Food for the goods? By Steve Way

 

Hello. As in some previous blogs my aim is to find out if any of you visiting schools have had similar or related experiences, which I would be interested to hear about.

As always, it’s important to state that most schools make visitors very welcome but in a small number of cases it seems that a few fail to make provision for the fact that we may occasionally have to go to the toilet and also have something to eat and drink at lunchtime.

I still remember the look of disapproval on a school secretary’s face when, after a two-hour journey on a very cold day, I politely asked her to direct me to the toilets at her earliest possible convenience. What an affront!

I’ve mentioned poet Conrad Burdekin before because as ‘The Wakefield Writing Warriors’ we visited several schools together, battling each other as the evil No-Plot Person (boo) and Story Man (hurray!) Con was often intrigued by the lovely sandwiches my wife would kindly make me, usually mainly comprising wholemeal bread, beetroot and lettuce. I loved them but the recipe clearly didn’t appeal to Con. However, when I was a long way from home, or away from home visiting a number of schools, I copied Con’s method of dealing with gaining the nourishment he needed after a hard morning’s creativity and would ask the school I was going to if they could organise some lunch for me. I had also noticed that this meant that Con often got to eat dinner with the children, which is always a joy. In one school in particular, all the staff and children ate together and the atmosphere throughout the school, not only at lunchtime, was one of harmony and community.

One of my trips took me to the famous fishing port of Grimsby. ‘If you’re coming to Grimsby you must have some of our famous Fish and Chips,’ the teacher organising the trip declared when I made my request. My mouth was watering even before I’d put the phone down.

It is certainly true that said teacher had kindly organised for one of her colleagues to pop to the nearest Fish and Chip shop shortly before I finished storytelling for the morning. They were handed to me in the traditional wrapping, still lovely and warm. ‘I didn’t know if you’d want salt and vinegar,’ this teacher declared. ‘So I didn’t ask for any.’ Oh. It then transpired that there was no salt of vinegar to be found in the school building (or for that matter tom sauce.) Not only this, it turned out there was also a dearth of usable plates in the building… and cutlery.

I didn’t much mind the lack of the latter… it was a bit like eating Fish and Chips at the seaside, though I think even I would have thought of asking for a wooden fork. I can also confirm that Grimsby thoroughly deserves its reputation as a mecca for fish because even without the addition of any condiments or sauces Grimsby Fish and Chips is… slightly pleasant.

I had another even more slightly pleasant meal when I visited a private school in London. I bumped into the school chef in the staffroom in the morning and she really ‘bigged up’ the quality of the food delivered daily to the school. It was all organic this and whatsit free that. She was so sure of her kitchen’s culinary quality that she even insisted on showing me around the kitchen when I happened to be passing during the first break. It was certainly very clean, packed to the rafters with modern shiny equipment and the ingredients looked delicious. It looked like the set of Masterchef before the contestants arrive. I ordered a curry for lunch, particularly as the chef especially recommended it.

Now maybe I’d been spoiled because I can knock up a reasonable curry, my wife is an excellent cook and I’ve lived in the North of England for most of my life. Also, many years before, when we were doing our teaching training, my fellow students and I spent a week visiting primary schools in Tower Hamlets. The curry served for lunch there was delicious. Not overly hot – it was a primary school after all – but you could taste and enjoy the spices. It actually contained some. If there were prizes for blandness the curry served up at the private school in question would have won first prize. By a country mile. When the meal finished, eaten with all the staff in the staffroom, the chef appeared evidently expecting me to shower her with compliments. I realised on this trip I was going to have to be creative not only when facing the children.

Similar creativity was needed when I visited a school in Scunthorpe. When she heard I was having a school dinner the headteacher told me it would be delicious, especially as on that day the cook was making a Spaghetti Bolognese, her signature dish.

I don’t know if you’ve ever wondered what the food Oliver was served in the workhouse was like. If you have then rush to this school in Scunthorpe. It seemed like it only contained one ingredient, a kind of knobbly black oil that with some considerable effort could be converted into bitumen and petrol. It seemed inconceivable that a single onion had gone into the dish made for the whole school, or a tomato. The inclusion of a mushroom or two was clearly a ridiculous fantasy as far as the cook was concerned. Jamie Oliver would have had a fit.

As I hungry after a long journey to the school and a busy morning I tried eating a few mouthfuls. Soon I could bear no more a surreptitiously washed it down the sink, where it may have polluted Manchester. Soon after that the head came into the staffroom beaming at me. ‘I bet you enjoyed that!’ she declared. I had to stay there for the rest of the day and I wanted them to pay me, so I decided to be British. I still wonder whether the head knew what was coming and had a strong sense of irony.

On the other end of the scale, when I visited an international school in Egypt, one of my hosts, at the school’s expense, took me to a wonderful restaurant in Cairo. The food was excellent, but my host seemed to want me to consume every single dish associated with Egyptian cuisine. Dish after dish arrived, enough to feed a small army. I manfully did my best to politely eat and enthuse about as much of the food as I could but I was aware that I was supposed to be working with the children the following morning and needed to be capable of actually moving around a bit. Clearly, when he kindly removed me from my table of torture my host was clearly disappointed by how little I’d eaten. Egyptian food is absolutely gorgeous but you can definitely have too much of a good thing.

When I was a college a wrote an article for the university newspaper describing the awful flat my friends and I (briefly!) lived in, challenging anyone to claim to have lived in a worse one. Another of my friends contributed an answer to my challenge. This time it’s up to you folks…