On the Road Fed up of the office? Over the next few pages, we explore opportunities to learn new things, change your line of work and head out on new adventures – beginning with the travels of an English teacher abroad
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write this as Typhoon Neoguri sweeps into the Kanto plain, hoovering up stray umbrellas as it rips among the giant pinball machine of Tokyo’s towers. Thunder booms. The Japanese call it kaminari – ‘god’s sound.’ I learnt it off a cleaner who I smoke with. She would use the word as we huddled on top of the skyscraper watching the rain slash the concrete black. Teaching English as a Foreign Language – ‘TEFL’ for short – has become a multibillion pound industry worldwide. The economics of the world’s insatiable desire for English gives the newly embossed neophytes of the ‘real world’ a tempting out card: if you have a degree and grew up in the UK, you can get a job as a teacher abroad. Casually flick over websites such as tefl. com and eslcafe.com and you will find a frothing sea of opportunities in every distant corner of the globe. First rules: always look a gift horse in the mouth; seek references from their previous employees; and never, ever pay to get a job. Many positions will ask for a CELTA, which we’ll discuss later, but it’s possible to get a job in Asia without one. That’s how I started. It was a matter of panic rather than enterprise. I had a week to go before my student tenancy expired. I’d already gotten myself embroiled in a few grim telephone interviews with call centres. The choice between a recruiter offering me the ‘breadbasket’ of China and the Longbenton Industrial Park seemed clear. So, two weeks and some unnecessary rabies vaccinations later, I shook off the surreptitious neo-colonialism and was on the plane. On arriving in China, I found I’d pitched up in the equivalent ten thousand industrial parks stitched around rice paddies. Highway by highway, my dream of timber houses, incense reveries and Zen was crushed under the roars of endless trucks ferrying consumer goods to nearby Hong Kong. The driver of the minibus kept gobbing phlegm from the window at every second junction as though he was leaving a trail of saliva crumbs to help him navigate back to the airport should I not be deemed fit for purpose. I arrived, and was taken to my kitchen-less apartment; I
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shrugged it off in exhaustion and tried to sleep. Six hours later, a knock on the door. I was to be presented to the school; a microphone bundled into my hand, “Speak about yourself.” I was escorted to the front gates where three thousand yellow-shirted preteens had assembled. They bellowed “HELLO” as one. My jet-lagged brain crumpled. “Um... Hello... I’m Sebastian. I like... swimming.” I hate swimming. I’d been a teacher for all of 30 seconds and I’d already lied to them. I was whisked away to cheers, and told I had two weeks off before my first class. I blinked at that, and was left alone to explore the urbanwild and meet the locals. In China, they will approach you with a breathtaking gumption – everyone seeking their English friend. The problem with this instant friendship is that hacking through the vegetation of low-level synonym creation and navigating semantic pitfalls can be exhausting after having already spent your day doing just that. However, embrace it – and the hospitality will go on and on. One evening, a brief cafe conversation got me a four star hotel for the equivalent of one five pound note. Another stray yes got me bundled into a Ford Mondeo, where I was greeted by two wide-eyed children who looked like they wanted to devour me and slurp the English speaking blood from my corpse. Fourteen sing-alongs to Thriller later, our expedition was chugging through the dusky foothills and I spent the evening in a bamboo shack sampling snake soup and binging on rice wine. As for work, the novelty of your presence will get you through – the fact that the pupils enjoy it is enough. In state schools in Asia, you are mostly a government-enforced spare wheel, the product of a policy that mandated native-speaker presence in the hope it would rub off on the young. You will be treated with respect, but you will not be looked upon to achieve much beyond being happy and present (and the latter is not always a requirement – I had a lot of spare time). Yet you may want to actually have control over the direction of the class – and looking for new jobs in dedicated language schools confirmed that if
I wanted any real freedom, either travelling or in the classroom, I’d have to get qualified. Type in TEFL and you will be stampeded by a bewildering array of acronyms that make the US Federal Government look positively verbose: TEFL, TESOL, ESL, CELTA, DELTA, TOIEC, TOEFL. The most intensive are the CELTA, by Cambridge, and the Trinity Cert TESOL. They are equivalent, but the CELTA has a slightly better name-cachet around the world. They both cost around a thousand pounds, last four weeks, and give an astonishingly thorough grounding in how to teach for a living for so short a course. Most of all, they’re great fun. I’ve not met a single teacher who hasn’t said theirs wasn’t one of the most enjoyable things they’ve ever done, as well as one of the most difficult. Getting the top grade of the CELTA is hard (a tiny percentage achieve it) but if you do the work you should pass the course.
