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On Saturday night, the laser unit of Nottingham Animal Rights powered up in the city centre and projected "Meat is murder" and the Angry Bunny (the NottmAR mascot) onto the town hall.

Across the country, awareness is growing of how damaging animal agriculture is to the environment and of the extreme savagery and animal suffering inherent in the meat industry.

With strong links to both heart disease and cancer (the two biggest killers in the western world) meat is considered by many doctors to be the "smoking" of the 21st century, and totally unnecessary with a balanced plant based diet.

Saturday marks the climax of National Vegetarian Week 2011 (http://www.nationalvegetarianweek.org/), the UK’s annual awareness-raising campaign promoting inspirational vegetarian food and the benefits of a meat-free lifestyle.

Around the country, vibrant, progressive cities have boasted colourful, health promoting attractions and the spirit of carnival in their town squares - events such as "Meat free in Manchester!" and the huge "Bristol Vegfest!"

Nottingham is sadly left behind though.
At one point the town hall hosted the East Midlands Vegan Festival, a seasonal event overwhelmingly popular with Christmas shoppers and the second largest festival of its kind in the country... but the city council have now scrapped it and instead rent public space to all manner of meat markets, including stalls selling the most controversial of foodstuffs like Foie Gras (an 80% fat pate made from the massively swollen livers of force fed, factory farmed ducks and geese).

Some hoped that when the city council of Ghent, our sister city in Belgium adopted a meat free day recognizing the health and climate change benefits of cutting down on meat (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/may/13/ghent-belgium-vegetarian-day), Nottingham might follow suit?

It was not to be however, the decision makers seeming to have ears only for the schmoozers of lucrative, corporate, leisure franchises, not for the trickle of melting ice and not for the health complaints of the community that elected them to their ivory tower.

The laser used in these projections is no more powerful than the kind one would find in a modern DVD player (just radiating at a different frequency), but with a high degree of spatial and temporal coherence, a visible beam from a pen size semiconductor laser dims and diverges little over tens of kilometres facilitating all manner of creative and educational applications.

Lasers are a 60's sci-fi dream that has made it to mass-produced, cheap ubiquity, yet there remains nothing ordinary about laser light...

But then, in a city with such an anti-vegetarian council, perhaps the message of Nottingham Animal Rights found old walls in no ordinary darkness.