority of votes in a mini referendum, would then permit whatever it contained to automatically gain planning permission.  On the face of it, how democratic and what a great way to avoid planners having to determine lots of individual planning applications! And how fantastic for the property owners, who could all stand to profit by building extensions or even whole new homes by subdividing...