"Ich bin ein Berliner”

I am just back from ICEF Berlin - still the biggest and best meeting place for Agents and Schools. I have attended about 20 times – so I guess I am a “veteran” as Steve called me in a recent Linkedin post - but this was the first time for me since my ‘retirement’ [sic]. As always it was both an exhausting and exhilarating experience. I had 34, 25-minute face to face meetings and many other informal ones. My voice nearly went again. I bumped into so many old friends and industry colleagues I hadn’t seen for a while, and I know there were others there I didn’t even see as the event was so big.

I have always thought of Berlin, which happens at the first week of November as the real beginning of the marketing season for Summer Schools. Even though we attended other events before this we always aimed to get our brochure ready for Berlin as that is when people start to think about next summer. Nowadays everything moves more quickly though and our brochure was ready months ago, The weekend before Berlin  five of our team were travelling. Colleagues were in Spain, Portugal, Vietnam and Italy and I was in Istanbul, where I literally landed with a bump (twice on the same flight)! I thought about suggesting that the pilot attend our Aviation Simulator Course at our Oundle campus.

Istanbul, a city of 20 million people is chockablock to use a nice word we borrowed from Turkish. It is said to be “too beautiful for one continent” as it sits astride Europe and Asia. I agree and I have been there many times. This time though, I am ashamed to say, I didn’t leave the hotel and on top of that I arrived in a car with blacked out windows, which I was grateful for after the dodgy landing, and fell asleep in the taxi on the way back to the airport. It was a nice hotel though, the Hilton, Bosphorus but currently under restoration. There were signs all over the hotel which said, “Designing for the future while paying tribute to the past”. I liked that. Pictures of old movie stars and celebrities adorned the walls. The Jazz Bar, which Louis Armstrong had played in was unfortunately closed too. I will have to go back. The hotel is the same age as me. Perhaps I need a bit of restoration too!

Then it was like the old days - back home, through the horrendous and tragic Spanish floods we were on the edge of, unpacking and packing and off to Berlin.

Travelling for work is a strange combination of amazing opportunities, gruelling schedules and personal sacrifices. I met a friend in Turkey who had been on the road for a month and was desperate to get home to see his wife and young children. He changed his flight and guiltily skipped an event to go home but I saw him again a few days later in Berlin. It reminded me of a poem I wrote years ago.

International Lonely Guy

4 am

Can’t sleep again

High in the Sky

Bed writing in Shanghai

As real life passes me by

Who the hell am I?

An old romantic

Gold Card Holder

Looking over my shoulder

Air mile collector

Hotel Room Inspector

A jet lagged fool

Doing it all for my school

A hamster trapped on a wheel

Feeling lucky

Feeling important

Feeling very sad

Shouldn’t I be glad?

Living the Dream

It seems

Treated like a star

But looks better from afar

Stuck on the hedonic treadmill

Or should it be DREADmill?

Meanwhile

This soulless crazy world keeps turning

Time is burning

I am missing you

What you gonna do?

(It’s my job!)

Looking out of my 5 Star window

As the city springs to life

Exhilarating but seen so many times before –

New York, Bangkok, Tokyo -

They all look the same

Skyscrapered metropolises

Of broken dreams

And promises

Memories of the night before

Back in Harry’s Bar

Drunk on the adventure

Spinning an anecdotal story or two

To I don’t remember who

The jukebox is playing the story of my life

I am trying to TAKE IT EASY but am really

Just STAYING ALIVE

Trying to SURVIVE

To move on

Even though THE THRILL HAS GONE

Best friend strangers catch my eye

The night flies by

Feeling very alive

But so nostalgic

Another old song nearly makes me cry

Just one more insignificant mortal

Trying to get by

Sore head

Struggle out of bed

Expert packing

Done so many times before

But for how much more?

Will I miss it when I retire?

Or shall I stay on as a gun for hire?

Deep down, like Elsa I know

It will be hard to “Let it go”

Time to stop this tome

And start the long journey ‘home’

Another airport taxi ride

But on the upside

As another great poet Shanghai Lil once said:

“I no worry, I no care”

I no fly Ryan Air!

ICEF Berlin remains though the flagship event, the place to be and to be seen in the first week of November. A place with many happy memories for me. It was a pleasure, as always, to share a table with Bram who was representing our sister company Exsportise. I enjoyed every meeting with old partners and new. It is always easier to sell something you believe in, and I think we have a fantastic offering at British Summer School. Four stunning schools, exciting pathways, modern innovative teaching methods, blended and task-based learning, unique features like ‘True Me’ and so much more. Our overarching aim is to create a safe space where students can own their own learning and be future ready. As you can see, I am finding it hard after two busy trips to switch out of meeting mode!

Coincidentally, the US Presidential election happens every four years at the time of ICEF Berlin. I remember sitting up in bed in the fantastic Intercontinental Hotel, in November 2008, crying while listening to Barack Obama’s “Yes we Can” acceptance speech which was so full of hope and promise. Time to “put hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day”. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. It seems though that the winds of change are blowing again. This time I caught bits of Donald Trump’s speech in the taxi going to the airport, and Kamala Harris is now “unburdened by what has been”. For some reason I keep thinking of the C.S. Lewis quote “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending”. Let’s all hope then for a brighter future.

It occurs to me that our Agent meetings are a bit like political campaigns. We both need to work really hard and knock on doors to ‘get out the vote’. Like politicians we want to be liked, we want people to believe our product is the most attractive, we want them to see the value of what we offer and believe in our ability to deliver on our promises. Both rely heavily on snapshots and sound bites as that is what most people tend to remember. In America this time it was crazy from mugshots to garbage trucks. I hope, more modestly, that the people I met saw the merit in our professional value driven programmes beautifully and comprehensively presented in our brochure and that the slightly eccentric veteran who spoke so enthusiastically and passionately about them made a lasting impression. I left it all out on the field, as did my colleagues, and all we can do now is wait for the votes (bookings) to come in.

So, thank you British Summer School and ICEF Berlin for giving me the opportunity once again to ‘do my thing’. It was a blast! I really hope it leads to more and more students attending our transformational courses.  I will leave with the words of another consequential American President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin. And therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’.