On Tuesday, fresh back from Potsdam I was invited to meet a cultural delegation from the City of Malmö. A group of delegates from their top cultural institutions were spending a few days in Birmingham meeting people and seeing things. As ever it was interesting to hear how things work in other places. It was particularly interesting to hear about how things work at Malmö Stadsteater. Apart from the scale of their operation the thing that impressed me most was that where we would traditionally have a twin pairing of Artistic Director and Chief Executive their both roles are given the same name and the two people work as a single unit.

On leaving the delegation’s coordinator kindly left us with a stack of gifts, including a CD by the ‘jazz combo’ (my title not theirs), called Neo.