I wasn’t, sadly, able to attend Zaha Hadid’s memorial event in the London Central Mosque today.   One of the things I found fascinating in reading about her after her death was the story of her failed project to design the Cardiff Opera House.   I hadn’t known that she won the competition not once, but three times, because it kept on being re-run to get a different result.   I had forgotten that its funding was turned down by the Millennium Commission on the grounds that its design was ‘insufficiently distinctive’, a hilarious rationale given that this was the one thing it most certainly wasn’t.   And I liked her comment after she won the competition that ‘The problem is that people in this country have seen so much garbage for so long they think life is a Tesco.   When the highest aspiration is to make a supermarket, then you have a problem’.