“Excuse me. It not allowed to toilet in turbulence. Please return your seat.”
We were on the Shanghai flight, two hours out of Finland, bouncing gently over the Urals. More than half of the one hundred plus paying passengers in the rear section of the Boeing MD-11, saw me gingerly return to my seat and try to contain my own turbulence which had caused me to leave my seat in the first place.
By that time anyway, I had already decided this was my last trip with Finnair. Indeed, on the European leg of my flight from Manchester to Helsinki, the meal they served made me nostalgic for the reincarnation of Sabena.
Those who ever flew the former Belgian national airline rejoiced to a man when it finally went bust. Its very name became synonymous with terrible food, Sodding Awful Breakfast Ensures Never Again, was how most passengers spoke about Sabena.
So why the instant divorce from Finnair? Clean plane, nice staff, decent drinks trolley it had. But in the competitive long-haul market, with eight airlines offering Manchester/Shanghai cattle-class return for only £352.00, all that distinguishes the best from the rest is the succulence of the chicken breast. Others offer much more than the soggy wraps, dry bread and chocolate bars which characterised the Finnair offering.
Not that it had all been luxury. The early morning had been characterised by frantic phone calls to ensure that a one hundred and one year old constituent, who was trapped in her home because the grids outside were blocked was going to be able to do her usually weekly shop at Tesco. The great thing about being a local councillor is that it keeps your feet on the ground, even though occasionally your head may be in the clouds. The same could be said for my airline. It was certainly up in the clouds, but unfortunately its reputation with me just vanished into Finn air.
12 December 2002
“Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday and now all is well”.
When you travel east beyond Mumbai, you are never quite sure what time of day it is. As we banked down into Shanghai, having watched the dawn over Beijing, I knew that the folks at home were on their way to bed. Once to ground, I was aware that the most gargantuan of tasks was to challenge my Circadian rhythms and convert night time into afternoon and evening into day. So as they went to bed to dream, I landed in one. Shanghai is an architectural peach.. Fortunately, Communism mummified many of the colonial jewels, so that today, the frozen gems of the past sit beside some of the most challenging buildings of the third millennium.
Across the city there are outstanding examples of Georgian, Gothic, Neo-Classical and the Chicago styles, as well as Chinese Imperial courtyards.
Unique to Shanghai however, are the Shikumen.
Built by successful British and French speculators for the new white collar classes of Shanghai in the 1850’s, they are a unique mixture of an English terraced house, surrounding a Chinese courtyard. Initially built to house a single family, they were soon sub-let to a peasantry, drawn to the city by opportunity and prepared to share not only kitchens and outside bathrooms but also the Chinese chamber pot, the Matang.
In the 1920’s, “no dogs or Chinese” were the words that appeared on the entrance signs to the tiny green plot that rests at the confluence of Suzhau Creek and the Huangpu river, know as the Huangpu Park. The five park regulations, adopted in 1916, initially only denied access to dogs and bicycles, but a separate regulation later denied access to all Chinese, unless they were natives, servants or friends of foreigners.
So what a privilege it is, ninety years after the first banning order, to be organising links between schools in the Hangpu area and those in Derbyshire.
If anyone had asked me in advance where I’d most like to have established a link with Shanghai, I’d have adopted the Huangpu area. Not only does it have an evident vibrance, but it is home to the famous Shanghai bund and also the busiest shopping street in the world. Even before it was pedestrianised, at the turn of the millennium, the Nanjing Donglu attracted an estimated 1.7 million shoppers every Saturday and Sunday throughout the year. It remains a magnet for those with a propensity to spend.
In the interests of carbon neutrality, after a pre-lunch nap of about forty-five minutes I had asked my hosts for less of the limo and more of the metro. As ever, the public transport proved infinitely more interesting than the private for those who put people watching before privacy.
Of course, there is always a bigger risk of robbery, violence and pick-pocketing when you use the public system, which my chaperone unfortunately confirmed in the café in the Palace Hotel when he searched for his wallet and found it had gone.
