Oasis

From the overhead railway, all I could see was an intensly urban landscape of looping railways and roads, weeds, battered and stained tower blocks, dark canals and traffic, all glistening in the hazy, dusty sunshine of a London summer afternoon. The train stank of BO and I was strap hanging, with my face uncomfortably close to the bare, hairy armpit of an exhausted labourer. He kept staggering against me as the train lurched, muttering 'sorry...' 'sorry...' as he stood on my feet for the nth time.

I don't often go to London, or a city of any kind. Alice is a country girl, and occupies a small part of rural England many miles from the concrete jungle. I had been contracted by one of the big practices (Alice on the way up? You never know!) to carry out a survey on a large, sad and worn out building in the City. No, I can't tell you which one, but it was listed, and must have been grand, before the occupiers covered absolutely everything with white gloss paint. Exhausted, I was on the way back to my hotel. The landscape was at once fascinating and depressing. From my carriage high up, I saw a car scrap yard with two young black men pulling the bumper off a wreck, surrounded by barbed wire and corrugated steel fencing. A basketball pitch with weeds around the edges was full of children of any colour you like except white, all running around - their shouts passed fleetingly into the train. Concrete, dogs, old cars, satellite discs, washing flapping in the filthy wind, bright colours of the Indian women's sarees, pure white of the Muslim men's robes - all glanced and left behind, a sequence of snapshots of East London life.

The train jerked to a halt to an announcement of 'minor delays'. My feet hurt. It was hot. Enough said. I looked down into the yard behind a large block of flats of the usual stained concrete beloved of the Utopian views of 1960's architects (may they rot in Archi-hell and have to produce drawings for the great God of twee housing estates for eternity). In a slip of land angled between the concrete abutment of the railway and the access road to the car park, an Indian man was tilling the soil. His head was beaded with sweat under the little wisps of black hair as he weeded a magnificent crop of onions. Cucumber and tomato plants were supported by the remains of old pallets. A net of wire protected a vivid green crop of peas and beans. Chilli and pepper plants, vigorously growing in old boxes promised an autumn feast. Kudu and coriander, beets, and exotics I could not identify pushed each other for space in urgent, sappy growth.

All along the edge of this little bit of land, this wonderful soul had planted marigolds, bright orange and red nastertiums as a border to his own private oasis.

Alice in the 21st Century

Relatively recently, I started using Computer Aided Design to produce drawings. Quite honestly, I was reluctant to give up the drawing board as I find the act of drawing strangely theraputic in the way a computer can never be. But - most of my colleagues use CAD, the industry is geared towards it (when making planning applications for example) and it does seem to save a bit of storage space. It is supposed to be faster, produce neater drawings, easy to alter and generally made in heaven for a busy architect. My own plan chest was becoming full, the attic and shed is also bursting at the seams with old files and huge bits of paper, so I decided the time had come to lay down the Rotring precision ink pen of the past and pick up the mouse of the future.

It is always irritating having to learn a new skill when your old ones have been perfectly adequate for the job for most of your career. My drawing skills were (are) finely honed, neat and above all, fast. Now here I am, limping along the ground where I once could fly. After a quick, extremely intensive and mind bogglingly dull course on AutoCAD, I decided the only way to learn properly was to do a real job using it. Hours and hours, days, weeks later, I am still struggling with the thing, and the client is having kittens because I am so late producing his design. Eventually, I finish it and send the drawings to him.

He was generally pleased, but wanted a few changes. Now, allegedly, comes the advantage of CAD over traditional drawing. According to the anoraks, it is really simple to change a CAD drawing with a few clicks of the mouse. As I have explained before altering an ink drawing on tracing paper involves scratching it out with a razor blade, using a rubber to smooth the paper down and then drawing over it. There are only so many changes you can make and still keep it looking reasonably tidy, and without going right through the paper.

Here I go, I thought. I will at last earn back the money the programme cost me (an astonishing amount, since you ask). I had to change some of the doorways, and yes, it took far longer than it would have done on tracing paper. Worse, my computer crashed before I saved the changes (all right – I’ll know another time). Of course, I was still at such an early stage of learning AutoCAD I did not know of the little tricks which would have enabled me to change the lot with a couple of clicks.

Six months on, and I am much better at it. Just for a change, I decided to do a small extension on tracing paper, to see if I could still produce a technical drawing. It took roughly half the time it would have done on the computer. But it does save storage space…. Cold comfort indeed.