“I’d been a teacher for all of 30 seconds and I’d already lied” Unfortunately, the majority of language schools spend more on glossy leaflets than teachers’ pay, but they are the engines that drive the nomadic life. The teacher is the disposable peon – they should be thankful for the Italian sunshine as they take the creaking train to a town the Renaissance obviously missed on its way through. Language schools are businesses, focused on trying to grind out the bottom line. Some are stellar, some are not. You are required to keep students happy and entertained as well as helping their English. A classroom of boisterous, middle-aged Italian students, however, is quite a system shock
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Words: Sebastian Fisher Illustration: Ben Kither (OWT creative) compared to young Asian children – suddenly piping up such questions as “What’s the third conditional?” apropos of nothing. Keen to please my new charges, I started chalking the words, “If I had have been...”, realising as I approached the verb something was wrong before hearing an “Are you sure?” at my back. No, I’m not sure, and you’re going to sit there while I desperately mutter my own language under my breath until I am, aware the whole time that you paid thirty euros an hour for this experience. ‘Blackboard-blindness’ is a real thing. Spelling words such as ‘accommodation’ transcends from awkward to a Sisyphean hurdle of consonant rearrangement, your hands dusty with chalk as you hastily swipe away your last attempt. Halfway through the tangent, one of the students demanded that we skip the whole question altogether because, actually, gerunds were on the upcoming test (which I hadn’t been informed about). Cue ten minutes of frenzied, breathless arguing in Italian among the students. Not exactly the holistic English environment I was striving to create. Your qualification gives you the weapons – but the classroom time sharpens them. After class, though, that same pugnacious student ushered me onto her scooter and we rode along the coast, the midday sun sparkling off the Adriatic. At the fish market, she helped me select a fresh octopus for lunch, shouting the cooking instructions over her shoulder as she took me back to my apartment, then left me with “Ciao! See you tomorrow!” and a kiss. Students, who will often be your age or older, will become friends. You will learn as much from them as they learn from you. Typhoon Neoguri has now abated. I watch the evening sun slide down the skyscrapers and join the crowd migrating homeward. Teaching abroad gives you a sense of place not found in two-week monument-dashes. I play ping pong in the park at dusk, join friends for sushi and sake, and slip into the arcade at nightfall – knowing that tomorrow I will wake, again, as a resident of the city.
