How much education does society need?

The big story in the UK at the tail-end of last week was the students' protests against the government's plans to increase tuition fees from £3,290 to up to £9,000 a year. Will these protests be a vanguard of popular discontent at Cameron's cuts?

Currently, the average British student leaves university with £24,000 of debt - student loans that need to be repaid. If you were hard-working and dilligent enough to complete a degree in law, medicine, engineering or accountancy and finance - the chances are it will not take you too long to pay that debt off once you've settled into a career where annual salaries can quickly leap from £25,000 - £50,000 - £100,000 a year. But if you went to a second-rate university to do media studies, your prospects are landing a high-paying job (indeed nowadays, any job) are rather bleak. And that average student debt is likely to rise to £32,000+ once the new tuition fees come into force.

I can appreciate the concerns of both students and their parents. But as with healthcare, the real issue with tertiary education is not really about costs but about rationing demand. Back in the late 1970s when I was a student, only 8% of young Brits went on to university or polytechnic. Today, the figure approaches 50%. The question is - are 50% of the jobs in the UK economy at graduate level? It's a similar question in Poland, indeed more so, as Poland's educational system produces holders of masters' rather than batchelors' degrees. Do our economies really need so many graduates?

As tuition fees rise, the question young people and their parents must ask is - what is the economic value of a university degree? The economy is crying out for engineers and scientists, yet few pupils today are prepared to work hard in subjects such as maths and physics in order to get onto courses that would guarantee them a well-paid career.

And so in the UK and in Poland, all too many young people go into university to fill the gap between school and work, between being a child and being an adult; to learn something that's not necessarily practical, but teaches you how to think. And while you are propping up the student bar, you can try to figure out what to do to earn a crust. The world is a tough place to get by in without education, but with more and more people competing in the labour force with a decent degree, is the economy ready to accept so many graduates?

In the UK, employers are increasing looking for bright school leavers who understand this dilemma and are willing to sign on with a large employer (Marks and Spencers, PWC or National Rail, for example) as management trainees, on a salary, getting experience and training. Three years later, these young people will be without debt, a few rungs higher up the management ladder and possibly even some savings to recompense them for not going to university. Will we see this trend spreading to Poland?

To make matters more complicated, while English, Welsh and Northern Irish universities charges tuition fees, Scottish universities do not. The Scottish Assembly in its wisdom voted to cover tuition fees from taxes. Only students from the rest of the UK have to pay tuition fees. Students from the rest of the EU do not. On the one hand, this policy is helping to attract the brightest and best students from across the EU. On the other, it's not helping to attract and retain the best teaching staff, especially once England's higher tuition fees kick in.

So then - questions for policy makers. What percentage of school leavers in any country should go on to university? What incentives should there be (other than the market) for students to study 'harder' subjects that employers need? Should tuition fees be higher for say, mediaeval Japanese poetry studies than for mechanical engineering or medicine? Or the other way around? Should tuition fees reflect society's need for a given skill - or the supply of lecturers in that subject? With two children at pre-university age, these are crucial questions for me!

Useful info from the BBC about this subject here.

Drab, sad West Ealing

London, I think, suffers from its very size. It is just the centre of London, from Kensington in the west right across to the City in the east, that foreigners think of as 'London'. Kensington, Chelsea, Knightsbridge, Mayfair, Marylebone, Belgravia, Westminster, Soho, Covent Garden, Bloomsbury, Holborn and the City of London - each with its own separate character. This is London proper, districts known by tourists and well-informed people around the world who might not have visited it, but are familiar with the above names from newspapers, books or films.

But the rest of Greater London? Acton, Forest Gate, Greenford, Kenton, Hornsey, Yeading, Isleworth? How many foreigners who've never visited London are even aware of these places? Peckham, Perivale, Catford or Whitton? Do these places resonate with atmosphere, with spirit of place? I rather think not.

Spirit of place in an urban setting comes from historic buildings, interesting architecture, geographic location - hills, rivers - West Ealing has none of these.

Beyond Kensington to the west, London continues to sprawl out with housing only giving way to fields once you get beyond Hillingdon, 15 km to the west. Half way between London proper and the countryside, surrounded by all sides by dense, forgettable suburbia, is West Ealing. Generic terraced housing. This is where I grew up. And while the top end of West Ealing, where my parents live, by Cleveland Park, is pleasant enough, the bottom end, along the Uxbridge Road, is drab and depressing.

Noble old buildings from Edwardian times are being demolished to make room for flats; more and more people (and their cars) are moving into the area. Large houses that were once home to a single prosperous Edwardian family and its servants have been sub-divided into four or five flats. Back gardens are being sold off as building plots for yet more flats.

