I’m about to shut down our old website, viney.uk.com. It’s out of date (as most books are out of print) and I’ve transferred most of the articles here. High speed broadband is coming up our road, and I’ll change internet provider when it gets here, and the old providers host the website at a cost. It’s daft to keep it, though it was my older son’s gap year project. So it will disappear.
One of the last remaining bits was a list of places where I gave ELT talks. I didn’t think it worth transferring as we have given very few talks since 2010. It seems a shame to let it all waft into the ether, as I’ll never remember the list, having got rid of most evidence years ago.
In the early days of ‘Streamline’ Bernard Hartley and I used to speak in different countries. Bernie did all the early lectures in Spain, and France, while I did the talks in Greece, Italy and Japan. We both visited Mexico and Portugal. When Bernie decided very firmly never to tour again, I took over in France and Spain. That may be why Spain and France are shorter lists than Italy – Bernie did the first few years.
Bernie also spoke in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Ecuador and Guatemala, as well as Sweden and Switzerland.
These were virtually all OUP tours, though I also spoke for Garnet to promote Fast Track to Reading (notably TESOL Arabia in 2010 and in the UK) and at least one with Heinemann or Macmillan for Survival English. That was in Paris. That was difficult as OUP made it very clear they did not like me promoting for Macmillan. After 2000, Karen and I usually toured together as we developed a good double act. Our tours dried up, not because we wanted to stop, but because OUP very markedly decided to “unfriend” us (at the top level) and stopped inviting us.
From a 2007 interview:
On promotions, I’ve done far fewer in recent years, but did enough in the past. People often speak about them as if they’re free jaunts or “jollies”. They’re not (for authors at least). They’re extremely hard work with the advantage being that you learn a great deal about the ELT situation in different countries. Normally, you get the chance to eat in good restaurants chosen by locals, but opportunities for “tourism” are limited or non-existent. I did most of my travelling when I had young children, and never wanted to add days at either end. I chose to make the maximum use of the time, by attending other lectures and speaking to teachers on the publisher’s stand. In some places I watched lessons in schools. If a place took my fancy, I’d visit it later with the family and do the tourist bit then at my own expense. I’ve even flown to Paris from Southampton, arrived at 12 (the flight was late because of fog), got in a car from CDG airport to the venue, checked the video equipment, spoken from 2 to 3, got in a taxi and been on the 5 pm flight home without either hot food or the French language passing my lips in France. “Going to Paris on Saturday” is not necessarily fun. I’ve done Zurich day return too.
Zurich was a lesson. The flight had seven or eight pairs of Africans. One had a briefcase chained to their wrist. The other was a burly bloke. They came straight from transit so had not entered the UK. They were all on the flight home with me, but without the briefcases. They went straight back to transit. Swiss banks.
BELGIUM
Antwerp
Brussels (3)
Liege
Westende
CHINA
Hong Kong
DENMARK
Copenhagen
FRANCE
Aix-en-Provence (3)
Avignon
Bordeaux (2)
Grenoble (2)
Lille (3)
Lyons (4)
Marseilles (2)
Montpelier
Nancy
Nice
Paris (many times)
Rouén
Tarbes
Toulouse (2)
GERMANY
Germany was an anomaly. I spoke just once at an International Schools European conference in Frankfurt. OUP’s German distributor, Cornelsen, declined to distribute Streamline saying it ‘was not suitable for Germans.’ This was odd as Germans and Swiss-Germans were among the top five nationalities we were teaching when we wrote it. Not only that, Deutsche Grammophon competed with OUP for our signature, wanting to turn it into an audio course. Friends in Bavaria used to buy ‘Grapevine’ in Switzerland, where it sold very well in German speaking areas. A lot were sold in the UK to German teachers taking them back. At Frankfurt they refused to display it on the Cornelson stand, so it was on the lone ELT series on the OUP Academic stand.
Frankfurt
GREECE
I know that National Road from Athens to Thessaloniki forwards. And backwards.
Athens (5 or 6)
Hania
Iraklion
Kalamata
Patras
Thessaloniki (4)
Volos (2 or 3)
HUNGARY
Was this tour the most enjoyable of all? I think so. A week in December with a “road show” and Christmas songs and great company. I opened, Karen and I closed each day.
Budapest 3 December 2005 “English As A Funny Language” plenary
Budapest (4 or 5)
Debrecen
Eger
Miskolc
Pécs
Szeged
IRELAND
A memorable conference, with a reception at the Mansion House with the Mayor who had been a language teacher (Gaelic, I think). I sat on a panel of four at the end. The first three (including Robert O’Neill) introduced themselves with a lengthy account of their Irish heritage. I was last and said, ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I have no Irish DNA at all. Not only that, my wife grew up in Belfast.’ and got the biggest round of applause. All the UK speakers were on the same Sunday flight back and they took us in a minibus. I sat with the driver who said ‘Ireland is the most beautiful country on God’s Earth. Or it would be if it’d just stop fecking raining for a minute.’
Dublin
ITALY
All this, and I’ve never been to Venice. OUP / La Nouva Italia decided to stop taking authors to Venice because too many had contracted food poisoning and they lost the tour. We spoke in Padova and they came out.