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Real Dreaming In a climate of cuts, routes into the arts are varied. A writer, a creative game developer and an art researcher share their stories
Interview: Lara Williams Illustration: Louise Lockhart
Free for All Did you know you can study a course set by Harvard while sitting on your couch in your pants? No, neither did we Words: Laura Swift
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career in the arts’ is the sort of played-out phrase you lob about having completed your entirely useful BA in Philosophy with Modern Languages, though the reality often seems abstracted. Finding work in a creative field or working as an artist feels largely inaccessible if you haven’t done your 100 hours practice, if you can’t afford to take that requisite unpaid internship. While funding for the arts continues to dwindle, and with less of a formalised foot-inthe-door, routes into the creative industries have become a little more flexible simply because they’ve had to. Independents and not-for-profits offer short courses, the sort of thing you can do on your night off; distance learning is increasingly more affordable and even postgraduate qualifications have caught on to a little of the old pragmatism – most people gotta make a living. So what are the ways to pursue your heart’s true want while juggling the grind that pays the bills? Manchester Digital Laboratory, or MadLab, is a self-funded enterprise located in a former shop in the city’s Northern Quarter, offering everything from short courses on developing to mouse taxidermy. The courses are relatively low cost and provide sensible schooling to low number groups in the evenings and weekends, using interactive and workshop formats. Now a senior games developer at CBBC, Dan Hett took two of MadLab’s weekend-long courses “mostly out of curiosity;” one in Arduino, a creative electronic application, and another in projection mapping, learning how to project artwork on to buildings. Hett worked in programming for an agency at the time, but while he had the technical nous, he was apprehensive about the creative aspect of the course; nervous to “make art as opposed to sitting in the corner coding.” He found the intensive weekend format the ideal way to learn and the hands-on workshop approach a great way of figuring things out: “It was an entry point to teaching myself.” Hett now oversees the development of games for the CBBC website, and works on projecting visuals and artwork in clubs on the side. Indeed, he has come full circle, and will be delivering a gaming workshop at MadLab in the coming months that will follow the accessible structure of which he was such a fan (and has a working title of the none-too-scary ‘Games Development 101’).
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Kin2Kin in Liverpool is a ‘creative community’ that offers more informal, broad Continuing Professional Development, with a concentration on marketing yourself and getting to know the industry. Creative Entrepreneur David Parish delivers many of the workshops, with a focus on the efficient – he trains creatives to apply their imaginations to business. Though the combination of art and business might make you bristle, product designer and course attendee Ilsa Parry believes otherwise, saying, “business is an opportunity to be grasped by creatives and not to be feared;” and there is certainly something to be said for the de-romanticising and re-professionalising of creative roles, particularly if you’d like to be, you know, paid.
“I had a great idea for a second novel, having already written an unpublished one…” Greg Thorpe
Continuing Professional Development that errs more towards the collegial comprises a host of vocationally minded postgraduate qualifications, with an eye on the prize – the prize being an actual job. Having studied a BA in Linguistics, arts executive and development manager Clare O’Mahoney had ambitions to be an artist but felt pressured to go down the academic route. Volunteering at the Whitworth Art Gallery while studying a BTEC in Art and Design led to an MA in Art Gallery and Museum Studies, and she has since worked as director’s assistant at the Whitworth and managed the Manchester International Festival’s members’ scheme. “The MA gave me an exceptional grounding in understanding the role of public funding for art galleries, of the importance of finding new and interesting ways to raise money,” she says. “We can’t just continue in the same way.” Fellow
alumnus Jenny Oakenfull noted the expectations of institutions in having studied at this level. “Most museums want you to have an MA before considering hiring you,” she says. Oakenfull took a career development loan to support her studies, working around lectures, eventually securing a role with art researchers Morris Hargreaves McIntyre. “It took me a year and a half of applications, two jobs in two cafes, and one in a bar, but I got there. Eventually.” Much has recently been made of creative writing courses, whether it is Hanif Kureishi getting shirty over whether you can teach writing (while receiving a salary to do just that) or Junot Díaz noting the “unbearable whiteness” of the courses, which is probably fair. Freelance writer/ copyeditor Greg Thorpe studied an MA in Novel Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Writing School. “I had a great idea for a second novel, having already written an unpublished one… I’m good with deadlines so I knew the MA would force me to finish something.” The course blended critiquing contemporary fiction with writing workshops, though was angled towards being a publishing qualification also, which was particularly relevant to Thorpe, who worked fulltime in academic publishing. Despite lectures taking place outside of office hours, balancing work with studying was hard. “I received little support to compensate and eventually the stress and guilt were overwhelming,” he says, advising those considering a CPD to be prepared to get into debt, be organised, and explain to everyone around them the importance of the commitment, and to seriously work out some stress-management solutions. “In the end the indifference and lack of support from work sealed my determination to leave.” Thorpe eventually quit his job and made good on dreams of going freelance, the MA supplying the requisite editing skills and confidence to make the leap. He now copyedits academic books, works on artists’ installations, and writes for a host of arts organisations and exhibition catalogues. “The main thing I want is to be admired as a writer,” he says. “That’s the most important thing in the world to me.” www.madlab.org.uk www.kin2kin.co.uk
