The Firm

Learning the ways of the English shrubbies (and archibots).

Work has been keeping me busy these past weeks, and I must say I am thoroughly enjoying it. Being back in a firm is as much a comfort as entering the kitchen life was a discomfort. People might knock Monday-to-Friday-nine-to-five type work but it sure beats the erratic schedule of the restaurant and the skills that have been dormant for a year are coming back to full strength. I just have to make sure I keep cooking at home so I can preserve what I learnt in the kitchen.

One of the great perks of this job is the travel. Because our office has projects throughout the UK, I will have to make occasional visits to sites all over the country. The added bonus is that travel is of course covered as a work expense. Albeit my visits to these new places will be brief and focused on the task at hand, but getting out there is getting out there.

Last week a coworker and I visited a site in Oxfordshire. It was the first time I had been to that part of the country. I can't really say that I have been to Oxford proper, as we really just drove around it through the suburban northern tip of the city, but we did stop twice at a Welcome Break on the motorway just outside the city, which my colleague informed me was a "green" development. The building re-uses greywater, has a nice marshy water feature in the front plaza, and upon further investigation I see that it won a 2006 Four Star Loo of the Year Award. Of course the interior is littered with all sorts of unsustainable shops that ship things from all corners of Europe, rendering the environmental efforts virtually pointless. I guess, to borrow a slogan from another unsustainable mega-store: every little helps.

The site visit was good practice in tree identification. My knowledge of plants was never great, but now I find myself in a different place with different plants to learn. In the end there are not really that many differences. There are maples, poplars, elms and the like. But now there are sycamores, bamboos, and a lot of others that we have back home, but don't see as often as here. There is also this long-held English obsession with the hedgerow. In Canada it seems rare to put a hedge in any landscape design, save perhaps for a large private residence. Here, the hedge, the age-old boundary marker of rural and urban England, is in virtually every design. So along with tree and shrub specifications, there is a whole table for native hedgerow planting.

A few other differences have shown up, mostly lexical in nature. For instance, a curb is a 'kerb' here. There are different words that I was already familiar with, having lived here already. Examples include 'pavement' to replace the word 'sidewalk;' 'tarmac' rather than 'asphalt' and when something is custom built, it is 'bespoke.' That one took me a while to figure out. I had been hearing and seeing that word everywhere since beginning my job search and finally, as discretely as possible to avoid embarrassment, I looked it up. Suddenly all of the instances of the word began to make sense. Now I just have to get used to saying 'bespoke' rather than 'custom.'

I finally got to spend a weekend in Bristol, which gave me the opportunity to see it in the daylight for a change. I made the half-hour walk down to the city art gallery and museum to see what it had to offer. Admission is free after all. The museum has great displays from geology to archaeology. There is a great collection of stuffed animals from around the world, culminating in the case containing the famous Alfred the gorilla, a resident of the Bristol Zoo for most of his life in the 1930s and 1940s. One of my favourite display cases contained a bald eagle and a beaver. The placard for the eagle mentioned that the bald eagle was adopted as a symbol for the United States. However there was no mention of the beaver being one of Canada's emblematic animals. The top floors housed the art gallery, with a great collection of local works, as well as pieces from elsewhere in Britain and Europe.

I also found my way to Cabot Tower, a tall brick structure at the top of Brandon Hill in the park of the same name. The tower was built in honour of John Cabot, the founder of North America, who landed in Newfoundland in 1497. Of course the Vikings were there nearly five centuries prior, and the Aboriginals were there for millennia before, but nevertheless we shall, for the purpose of simplicity call him the founder of North America. There are other things named for Cabot in Bristol: the Cabot Trail and the Newfoundland Way are two examples. There is also a pub called the John Cabot. Brandon Hill Park offers great views over Central Bristol.

There is still much to be discovered here. I would love to hop on bus 54 and head out to Cribbs Causeway to see the edge of the land and Wales across the Mouth of the Severn. And of course in the other direction, down the Roman road, is the historic city of Bath. Naturally there will be another trip Midlandsway to retrieve the remnants of my belongings in Nottingham as well. It looks like I will have my weekends filled for a while.

Cheers.