Welcome to The Pod

This is our house at 631 Spain Street, New Orleans. We call it The Pod because it's green and has two Ps in it.*

We put the flags up a week or so ago to make it even more colourful than it already is. You could make a really good living selling flags in New Orleans because everyone has them. The one in the middle features the fleur-de-lys emblem of the city's founding dynasty, the Bourbons. Flags are a great way of making a statement about who lives inside, as in the example below, round the corner from us.














Our house is called a shotgun double. 'Shotgun' means the rooms are arranged in such a way that if you fired a gun through the front door, the bullet would exit through the back without being obstructed by any walls - an experiment performed on an almost daily basis in this city, where the homicide rate is ten times the national average.

'Double' is what in Britain would be called semidetached, except that here, unusually, the houses are back to back instead of side by side. Our landlord, Steve, lives in the one at the back.

We live in Faubourg Marigny, known for short as the Marigny. This is the next district down the Mississippi from the French Quarter, the city's tourist and entertainment hub. It's just as colourful and historic as the Quarter, but without the drunken students vomiting up their margaritas in shop doorways.

Fortunately it escaped significant damage during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, so it's an oasis of tranquillity amid a desert of destruction - you don't have to travel far to find large areas of abandoned housing.

I tend to like ultramodern architecture, and my place back in London is a somewhat minimalist 1960s box with a grey and white interior, but I think The Pod is beautiful. We spend a large part of our lives outdoors: working with laptops, gardening, and sitting on the swing chair on the porch, shooting the breeze with neighbours and passers-by.

This is Pam watching TV in our living room, from where a spiral staircase leads up to one of the two bedrooms.

*Just like a grasshopper, or an apple - perhaps an unripe Cox's Orange Pippin. Can anyone think of any other examples?