f you’ve looked into distance learning, perhaps you have come across the pleasingly bovine acronym MOOC – or, Massive Open Online Course. The principle of MOOCs is to make available the raw materials you’d need to study, say, game theory, or Scandinavian film and television, or y’know, equine nutrition, free to access by anyone, anywhere, via the internet. Hype intensified a couple of years ago, as bigger numbers of highprofile educational institutions began signing up. Some of the providers are initiatives of or at least closely connected to those big hitters themselves – the founding partners of edX.org are MIT and Harvard, while Coursera was set up by two science professors from Stanford. Others, such as P2PU (Peer to Peer University), are driven not by traditional collegiate bodies but function as a network of experts/practitioners creating courses of their own. If this sounds too good to be true, maybe it is. Interaction with professors or your fellow students is limited; you don’t have access to the physical facilities of an institution. Completion of the course doesn’t usually accrue university credits – although in most cases you will receive a ‘statement of accomplishment’ – and if you want a properly authenticating certificate, providers may require a fee. Don’t let any of this put you off, though – the important thing is that there is a totally nuts amount of stuff out there to discover. If you’re anything like most humans you’ll probably sign up to 21 different programmes and drop all of them after the first webinar – but for those with some determination, here are just five things you could do:
1. Plot a space mission and invent your own planetary system in Imagining Other Earths (Princeton University via coursera.org, starts September). Consider also, ‘Dino 101’, which is ABOUT DINOSAURS (from the University of Alberta). 2. Understand the city as a human-made ‘organism’ to be able to plan a better life for our rapidly growing urban populations, in Future Cities – delivered by tutors affiliated with ETH Zurich through edX.org (starts September). Or, y’know, receive an Introduction to Philosophy from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That’s MIT for short. 3. Examine the power of lovely Mario Götze – sorry, football – and its influences on everything in Football: More Than a Game (the University of Edinburgh via FutureLearn.com, starts 20 Oct). Other important offerings from FutureLearn include How to Read Your Boss and uh, Looking After Your Liver. 4. Make your own version of the bane of everyone’s life, (mobile app game) 2048 – or learn how to track and, indeed, capture a runaway robot – through udacity.com, which boasts relationships with various Silicon Valley types including Google and Facebook. 5. Work on your mandolin technique at worldmentoringacademy.com.
www.manchesterwritingschool.co.uk
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Design for Life
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Looking for a leg-up into the world of graphic design? Our writer experiences a day in the life of a student at Shillington College, and finds fast-track delivery that doesn’t cut corners group then gather around the table to share their initial ideas. (The classroom is more like a studio, with none of the vast anonymousness of a lot of college set-ups, and groups never number more than 22.) The students are encouraged to bring their own backgrounds and experience to their design ideas, and discussion ranges from globally networked AV festivals to contemporary typography, the music videos of Aphex Twin and the soundshapes in the scientific field of Cymatics. The tutors let the students do the talking, gently nudging them in certain directions or suggesting areas they might not have heard of – and obviously enjoying being occasionally stumped by some of the new ideas brought to the table. Everyone, including The Skinny, comes away from the session with a full notebook of fresh ideas and things to look up later. Throughout, the tutors keep a clear focus on the practical outcome: how would this work for the company, the audience, the city or client? The end goal for everyone is, after all, establishing a career in design and getting that job.
track records of alumni had been very much part of the decision to commit. “A friend of mine from Australia did the course in Sydney,” says Kate Walker. “Since then she has worked all over the world for various design agencies and fashion designers.” O’Brien, too, knew someone who had done the course previously; “hearing about that experience was like an epiphany for me,” she says. Indeed, Manchester alumni have a high success rate in getting work quickly. “All of the hard work paid off,” says designer Becky Evison, who graduated in 2013. “I found work within two months at [creative agency] Fuzzy Duck in Stockport.” Jimmy Lee, who completed the Shillington course part-time and graduated in 2013, is currently at the BBC in Salford working as a trainee UX Designer in Sport. “For me, the course provided a great introduction to designing for digital platforms and across different devices/screen sizes (desktop/mobile),” he says. Others have gone on to work at Manchester agencies Retrofuzz and MC2.