A briefing session with the British Council and an excellent Chinese meal in a regenerated sector of the city adjacent to Peoples’ Square, was still insufficient to stop me snoozing in the rear of the taxi back to the hotel. In the lobby, a voluptuous Chinese chanteuse sang a thirties jazz song evocative of Shanghai between the World wars. Sadly, the restaurant tables in front of her were empty and her only audience was the accompanying pianist.
13 December 2006
“ Real Estate on the No 1 Site in Huang Pu is selling at 17,000 RMB a metre”, said Mrs Li.
Call that a round £1,200 a metre. It means that property prices in downtown Shanghai are now above those in many parts of England and rising faster. (Just by way of comparison, the average price per square metre in Cardiff- Wale’s most expensive city- is £1,700) I was on the site of the now reclaimed former military airport,which if Mrs Li’s ambitions were realised, would be adding another 80,000 people to the already crowded Huang Pu district of Shanghai. We had just left the completed second campus of Fudang University, which by September next year will house 10,000 students and 50,000 white mice.
Of course, building on a former military site has had its complications, but once the builders became familiar with the shells of explosives, the safety record significantly improved and causalities have since fallen.
The Huang Pu authorities have sought to build an ecological urban garden in an urban setting, harnessing the water, connecting the whole network to the Yellow River and providing a fisherman’s paradise beneath the newly planted shrubs, trees and flowers.
The day had started with flowers at the Huang Pu School of Shanghai Conservatory Music. Half of the 1,300 six to fifteen year olds at the school play musical instruments, amidst the poinsettias and chrysanthemums which grow vigorously from pots dotted throughout the campus.
A precocious seven year old welcomed me to her school in perfect English, said that she was about to perform for me and in front of her sixty contemporise from the primary school orchestra, proceeded to play with the virtuosity of a born musician, a lilting Chinese folk song, which finished to rapturous applause. She then proceeded to conduct the sixty piece orchestra of six to nine year olds, swinging the baton and tiptoeing along the touch line like Jose Mourinho on a better day. Whilst I much appreciated the performance, I also saw it as a wake up call for Britain. If these kids could perform so well in classes of fifty, why don’t we see similar standards back in the UK?
Across the road in the secondary school, the sixty piece orchestra blasted out the March of Toreadors from Carmen, then for their English guest, they played the “Red Dragonfly”, a Japanese song, on Indonesian instruments, its flow only interrupted by the flash and pop of the paparazzi who had inexplicably appeared immediately after my arrival. Even their presence didn’t stop me embarrassing myself with an inept display of musical talent on a bowed Chinese instrument whose owner had made playing look so easy.
14 December 2006
The next school I visited were planning to twin with Anthony Gell Sports College in Derbyshire. A so-called attached middle school of the Shanghai physical education university, half of their three hundred and eighty students were recruited from Shanghai, the remainder from the rest of China.
They talked of plans for the Beijing Olympics and of their strategy for stacking up further medals in London in 2012.
The Principal, who numbered Tai Boxing amongst his professional talents, showed us examples of Japanese karate, Korean Te Kaedo and Chinese Dragon Dancing, before taking us out to watch a Chinese flag ceremony in which Shirley, the English translator, was exercising with the kids.
“Important make teacher healthy too”, said the number two translator.
The new Head of Education at the Huang Pu Town Hall was the diminutive and charming Doctor Wu, who was just completing her second week in office. In a previous incarnation she’d been in England researching school leadership and inspection regimes and was anxious to replicate some of the good practice she had seen.
Over lunch I had been challenged to eat sliced dark greythousand year old duck eggs. The challenge is firstly to pick it up, secondly to swallow it and keep it down. The perfect gift for my cabinet colleagues back in Derbyshire. Shame about not being able to import foodstuffs I thought. The evening fare offered slightly more challenge. Chunks of lobster were attached to a skeleton by tendons and tendrils, which made lifting them from the plate without splashing the other guests in sauce an almost impossible task.
The most heart rending experience of the night was strolling past the supermarket and being forced into a double-take in the shop window next door. On two settees, stunningly beautiful Chinese girls clad in identical skimpy red tops, short black skirts and knee length boots lay sleeping in the window like puppies in a pet shop. Eyes closed, legs a akimbo, waiting to be awakened from their slumber by the next punter, they were presumably a twenty-first century hangover to the time when one in every dozen women were allegedly “metered, taxi-dancing” girls. “sing-song” hostesses and street girls. They don’t iron the newspapers before re-reading them like they used to in the thirties but some elements of Shanghai seem to remain eternal.
