The city's local economy received a timely boost this week with the news that Riverside's Odeon cinema is poised to make Norwich the richest city in the land via the unfeasibly expensive sweets it hawks from its foyer.  At £1.10 per 100 grams, you might think you were buying Beluga or Bulgari jewelry, if not the whole of Bulgaria - but no. What you get for your money is a ragbag of vividly coloured jelly shapes which - though they might look like red octopi - were once the hooves of maudlin cattle.

There's been a whole load of fuss concerning the plan to build a Tesco mini-market on the site of the old Arlington Garage, Unthank Road. Indeed, from the level of the campaign against the store plan, one might be forgiven for thinking something more sinister was being proposed; a halfway house for crackheads, maybe, or a rehearsal space for boy bands who come armed only with tight white vests, a copy of SingStars and a dream.

 Wowed and slightly stunned by the power of her award-winning poem in the recent nr1 2005 poetry competition, we commissioned the Larkman Laureate, Norwich's own Leanne Whitehead, to act as the voice of misunderstood youth in iambic pentameter.  Warning - the poem she has written for us, entitled simply 'progress,' may make some readers experience clenching. 

Greetings, poetry lovers – we, the nr1 poetry judges, salute you. This year’s batch of entries was typically eclectic, and our winners have been drawn from across the barricades of age, sex, and class; as always, we are curiously proud of this year’s winners. To add a dash of poetic metaphor ourselves: if our fine city is an allotment, we’re fondling some damn fine sprouts. Here are the winners, in all their glory.

When local reality television refugee Donna Heron went out to replant her ailing azaleas in a quiet corner of Rosary Road, she got a whole lot more than she haggled for. Heron, 37, whose third cousin once sat on Zara Phillips, could barely believe it.