Most white faces you pass will be talking Polish. There are five Polish shops between Ealing Broadway and West Ealing, a Polish hairdresser, restaurants and even a furniture shop (Polskie Meble!).

But the rest of the shopping is dire. The profusion of pound-shops (everything for one pound) is no more; all those Pound Kingdoms, Pound Lands and Pound Duchies have gone, boarded up, unable to face the competitive pressure from the almighty Pound World, which resides where Woolworths once was, and where everything from gas turbines to hovercraft to streetlamps can be purchased for a pound. People shuffle around in a daze, gormlessly drifting from store to store. Walking around West Ealing today, I had the distinct impression of a country without direction or purpose.

Central London has immense character, but it is ringed by dull, drab and essentially similar suburbs that the well-to-do flee from, either for the extremely expensive sophistication of the centre or for beautiful villages in the English countryside, far away from the ghastliness of the suburbs.

The choice between rural Buckinghamshire and Knightsbridge is one that today can be made only by millionaires. The rest is England's squeezed middle.

And so I prefer living in Warsaw, thank you!

Seasonal splendour in Edinburgh

As I wrote from Edinburgh last year, Scotland's capital boasts over 4,500 listed buildings. Few are more sumptuous than The Dome, the former head office of the Commercial Bank of Scotland, and now a splendid restaurant.

Above: the gallery on the first floor overlooking the lobby. The building, with its neo-classical portico fronting on George St, dates back to 1844. "The figures on the portico represent Caledonia, flanked by Prudence, Agriculture, Commerce, Enterprise, Mechanical Science and Learning", it says on a handy sheet about the Dome's history.

A big thank-you to Peter and Krystyna for inviting me to lunch at the Dome, where we spoke enthusiastically about Poland's economic prospects for the coming 30 years - a period in which Peter, a financier, expects the country to catch up and indeed overtake western European economies. As I was in Scotland, I lunched on haggis, that 'wee, sleek, cowering, timorous beastie', shot earlier that week on a haggis hunt in the McSporran mountains.

Left: Christmas tree in the restaurant slowly changes colour. The Dome decked out in its Yuletide finery is a treat to the eye, very tastefully done. Of the three waiters serving us at our table, three were from Poland. Every table was occupied, the place bursting at the seams. Certainly this part of Edinburgh, the recession's well and truly over!

Edinburgh portraits

Good to be back in Edinburgh - shame it's only for less than 24 hours. Early flight in from London on Thursday, even earlier flight back on Friday, a business lunch and evening seminar in between, so precious little time for seeing the sights. And weather gorgeous - much sunshine.

Above: view from above Waverley station. Edinburgh's hilly location and grandiose architecture lend it an imposing, enchanted air. Turreted Victorian stone and winding cobbled streets, buildings of commerce and finance, hotels and guesthouses; The Mound and North Bank Place.

Left: battlements and turrets - the Balmoral Hotel, overlooking Waverley Station, and the North Bridge spanning the railway line. The five-star Balmoral fronts onto Princes St, Edinburgh's main shopping thoroughfare (and the northern end of the A1 road that runs to London). It's a favourite among wealthy Japanese tourists. Taxis dropping off passengers outside the Balmoral are greeted by Scotsmen in kilts and full Scottish regalia. To the left of the shot, the Nelson monument, at the foot of which, the Pivo Café.

Above: Scotland's capital is not far from the sea. The Firth of Forth, being the estuary of the River Forth, which flows eastwards into the North Sea. To the south of the city, there are the Pentland Hills. The atmosphere and location make Edinburgh number one choice for where Brits would most like to live and work.

Above: Edinburgh by night - looking down Thistle St. A magickal klimat, what the city's good at doing.

London notes

London never fails to make an impression, especially after a lengthy absence. I've not been over since April, mainly because of reasons to do with the economy - fewer companies willing to sponsor Poland-related business events in the UK.

Arriving early at Luton, I just make the bus from the airport to Luton Parkway station. I hand over 50p of the £1.50 bus fare and I'm scrabbling around in my wallet among the one, two and five zloty coins for a one-pound coin, which in the dim light I can't seem to find. The driver gives me the ticket and waves me into the bus anyway. It's more important that he gets the bus boarded than hold everyone up for a mere pound. How practical! I repay the social trust accorded to me by handing over that coin later once I'd found it.

Elsewhere, I see more examples of social trust and social harmony in action. At St Pancras station, a man in a wheelchair is asked by a member of staff (in obligatory high-visibility vest) "Can Oi 'elp yaouw, Sir?" I can't imagine surly PKP staff at Warszawa Centralna volunteering to help in such a kindly way.

