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…

Clash of The ... ? By Steve Way

For those of you who, like me, enjoy visiting schools to share your work and/or to do workshops, I thought you would like to know about a workshop/event/thingy that poet Conrad Burdekin and I contrived a few years ago, which was great fun and which I thought might make you wonder about staging similar events. I would be interested to know about similar activities you may have carried out in schools.  Most importantly I wanted to share our experiences as I think the children enjoyed our double-act and we helped invigorate their creative writing.

As it happens Con has a twin brother, and this gave us our starting point. We would visit a class together and explain - or claim! - that we both had twin brothers. Con’s imaginary twin was the evil ‘No Plot Person’ (boo!) who aimed to visit schools and steal away the children’s imaginations. My ‘twin’ was the noble ‘Story Man’ (hurray!) who battled to prevent the nefarious acts of NPP and to inspire their writing. We further explained our suspicions that NPP had infiltrated the school and was at that very moment seeking out classes upon whom he could unleash his imagination-stealing powers. Con volunteered to search the rest of the school, while I helped the children create a protective imaginative forcefield around first the class and then the school to hopefully defend the school from the fiend and his evil plans. Con would then ‘go looking’ while I shared some writing ideas, usually from my book Crazy Ideas (to stimulate creative writing).

In reality, Con was donning the hooded cape of the villain of the piece. His talented mum (a former teacher) had made capes for us both. Con’s was an uninspiring brown colour and sewn across the back were phrases such as ‘Dull’, ‘Boring’ and ‘can’t fink of anyfing’. Mine was a bright shiny red adorned with phrases such as ‘Colourful’, ‘Enchanting’ and ‘Thrilling’.

Back in the classroom, when Con had clearly had time to don his disguise, in mid-sentence I would suddenly ‘remember’ that I hadn’t shared some vital information with him and that he would now be in great danger! I implored the children to keep thinking of imaginative ideas and then ran out of the class, screaming out warnings to Con.

As the sounds of my screaming died away Con would burst into the classroom, ‘disguised’ as NPP, gleefully declaring that he had discovered a group of children whose imagination he could suck from their minds. Just as the children were reacting to this horrifying news, Story Man (hurray!) would burst into the room loudly demanding that NPP cease his evil activity, insisting that he would fail in any case as he was sure that the children in the class had huge and lively imaginations that couldn’t be sucked away though his villainy.

As Story Man assures the children that he will help them defend themselves from the villain all seems to be going well until NPP begins taunting Story Man claiming to be in possession of one or more stories that are so incredibly boring they will blast the children’s creativity to smithereens.

Weakened, like Superman with a whiff of kryptonite, Story Man implores NPP not to read his awful stories, expressing the hope that neither of them contains ‘the word that begins with n… and ends with the word for frozen water’.

Invariably the children worked out the word that I - I mean Story Man! - was referring to before NPP began reading either or both of his stories, ‘The Boring Tortoise’ and ‘The Nice Day’. In the case of the latter story, Story Man would writhe in agony every time the relevant word was used (which was often) seemingly each time losing more and more of his power, though, unnoticed by NPP, edging closer to the whiteboard or flipchart. Just as all seemed lost and NPP contemptuously threw the stories at Story Man our hero would exert the last of his strength to lift a pen from its holder. ‘I have a Pen of Power’ he would declare, a hint of strength returning to him.

NPP would implore him not to use it, insisting, though sounding less sure of himself by the second, that it would be of no use as the children wouldn’t be able to think of any ideas to improve the awful stories. Story Man then begs the children to suggest ideas, which he writes down using his ‘Pen of Power’, gaining more strength with each idea. NPP meanwhile, though still weakly insisting that Story Man’s plan will never work, edges towards the exit, finally running away when there are too many good ideas being put forward.

Story Man then asks to the children to start converting their ideas into stories, explaining that this will finally ensure that NPP can be permanently ejected from the school. SM then explains that he will visit the other classes to make sure that NPP hasn’t sneaked there instead.