15 December 2006
Relatively unpleasant weather was an unwelcome element of the first morning of the Seminar on the “Education of International Cross-Cultural Preparatory Elites”, at which I had been I invited to present a paper.
Students at the Shanghai Foreign Languages School usually speak their own Shanghai dialect, Mandarin and one, two, three or four of the six other languages taught at the school, which are French, German, Spanish, English, Japanese and Russian.
It is true that these kids have been chosen on the basis of their ability. However, my experiences from early days had made it obvious that even where selection was not the case, teachers were able to harness the motivation of parents and children alike, in order to develop global citizens of the future.
Although this is was international symposium, with academics and practitioners from many parts of the world, the average age of the youngsters looking after their honoured guests was thirteen!
Even if we don’t find that awesome, which all of us agree we did, the prize winning students from the college made conference contributions that would be the envy of many and beyond the capacity of many more back in the homeland.
Fascinatingly, the Principal of the Shanghai Foreign Languages School makes his introductory presentation with one of his students and allows the learner to spend more time explaining the purpose of the Conference than he takes himself. In such circumstances, asking for evidence of output or achievement becomes churlish because it’s personified in the way in which the college presents itself. In that context it is hardly surprising that the students appear supremely confident as they have every right to be.
The day is as diverse as it is rich. The Conference Hall is located in the Sisu lecture hall which benefits from air conditioning, unlike the schools, which operate without either heating or conditioning. Winter temperatures are close to zero and height of summer humidity bathes you in sweat before, during and after every lecture and every musical and sports performance.
As part of our rich and diverse menu we hear a prize student present in CNN perfect prose before watching mock UN meeting in which students play ambassadors and deal impressively with difficult decisions of the day.
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16 December 2006
“There is nothing to be gained from playing a piano to a cow”.
Today was presentation day. The text is on http://www.derbyshire.gov.uk/Images/Global%20Citizens_tcm2-177495.doc .
Fortunately, I brought my laptop to China and had some visual materials which I had managed to paste into my presentation last night. Most of us believe that “A picture speaks a thousand words”, but nevertheless fail to use pictures and indeed visual aids of any kind. For sure, death by a thousand PowerPoint pictures is painful, but the opportunity to do so much more with a presentation is so often missed by people who consider that words are enough.
For me, it was Rudyard Kipling who identified the essence of a presentation –
“I have six honest serving men,
they serve me well and true,
their names are How and Where and When,
and Why and What and Who”.
My task was to illustrate how education can change the world; my challenge is that is still has a long way to go.
On this particular occasion I chose Breughel’s picture, “The Fall of Icarus”, to illustrate how education professionals throughout the world can meet, feel that they are making a difference, but find they have made little, if any, impact on the world as a consequence.
Bosche and Breughel vie for my nomination as the most significantly challenging western artists in history. I can’t speak for Pacific Rim paintings because almost all of them incorporate calligraphy which describes the emotions of the painter at the time of creation and as a consequence, as a westerner I have never managed to even start to understand the qualities of the calligraphy, never mind the intricacies of meaning which the Asian artist adds to his or her creation.
Icarus, was a now very modern character from Green mythology, who ignored the advice of his parents. Given the gift of wings to fly, he was advised that the wax that attached them to his body was liable to melt if he flew close to the sun. But Icarus was a young man. He flew higher and higher until suddenly he lost control and fell to his death. Of course, we now know that his wings did not melt, but that as a consequence of flying closer to the sun and higher in the sky, the wax on his wings actually froze rather than melted, but the outcome was the same.
Breughel presents the fall of Icarus on a typical sixteenth century Flemish canvas. In the background a galleon sails towards a sun-kissed city. In the foreground a peasant ploughs the field, much as he has done over the centuries. W H Auden’s poem on the fall of Icarus, more accurately describes the scene than any words I can choose
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
In the corner of the picture, Icarus has fallen to his death, but only his legs show as he tumbles head first into the water.