The train to St Pancras is three and half minutes late. Over the station loudspeakers at Luton Parkway we hear abject, grovelling apologies for any inconvenience the delay might have caused. (Not a bit - I've have missed the train had it been on time!)

On the train, I'm sitting near four students discussing between themselves their accents ("My parents say I'm well-spoken," says one, who sounded upper lower-middle class to me. "Ah've got Black Coontreh vowels," says another). Accent is so important to Brits. With 80% of the indigenous population falling into the general category of 'middle class', it's crucial to distinguish between the wafer-thin sub-stratas therein. Quoting Carol Midgely from today's Times, 'Britain is socially immobile because its obsessed with class. It's not where you're going by where you are from." Not a problem that Poland has. As I wrote here, in Poland, accent is pretty much homogenous. It is a Pole's vocabulary that reveals much about his or her schooling, rather than it being accent that betrays the speaker's social and regional provenance.

St Pancras is as beautiful as ever, the East Midlands high-speed train that gets there non-stop in just under half and hour deposits me on the main concourse rather than in the underground Thameslink platform. Passing the glittering shops lining the lower concourse, I see something you just don't see in Poland - rich old people.

Sir John at St Pancras: my favourite poet

Entering the Underground, I see all the Tube lines are running a good service. And then a loudspeaker announcement. No service on the northern end of the Victoria Line - person under a train. And a minute later - no service on the northern end of the Bakerloo Line - another person under a train. A spate of Wednesday evening suicides is holding up North Londoners returning home tonight.

But the Piccadilly Line's still good. A westbound train is standing waiting for me, ready to whisk me on towards Ealing. Central London is still quite posh, as you can hear by the upper-middle clahss aircsents between South Ken and Baron's Court (though you'd not guess by looking at the speakers' egalitarian clothing). It's worth watching the first two scenes from the musical My Fair Lady to see that in this department, little has changed since the days of George Bernard Shaw - "An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him/The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him."
But by the time my train reaches Acton, I notice that I'm in the one-third minority of passengers in my carriage who are white (and I'd guess half of those are Polish). London's diversity makes the native English a minority in the land of their forefathers.

There's a ticket inspection between Acton Town and Ealing Common. The ticket inspector is backed up by a uniformed police officer (a volunteer Special Constable); this type of revenue protection measure would be unthinkable in Poland - what happened to the social trust and harmony I'd witnessed earlier? Indeed, I no longer recognise the land where I was born.

Warsaw - childhood memories

Prompted by two visits to the Old Town and New Town on two successive days, I have found two photos from my father's B&W negative archive of this part of Warsaw from the mid-1960s. I was in two minds whether to post this on my Grey Jumper'd Childhood blog or here, but given that site traffic on W-wa Jeziorki is 20 times higher, I decided to give this post a wider readership on account of its Warsaw subject matter.

My first visit to Warsaw was in the summer of 1961 - I was three and remember only the image of a live carp swimming in an enamel bowl before being killed and cooked. My subsequent visit, in August 1966, was far more memorable. First of all, our family in Warsaw lived in Ochota (as they still do today, same building in which my father lived before the war). Ul. Filtrowa, being four tram stops from the very centre of town was a spectacular contrast of urban sophistication compared to suburban Hanwell and West Ealing.

Instead of sprawling grey suburbs stretching out from the rarely-visited centre of London, full of soot-darkened Victorian architecture, this was City Life. Warsaw had just been rebuilt after almost total annihilation, and looked brand new. Here were trams, neon lights, shops, restored historical buildings, museums and galleries, military bands parading, royal parklands - things that one had to travel a long way from Hanwell into the central London to see - and here it was all on our doorstop.

Left: The entrance to the Old Town market place, corner of ul. Świętojańska and Zapiecek. I'm in the small group of people on the pavement to the left, aged eight, along with my late uncle Zdzich and his daughters Marynka and Jola. The cars are FSO Warszawa M-20s, locally-produced versions of the Soviet GAZ M-20 Pobieda. Traffic was so scarce then that there was no need to ban cars from driving around the Old Town.

Below: View of the New Town and Old Town rising from the Vistula banks, taken from the Most Gdański bridge. The Wisłostrada - today three lanes in both directions (and jammed up totally during rush hours) - in those days was very quiet!

Before coming to Warsaw, I'd already been steeped in Varsoviana as a child; I was continually fascinated by two large photo albums that my father had; one of Warsaw before, during and after the war, the other of the Warsaw Uprising. This imprinted in my mind images of certain Warsaw landmarks - the pre-war Prudential building (now the Hotel Warszawa), the headquarters of the Polish Academy of Science (PAN), the Zachęta art gallery, the Old Town and its churches. Our family in Warsaw would send us bundles of magazines including Stolica, which would portray the capital city as modern, exciting, bustling - and this is how I found Warsaw when I came to see for myself (although the reproduction of colour photographs was poor compared to British magazines of the era).