“At University you can be given up to half a year to complete a body of work. That’s not realistic in the commercial world”
The key to this success is the development of a strong portfolio – one of the course’s main focuses. The portfolio is, in effect, a graphic designer’s calling card. All of the projects completed over the three months at Shillington lead up to the portfolio period, and the students in this cohort are determined to use this tool to get their foot in the design-studio door. So what are their plans for the future? “I want to get a year or two of UK studio experience and then the plan is to move back to Ghana where I grew up and just try and see what I can do there,” says Leroy Wadie. “It’s a creative country and the perfect time to put my skills to work.” Others are quietly confident that the course at Shillington has made it possible for them to apply for the kind of jobs they have always wanted. “I’d love to make a living out of the skills I’ve learned here,” says O’Brien. “I’m not sure yet of the exact direction I’ll go in, but I’m keeping as open as possible. There shouldn’t be a limit and learning more only makes you more capable.” “The course has really been a release for me to express myself creatively which, before, I struggled with,” says Georgia Vincent, who had been working in branding in London, and took the course at Shillington to find her niche within the creative industries. For her, it’s all about this final intensive portfolio push – and then afterwards? “Sleeping! I can’t wait to do a bit of that.” After all their hard work, they probably deserve it.
Ross MacKay
Understanding the industry
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ight, let’s talk about ideas,” says John Palowski, Graphic Design lecturer at Manchester’s Shillington College. This morning, the latest cohort of design students are working on their final project together before they disperse to complete their portfolios. The mood is energetic, the atmosphere relaxed – the students have, after all, been working intensively together for three months now, and know each other well. Shillington College has campuses all over the world; in New York, London, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and on Portland Street, right in the centre of Manchester. They offer two courses: Graphic Design, which is taught intensively over three months or part-time over a year, and a shorter web course with the focus on coding. No experience in graphic design or coding is necessary, which is part of the attraction for many students, who come from a wide range of backgrounds and skill levels. Some students have already completed a design-based degree, but feel they didn’t learn the very basic fundamental principles; for others, the course is a complete shift towards a creative career. “I did my degree in Spain but I felt that by the end I still didn’t know what graphic design really was,” says Felipe Lozada. “I learned how to use the technical tools but I felt we didn’t learn the basics of designing or how to best develop our ideas. That’s what we’ve been learning here.”