The theme is simple. As the family of Icarus, as educators in schools, we can feel very important when we are with each other. Certainly, Icarus himself and his family would have viewed his death as an event of great significance. But what goes on in the confines of a small family or a capsule of educational practice is nothing unless it influences the rest of the world.
The challenge for the educated is to use their newly acquired knowledge and understanding, but critically to feed it back into their communities so that they, as a consequence, increase the mutuality of understanding across the world, and hopefully contribute to the peace and understanding which the Shanghai Foreign Languages School identify as the objective of their mission, to transform the life, opportunities, engagement and fulfilment of their students.
17th December
"The husband is the head, the wife is the neck and the neck ensures the head turns in the right direction."
The discussion around the head and neck began as a consequence of me misguidedly stealing a piece of duck which the lady sitting next to me indicated that she had earmarked for her own consumption.
On formal occasions, Chinese food is served up on a lazy susan, (or in some cases a lazy sally).
For those unfamiliar with Chinese customs, around ten guests surround a table, the centre-piece of which is a huge glass plate which turns like a wheel. Dishes are placed on the wheel and diners help themselves to passing fayre. Particularly testing with chopsticks are sticky lotus roots, (which are sliced but which nevertheless, as a consequence of being stuffed with rice, often have a stronger seal that Bostik), prawns from which you have to remove the shells and heads with chopsticks and teeth without using your fingers, and of course the jelly fish, which when dried are ideally designed to evade puncture with a fork, never mind clamping by chopsticks.
The duck in question arrived at the table to my left, in a bowl thick with hoisin sauce and liberally sprinkled with spring onions and other greenery. Unfortunately, it sped clockwise, so that by the time it reached me, all the upper flesh had been consumed. Under the hoisin sauce however, I detected a leg which I lifted on to my plate, much to the disappointment of the lady next door. Although I offered to put the item I had chosen on to her plate, she refused and took some other part of the anatomy and put it on her own plate. It was only then that I realised that I had not chosen a leg, but in fact the head of the duck – tongue, brain, eyes, cheeks and all.
Critical to relationships with Chinese people is that they should not lose face and that you must appreciate their food. In this respect, in truth, they are not very different than their British counterparts, for having chosen the piece of meat which one of my Chinese hosts coveted, I felt I had no option other than to consume it in full. Luckily, it turned out to be delicious. Guests to the Wilcox household, who frequently come and sample the local delights, will no doubt take account of my reaction to this part of the duck when considering future invitations.
Having been under the impression that I had resolved the situation, imagine my despair when the fleshless duck had almost completed its second circuit, and this time, spotting the real leg below the thick sauce, I lifted it from the dish on the lazy susan and dropped it on my plate.
Again the lady to my left had a eureka moment.
“That’s my second favourite part of the duck”, she told me, again refusing my offer to take it from my plate.
Closer examination revealed that on this occasion I had plucked the neck of the duck from the sauce, at which point I presumed that when it was slaughtered it must have been inebriated because as poultry goes it was clearly legless.
Again, in order to save face, I consumed the delicious fleshy neck and understood why my companion had preferences for parts of a duck which I had never previously considered edible.
As ever, there’s nothing like a familiar food in an unfamiliar culture, challenging prejudice and making you reflect on where and how you registered that prejudice in the first place.
On the way back to the hotel, it was time to prepare for home. I passed the forty foot high Christmas tree and a sleeping woman dressed as Father Christmas at the entrance to her tiny grotto when the singer next to the piano, embarked on yet another rendition of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”.
Only a couple of days earlier, students from the Shanghai Foreign Languages School had conducted a lively debate on whether the Chinese should celebrate Christmas and in a tightly fought contest had decided the motion to the negative. Yet every shop, shopping mall and restaurant was decadent with Christmas lights, Christmas wishes, Christmas music and Christmas fun. But of course, this is Shanghai, the most exciting and vibrant of all Chinese cities, awash with entrepreneurs and joint venture opportunities and confident that in spite of Beijing hosting the Olympics, that the minor part that they will host in their soccer stadiums, will nevertheless be the highlight. I’m rather hoping I might be there to cheer for China.
How much better that would be if hundreds of youngsters from Derbyshire had already visited China and and knew the score in advance.
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