A particular memory was driving into Warsaw from the west at dusk, the broad and largely empty roads, the skyline (then totally dominated by the Palace of Culture), the bright lights, tram lines on the edge of town, and very quickly we were right in the centre with its neons and department stores. Of these, the one most strongly etched in my memory was the Centralna Składnica Harcerska (Central Scouting Repository) which was the place to buy Polish scout- and cub uniforms, but more importantly the shop was full of East German model trains and plastic kits, diecast model cars and other goodies outside the scope of West Ealing's department stores.

Such childhood memories - along with subsequent visits in the late-1970s, have cemented a powerful emotional bond in my mind with Warsaw's spirit of place.

Poland's English-language blogging community get-together

To Warsaw for the half-yearly blogmeet. The last one was in Kraków in May, now Warsaw plays host. Venue is Legends Bar, ul. Emilii Plater 25, a British eaterie with goodies such as All-Day Full English Breakfast (below, 30 złotys) bangers-and-mash and chicken and leek pies on the menu.

The entire Polandian team, 60% of which is Kraks-based. Island1 and Scatts (from the UK) who got the blog up and running, plus Decoy (from Ireland), Brad (from Oregon, USA). As well as contributing to Polandian, Scatts also runs 20 east, while Student SGH does his Politics, Economy, Society blog.

A big welcome to two new Warsaw bloggers, Kolin (Borsuk na Pradze, who hails from Canada)and Paddy (Pozdrowienia z Ursynowa), as well as Pan Steeva of the re-activated Młochów (Mwo-hoov) blog (two more Brits). And me and my two blogs, this one and Grey Jumper'd Childhood. Plus our regular blog readers and commentators Adthelad (a UK-born Pole like me) and Bob from Colorado (US) to whom thanks for the brilliant suggestion of venue.

And the Muses (below from l to r: Mrs Decoy, Mrs Island1 and Mrs Scatts with daughter Zosia).

So in total there were 15 of us, nine regular bloggers representing seven English-language blogs about living in Poland.

After enjoying Legends for several hours, we moved to Scatts Mansions for more ale and wine and cultured debate (anyone know why we don't eat turkeys' eggs, for instance? Or whether a carp could beat a turkey in a pre-Xmas fight?)

Fish and chips in Warsaw

It is now held as conventional wisdom that Britain's national dish is chicken tikka masala. Whatever happened to fish and chips? A seafaring nation (once) surrounded by nutritious cod, and land admirably suited to the growing of potatoes... Decent fish and chips are becoming ever harder to come by in England (though there still are some excellent places around). But in Warsaw? Late last year, a traditional British fish & chip shop opened on ul. Koszykowa 30 (just off Pl. Konstytucji), but it was only today that Martin Oxley and I gave the place a first visit.

WOW! Unbelievable. The atmosphere is so authentic, you'd think you'd just been teleported a thousand miles to the west!

Above: waiting for cod and chips with mushy peas twice with salt and lots of vinegar. For anyone homesick for Glasgow, deep-fried Mars bars are also on the menu. Sausage and chips also available. And vast amounts of British brands, comfort food largely unavailable anywhere else in Poland (Kuchnie Świata in Złote Tarasy does HP Sauce, Worcester Sauce and Branston Pickle, Fentiman's soft drinks and a few others, but this selection is amazingly wide).

Look at this parade of iconic British brands! Yorkie bars! Marmite! Twiglets! Cadbury's Dairy Milk! Fuller's London Pride! HP Sauce! Branston Pickle! Kettle Chips! Jammy Dodgers! Ribena! Fray Bentos Pies! Jacobs Cream Crackers! PG Tips! Tiptree marmalade! Rowntree Fruit Pastilles! I have NEVER, EVER, in my ENTIRE LIFE, seen such a magnificent line-up of British comestibles in one place, outside of the UK. Brilliant.

This place being a takeaway, we rushed back to Martin's car and devoured the fish & chips in the office. Nathan, another Brit from the next-door office came to join us and attest to the food's total authenticity. Looking at the huge variety of comfort food brands on offer, he observed that much of the above is a contributing factor to the visible weight difference between Brits and Poles.

Still, for the occasional treat (and what a treat!), Fish & Chips on Koszykowa is a superb place for those hankering for an authentic taste of Britain.

Fish & Chips, ul. Koszykowa 30, telephone orders +48 692 240 804; email: info@fishandchips.pl; website www.fishandchips.pl

Polandian's beaten me here by four months - link to Scatts's review here.