And just to start off, just something interesting that caught my eye while working last week on this article about migrant workers. As my colleague Rhona Ganguly points out in a top post on her community relations blog, there are a lot of misconceptions and prejudices about the 125,000-odd migrant workers in the West Midlands. So it’s nice to see some positive views of migrant groups crop up from time to time.

According to this recent study (which has far far too many interesting points to bring up here), Polish workers are so much in demand for their industriousness and reliability, that migrants from other new European countries like the Czech Republic and Romania are actually pretending to be from Poland to increase their chances of getting a job. (p147)

Obviously a positive stereotype then? But does it help Polish people to be pigeonholed like this, even if it is for something good?

…or despite public indifference, whichever you prefer. After deleting my old blog for various silly reasons about a week after it started, here I am back and as opinionated as ever. For the readers who are neither related to me nor work with me (however many there are), I’m a young-ish trainee journalist at the Birmingham Post, where I’m Enterprise editor, as well as doing a variety of other tasks.

So here I am once again,  writing about various stuff that happens in my life and my job (much the same thing, sadly). Journalism, beer, football, food, learning arabic, films, television, music. Whatever, I’ll decide later.