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Interview: Sacha Waldron Photography: Simon Bray
Three months may not seem like a long time but it is this very intensity that keeps the fast-paced course at Shillington firmly rooted in the industry reality. “At University you can be given up to half Kate O’Brien, on the other hand, was working as a year to complete a body of work,” says Ross an account manager in London, “where I got exMacKay, who graduated in 2012 and now works as posure to creativity but wasn’t ultimately doing an Interactive Creative at fashion and style brand it myself. I wanted to get more hands-on.” boohoo.com. “That’s not realistic in the commercial world. At Shillington you learn to work Brainstorms and mood boards on ‘live’ briefs at speed while also managing your The focus at Shillington is on process of workflow, which is invaluable.” design, not just on technical delivery – although With education becoming an increasingly of course training is given in the three key luxurious commodity, the speed of the course is programs, Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator. also highly attractive to those who cannot afford Again, students’ previous experience of these to take a long career break or do not want to jugpackages is mixed, with some coming at them gle work and study. The students in this group for the first time and others, who are already had not taken the decision to take that break established in the industry, brushing up their and go back into intensive study lightly, and had skills. The course does not have any one technical clearly done their homework. Experiences and agenda, however, and students are given a variety of different types of projects including craftier briefs, where students get the opportunity to create work by hand. For today’s project, students are asked to develop a concept or brand for an event. Given an array of options such as sound art, architecture or product design, everyone has been brainstorming and creating mood boards. The first part of the morning is spent on an informal presentation given by Palowski, who is, like all the Shillington tutors, a practising designer himself. He looks at a range of examples from the cutting edge of Scandinavian cool to brand packages for the Sydney Biennale. Half of the
Building a body of work
Head along to Shillington’s next info session on 9 Aug, 10.45am, to find out more The next full-time and part-time courses start 22 Sep 2014 www.shillingtoncollege.co.uk
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Going It Alone We’ve explored some new career paths – but you’re keen on being your own boss. Here’s a look at where you can earn the entrepreneurial know-how to turn a hobby into something more Interview: Jacky Hall Ilustration: Caroline Dowsett
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rom financial forecasting to marketing strategies, starting a business can be daunting, especially for those with creative skills. It’s a world full of baffling business-speak like ‘scalability’ or ‘drilling down’, and where years are divided into quarters. But as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and the cooperative movement, the Northwest has a long heritage of industry, innovation and generally making things happen – and though the mills have become boutique hotels, the work ethic and self-determination still exists. Nationally, self-employment is at its highest since 1992, with 4.5 million people in the UK registered as their own boss – and across Liverpool, Manchester and everywhere in between, people are developing their passions and hobbies into viable businesses. The School for Social Entrepreneurs (SSE), based in Liverpool’s Hope Street quarter, supports those aiming to start a business that not only turns a profit but also does some social good. The Brink, a nonalcoholic bar on Parr Street, began as an SSE supported project. Lisa Mairah, SSE’s Learning Manager, is keen to emphasis that entrepreneurship doesn’t require qualifications. Anybody with passion, commitment and an idea can do it. “SSE is a peoplepowered learning programme for individuals who want to transform communities through social
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enterprise,” she explains. “We work with a diverse range of people, from those who have just had an idea up to those who want to grow their existing social enterprise.” During a period of unemployment, Chorltonbased Sally Thirkettle began crocheting to “stay sane while job hunting.” After selling her handmade accessories and homewares at craft markets, she found business support through Blue Orchid. Training in social media management and bookkeeping helped her business, SallyStrawberry Creations, to grow. Thirkettle found the financial training especially helpful: “I had had a stab at this myself,” she says, “but my advisor assisted me in changing my system so that it would stand up to inspection should the Inland Revenue pay me a visit.” Un- or underemployment can make anyone feel a bit, well, rubbish, but Thirkettle refers to crafting as “a lifesaver” – for her, the satisfaction of developing a business and the positive impact on emotional wellbeing is obvious. She relates a time spent, out of necessity, without internet, just the radio and crocheting: “It gave me focus, a sense of achievement.” After travelling around Australia and New Zealand, computer programmer Ian Moss decided to turn his love of adventure into a business by setting up 196 Destinations, a website for
