"The End of Birmingham" and the Beginnings of My Blog

As a consultant, I find that it is good practice to revisit the beginnings of a particular project from time to time, and to remind oneself of the initial catalyst for the enterprise.

In March, I emailed my friend and associate, Patrick Roper, with the following comments :

"Speaking of Dostoyevsky, I travelled up to the National Motorcycle Museum near the Birmingham NEC (National Exhibition Centre) the other day - not so much a museum as an enormous subterranean conference centre with small surface museum. The journey to/from the train station was a real "dark day of the soul", traversing motorways on foot as my "how to get there instructions" said the Museum was 5 mins (by taxi - except this wasn't mentioned) from the station. Birmingham to me is the antithesis of sustainable planning - fine countryside is swallowed up whilst the City remains a wasteland of brownfield sites.....".

On receiving this, Patrick suggested I set up a blog. His suggestion "sunk in" when I chanced upon David Miliband's blog. Mr Miliband was then a minister at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, and is now Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Incidentally, whilst Patrick brought up Dostoyevsky, my March visit to the NEC area took place the day after I watched the first installment of Channel 4's "The End of Russia" week of programmes. In this, Louis Theroux evokes a particularly apocalypic picture of modern Russia, with its defunct soviet factories and endless dereliction (human and environmental).

Some may remember that we had a rather cold and grey spell around the Spring Equinox, which I found had an almost "Soviet chill". As I travelled on the slow train from Worcester to Birmingham - which for some reason did not stop at the suburban commuter stations of the West Midlands Conurbation, thereby leaving many people in the cold - it did occur to me that Mr Theroux might also make a programme about "The End of Birmingham".