We've Got Feet
Apologies for the silence – the blog has taken a back seat for a bit. Life has been pretty crazy for the past few weeks, and I've just finished a fortnight-long tour of schools around the UK, speaking to nineteen schools (often two or three in the same day) to promote the Ice Edge competition.
I think what I had to say was well received, but the range of reactions I saw was amazing; from being fixed by the indifferent glare of the inner-city Liverpool teenager with stripes shaved into his eyebrow to spotting the Belfast girl hiding behind her scarf when I talked about the polar bear Pen Hadow and I encountered in 2001. I ate school dinners, drank overbrewed tea and signed autographs with chewed-up pencils. Schools are, I decided, simultaneously the toughest, and the most rewarding audience a speaker could ever hope for.
Speaking of rewarding, the best experience of the fortnight came on the very last morning, when I spoke to the wonderful Dyffryn School in South Wales. Not only did I experience the warmest welcome of any of the schools I spoke at (amazingly, some schools didn't even offer me a cup of tea after we'd travelled halfway across the UK to speak to them) but the pupils there had also already produced some fantastic work towards the competition, and they seemed both enlightened and passionate about the environment. One piece of work, by Alex Hollet, nearly brought tears to my eyes. He'd spent days making a giant Arctic scene, contained in a huge white-painted box. There was a poem written on the lid, and the title of this post comes from two lines of his work:
We drive our cars and that seems neat.
Have we forgotten we've got feet?
You can see more photos of Alex's work here (and a zoomed-in version of the poem here).
Somewhere in amongst all the talks I managed to move to a new flat in Parsons Green. I'll post some photos of it soon.
Last up, a few other things I've been meaning to share:
- The Offscreened schools expedition to Dubai and Oman.
- Rene Pollrich's winter ski tour to Norway (otherwise known as 'photos to make Ben envious').
- Rosie Stancer's 2007 solo North Pole expedition. I've been harbouring a secret desire to head North alone again this spring, but couldn't find either the sponsorship or the time to do it in the style that it deserves. Rosie is a great friend of mine, she's been training like a maniac, she's one of the most driven people I know, and she deserves to pull it off. I can't wait to follow her progress.
— Filed under Miscellany, Schools/Education