Having raised the issue of food security (along with a low-cost, convivial alternative-style means of regeneration) as a topic for their Annual Conference last week with publication of Roger Levett's essay in Fit for Purpose (see blog entry), the WMRO appears to have promptly ignored it all.

Food after all, appears as if by magic. When the Conference delegates ate their lunch, I'll bet they thought little, if at all, about the fragility of the just-in-time systems that got it there, let alone where on earth it originally came from.

Or, as pertinently, where it all went to. This includes what the food companies chuck at source or in transit, the freegan stuff the supermarkets discard, the 30% we throw away, and the dung we produce.

I have just volunteered to leave a newspaper I love and a job about which I am passionate.

Last week Trinity Mirror, the company that owns the Birmingham Post, announced 41 journalists in the Midlands are to lose their jobs by the end of the year. I am offering to leave as part of the cull.

Why?

There was on-line comment and a flurry of emails after last week's entry Green shoots of recovery. This was about Roger Levett's essay on guerrilla spud-growing in the WMRO publication West Midlands: Fit for the Future.

I was led to the eloquent and engaging talk by the architect Carolyn Steel at the 2009 TED Conference in Oxford. She wrote Hungry City: How food shapes our lives.

Celine Gittens and Tom Rogers in Birmingham Royal Ballet's E=mc2. Photo: Bill Cooper

This morning on the Today programme, Radio 4, The Times' Dance critic Debra Craine lamented the lack of 'edgy' ballets being created in Britain today.

She said:

"Ballet companies have become more conservative as the audiences have become more conservative...The ballet world It's now all Swan Lake and if you are a touring company, particularly in Britain you've got to produce full length productions, the title of which is recognisable on a marketing poster."

The comment came out of a discussion about Sergey Diaghilev - celebrating the way the choreographer could bring together Picasso, Stravinsky, and Matisse for a production, making ballet a fashionable art form.

Last week Birmingham's dance scene was rocked by a tremer of new works across the city - from blow-out productions to small scale companies and some promising new talent - it was a week to prove Birmingham is still creating fresh new work in all forms to rival the capital.

It sounds like the plot from a Hollywood movie: celebrity arrives in a country to be guest of honour at a high profile event, only to be arrested on a 30 year old international arrest warrant and carted off to prison to await extradition.
It seems Hollywood plot lines are not always as far fetched as we are sometimes led to believe.

British cities outside London have long lived in the capital's shadow, but I didn't appreciate quite how much until I took this trip.

When people from outside Europe hear an English accent they tend to assume you're from London and respond with a blank expression when you correct them. Cities including Birmingham are actively working to raise their profile and attract more visitors and good results have undoubtedly been achieved. But how can the UK unite to make sure the message is being heard internationally, particularly outside Europe, that there's life in the UK outside the M25?

The WM Regional Observatory has published a 10-essay collection under the title West Midlands: Fit for the future: Positioning the region for economic recovery.

These essays are to be discussed at their Annual Conference on 20th October.

Only one contribution, however, adds something surprising, even startling to the debate. It is by Roger Levett.

But let's start with the Foreword by Ian Austin MP. I quote: we know what we need to do to make the region the workshop of the world again.

We know? Eh? Workshop of the world? Which century is this man in? Or is he merely pandering to some vague nostalgia about what went on in Matthew Boulton's time?