Alghero (2)
Ancona
Arrezo
Bardolino
Bari
Bologna (3)
Brindisi
Cagliari
Caserta
Catania
Cosenza (2)
Cuneo
Florence (many times)
Forli
Genova (2)
La Spezia
Lecce (2)
Livorno
Macerata
Milan (many times)
Modena
Monza
Naples (3)
Padova
Palermo (2)
Rimini
Rome (many times)
Sassari (2)
Savona
Sorrento
Trento
Turin (many times)
Verona (2)
Viareggio (2)
JAPAN
Japan 2004, Nara
Fukuoka (3)
Hiroshima (4)
Kagoshima
Kita-kyushu
Kobe
Kyoto (5)
Nagoya (5)
Nara
Think Tank Live, JALT 2004, Nara
Okayama
Osaka (many times)
Sendai
Sapporo (4)
Tokyo (many times)
Yokohama (2)
MEXICO
Mexico City was the largest audience I ever spoke to. I can’t remember whether I repeated the speech two times or three times in a day (I think three), and the audience was changed each time. A large full hall with people standing at the sides and sitting on the floor. OUP even got me a day room at the hotel venue to relax in between sessions. There was always tea, coffee, water and snacks waiting. Wonderfully looked after by Alan Jackson (as in Greece, Spain and Portugal).
Acapulco
Cuernevaca
Guadalajara (3)
Léon (2)
Merida
Mexico City (3 )
Monterrey (3)
NETHERLANDS
Amsterdam (2)
Groningen
Sittard
Utrecht
NORWAY
Oslo
POLAND
Lodz (2)
Radom
Warsaw (2)
PORTUGAL
Faro
Figueira de Foz
Lisbon (3)
Porto
SPAIN
Alicante
Barcelona (3)
Bilbao
Granada (many times)
La Coruña (2)
Las Palmas
Madrid (many times)
Malaga (4)
Murcia
Orense
Oviedo
San Sebastian
Santiago de Compostela (3)
Sevilla (2)
Torremolinos
Valencia
Zarragoza (2)
SWEDEN
Stockholm
SWITZERLAND
Basle
Berne
Geneva
Laussanne
Lugano
Zurich (2)
THAILAND
Bangkok
Chiang Mai
Khon Kaen
We were booked for an IN English joint tour of Thailand later. Some years earlier, ELT Marketing listed authors who should travel business class for flights over 5 hours. It was their initiative and wise.We were on it. The OUP executives travelled business class. I couldn’t take time to adjust for jet lag. I’d arrive and speak the next day – on the same day, once or twice. We were after all travelling on business. It’s not about pheasant and caviar, it’s about being able to sleep on the plane. Anyway, we were on that A list. When OUP Thailand realized they were going to have to pay business class they asked us to fly economy. We said ‘Fourteen hours? No chance.’ So they switched to an English File tour.
TURKEY
One of the treasured memories. A string quartet of pupils from a secondary school played gentle classical music for ten minutes before I spoke, and it relaxed the audience and made them receptive. I stayed in an ancient and magical small hotel between the Blue Mosque and Santa Sophia. I was due to do an extensive tour of Turkey the next year, but I damaged a tendon in my ankle and couldn’t walk for weeks and had to drop out of that tour plus Czech Republic / Slovakia.
Istanbul
UK
While resident in Bournemouth (then Poole) in the last twenty-five years I’ve done more formal talks in Brighton. The football rivalry remains. The Mayor of Brighton opened an ELT conference and asked me where I was from. I said ‘Bournemouth’ and he said, ‘Oh. I won’t shake hands then.’ (with a smile). I reminded him that the filthy gravel strewn end of the old Bournemouth football stadium was called ‘Brighton Beach’ because that’s what their beach looks like. Ours is fine golden sand.
(several are multiple)
Bath
Birmingham (2)
Bournemouth (many)
Brighton (many)
Bristol
Cambridge (3)
Canterbury
Chichester
Coventry
Croydon
Exeter (2)
Folkestone (3)
Guildford
Hastings (2 or 3)
London (many)
Loughborough
Manchester
Oxford (many)
Pangbourne
Reading
Saffron Walden (2)
Southampton
Torquay (2)
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
Dubai
USA
Long Beach, CA
SEE ALSO ARTICLES:
So you never came to Korea, where your books were pirated and retitled in the 1990s.
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No, though there was a big fuss on a panel at JALT in the 80s. The Korean Minister of Education was there and Bill Gatton from OUP asked him when Korea would stop pirating books and stealing from British and American publishers. I was on the panel and the Korean guy had a fit and started screaming at him. We noted to OUP that we were selling 3000 Streamline Destinations TBs a year in Korea (let alone other levels), but no SBs or cassette sets. The conclusion was that the spiral bound TBs were cheaper to buy than pirate. I didn’t know about the change of title. What was it? (I’m now thinking we’ll get rid of Karen’s Kia!) OUP told me that Russia alone pirated more Streamline than our lifetime legitimate world sales. Iran pirated it removing all the illustrations. Vietnam and Cambodia pirated it.
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Plus China! And Malaysia. In the late 90s, an OUP senior executive told me that Hong Kong and Taiwan (which accounted sales) were worth far more than China, where they took licences to print 50,000 and printed a million.
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I forget now what the title was, but the teacher I knew who was using it had no idea that it was a pirated Streamline. It was the only time I saw a coursebook being retitled, though there may have been other cases. It was common for photocopy shops to make class sets to order of whatever book you liked, with no attempt to change their identity, but perhaps there was some profit to be made by renaming. I taught in a private language school in Hong Kong in the 1980s where all the students had legitimate copies of the Streamline books. Fortunately (not least for yourself), Hong Kong didn’t have the photocopying industry that I found when I moved to Korea.
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Longman owned schools in Hong Kong and they used Streamline.
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A Portuguese publisher did a rip off version circa 1980, different title, all names changed, 90% same text. OUP stopped them. France Telecom sold copies of a mixed Streamline / Headway compilation. Again, OUP stopped it.
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