Shortly after ‘SM’ exited, Con hurriedly returned as himself, supposedly wanting to report back to me and the class that he hadn’t been able to locate NPP. Just as Con was beginning to ask the children what’d been going on, I also returned, still crying out warnings to Con. ‘Relieved’ to have found Con safe and well I also asked the children what had been happening while we were absent, initially as incredulous as Con that the children had been able to repel the foul NPP from the classroom until they explained the while series of events to us and drew our attention to the list of ideas SM had written down using his ‘Pen of Power’. We would then compliment the children on being able to thwart the evil NPP with Story Man’s help and volunteered to help them with their stories.

Con has a real gift in helping children create poetry, so he would often work with a group converting their stories into a poem format that the group would then share at the end of the session and some of the children I worked with who would read their stories.

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One of the most charming aspects of the whole performance, particularly as we thought it might be where we would be called out, was the way in which the children explained back to us the events that occurred while ‘we’ were away and ‘NPP’ and ‘SM’ had been in the room, even when some of the children were suspicious that it had really been us. Just the capes and our ham acting seemed to allow them to ‘suspend their disbelief’.

Of course things didn’t always go to plan. I brought the capes we donned for our performance in a pilot’s case that had padlocks which were locked using a numerical code. During our first ‘performance’ after Con had left the classroom he realised that he didn’t know or had forgotten the code. To my amazement, while reading to the children, he returned to the classroom – I thought he’d forgotten the format of our piece – and he had to explain, ironically in a coded manner, that he didn’t have the code for the locks! So I had to excuse myself, while Con took over for a bit, so I could unlock the case.

The capes were very warm and when I mentioned I was going to write about our experiences Con reminded me of a class we visited on a lovely spring afternoon. Despite the good weather the teacher insisted on keeping the windows closed and after we’d left the room dressed as superheroes, we both had to drink gallons of water before we collapsed with heat stroke! As I left the classroom after Con he had kindly already found a drink for me, knowing I would need it.

As is often the case with normal school visits, not everyone is told we’re coming.* The same applied to a mother who had volunteered to listen to children reading. Just when we were at the climax of our battle over the children’s minds she walked through the door. Inevitably we all turned towards the disturbance, the action suspended in mid-sentence. Bless her, the poor woman took quite a long time to process the fact that something unusual was going on and verbalised her cogitations. ‘I’ve come to hear Aaron read,’ she explained. ‘But there seems to be something going on,’ she continued. Con and I widened our eyes and nodded slightly trying to urge on her thinking. ‘This is probably not a good time to listen to Aaron,’ she suggested. ‘I’ll come back later… I hope I haven’t spoiled anything…’ Finally, she left. For a couple of moments there was silence, as though we were all rebooting and then battle recommenced.

In one school we agreed to visit the reception class but as they were so young we agreed with the teacher to just pop in for a while, wearing our costumes and talk to the children. However even this diluted version of our act was too much for a couple of the boys and as soon as we walked in the room they burst out crying and were inconsolable until we left!

I don’t remember it especially but Con recalls a class where I was asking the children their names before hearing their ideas and it seemed as though every girl in the class was called Chelsea. Apparently, I started making a joke about it, guessing the names of the other girls before asking them. As the school was likely in Barnsley we were a long way from Stamford Bridge!

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Just one extra snippet, which I can’t see an excuse to share with you otherwise. Several years later I used my cape – turned inside out to hide the words, it was shiny on both sides – at a fair pretending to be a lady fortune teller. I called myself ‘Mystical Megan’ or something like that. I also wore a veil and similar paraphernalia. Most people knew I was having a bit of fun, particularly when I explained that my crystal ball was rebooting after an update and so I had to use my psychic Rubik’s Cube (backed up by my Asterix cards.) However when I suggested to one lady that the spirits were telling me that she was having problems with her dishwasher, she insisted that I might have ‘the gift’.

Perhaps I do have superpowers after all… or maybe it’s the cape…

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*This seems to be obligatory if you are using a room that someone else is likely to book or the room the dinner staff wish to invade half an hour before you’ve finished.

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Con’s website is www.conradburdekin.com

Mine is www.steveway.org

 

 Clearly authentic…