finding cheap air travel. For Moss, support from Business Growth Hub, who offer a range of support from their central Manchester office, has been crucial. “It’s reassuring to be able schedule in an appointment with a qualified professional,” Moss says of the mentoring he’s received, “and to receive constructive critique from someone on your side.” Defining his own working patterns outside of the traditional nine-to-five slog has been the clincher. “Who hasn’t thought on a sunny midweek day, ‘I wish I could go for a walk or cycle.’ As long as you’ve not got a client deadline, you can do this.” The dream, for many of us, is to quit our day jobs, tell The Man to stuff it, and be your own boss. The reality is that, despite support available, starting a business doesn’t immediately lead to drinking artisan coffees in your tastefully
EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT
decorated home office – many of those starting out as entrepreneurs fit the demands of running a business around other work. Thirkettle works part-time in a cafe, while Moss still takes on freelance work. However, both believe the hard work is worthwhile. Thirkettle has expanded into tutoring others, and emphasises that what she learned from Blue Orchid “gave my business direction, and the motivation to push it forward.” Moss, meanwhile, now runs Founders’ Assembly, a networking event for digital business startups to collaborate and constructively criticise – demonstrating that skills, once learned, are to be shared. www.the-sse.org www.blueorchid.co.uk www.businessgrowthhub.com
THE SKINNY
Back to the Land
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All this talk of reading and writing – what if you want to learn skills that involve getting your hands dirty? We check out some local opportunities to develop knowledge that allows us to become more self-sufficient, from foraging to brewing Interview: Jacky Hall Ilustration: Caroline Dowsett
ork. It’s a word that implies toiling in the fields or labouring under the sun. But for many of us, work involves sitting behind a computer screen, dealing with mental rather than physical challenges. We tap data into spreadsheets, scroll and scroll and press F5 on inboxes. Humans didn’t spend millions of years evolving for the comparatively sedentary lifestyles of graphic design, administration or PR. Nay, we humans evolved to survive in the great outdoors – though it’s safe to say most of us would feel we don’t have many skills in that area. So what if you’re looking to brush up? Learning to grow your own food is a good starting point. Watching and nurturing a seed grow from a tiny brown speck into a frilled and fiery rocket leaf is a small experience, but one to make you feel proud of your green fingers. From their beginnings as a community project on a disused car park in 1999, Hulme Community Garden Centre in south Manchester have always put education at the heart of their (not-forprofit) business. As well as sessions for schoolchildren, the centre runs regular horticulture courses and workshops for all (they also sell a range of organic plants seven days a week, so the learning process can continue at home; and big city living is no excuse, as even the smallest of spaces will have a windowsill suitable for growing something). Squash Nutrition also run horticulture and cookery courses from their community garden in Toxteth, Liverpool. Once you’re on your way to a greater degree of self-sufficiency foodwise, you’ll want to move on to drink. Recent months have seen an increase of interest in homebrewing – and for those with similar aspirations, Love Brewing run introductory courses in beer, wine and spirit making at their Liverpool showroom. Alan Wall, a barman living in Manchester, has combined his love of beer with completing a degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Salford to set out on a unique path: he explains, “I have built my own kit, and I treat it all as a big
science experiment, so it’s all about recording details and taking measurements.” Wall grew up in Burton-on-Trent, a brewing town, to parents who brewed their own wine, and says that “my background working with brewing system design probably had something to do with my decision to start brewing later in life.” It’s a decision that has led to business planning: he’s increased his homebrewing capacity, with a view to selling his real ale commercially. By now, you’re probably getting really into this dietary self-sufficiency thing. Foraging is the next logical step. Who wouldn’t want to have the skills to jump into a hedgerow, then emerge with a basketful of produce ready for a feast? Lee Craggs works with food every day at Manchesterh wholefoods cooperative Unicorn. Concerns about how our food is produced (he talks passionately about the way supermarkets have homogenised the way we think about fruit and veg: “just because it’s in a bag labelled ‘baking potatoes’ doesn’t mean you have to bake it”) led him to a foraging course at Sale Water Park with medical herbalist Jesper Launder (via Cracking Good Food, who lead wild food forages, helping you to identify an edible mushroom from a potentially fatal piece of fungi). “It was dead good,” he enthuses. “We learned how to safely identify food like wild garlic and elderflowers, then cooked it up over an outdoor stove. Sitting outdoors on a nice evening, having a drink and a chat with some other people is the most natural thing. We live in a city but, really, we’re still surrounded by nature.” With his new skills, Craggs now scans the hedgerows and parks for foraging opportunities on his cycle to work, and is planning to attend more lessons in the autumn to learn about mushrooms. www.hulmecommunitygardencentre.org www.squashnutrition.org www.lovebrewing.co.uk/courses www.crackinggoodfood.org
cambridgeenglish.org/celtauk
August 2014
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