It’s been quite a week, the first I’ve worked full-time in an office for ten years. As it happens it’s the same company which took me on in 1965 (my first real job) and trained me in punched card equipment. These had been invented by Herman Hollerith and James Powers to speed up the US Census of 1890, and the technology was still going strong when I started work, though within a year I retrained to learn computer programming. The company has changed its name only once since I left. To be discreet, I’m calling it the MaxiRam Corporation. It’s now owned by a Japanese company, and the building where I work has staff from all over the globe. Yet I can still detect the same old-fashioned polite Englishness as in the company that I left in 1969. “Welcome back!” they said, as if I would meet old friends. After a week, that’s what they have become.
Every lunchtime I take half an hour’s walk. There’s plenty of sky and I love the silvered air-conditioning vents on the skyline, and the constant drone of ventilating fans. I’m getting tuned to the New Town aesthetic. It’s the dream of planners and engineers made concrete, a large-scale craft worthy of respect. Opposite the ten-storey MaxiRam Castle there’s a pharmaceutical factory with a German name. What sinister chemicals are in the tanks, shown at sunset in my photo? Having read John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener & seen the movie I shudder as I pass these great windowless hangars. Do they experiment on animals in there? Do they export new drugs to the Third World, to test them on the unsuspecting? There is so much that I don’t know, but I will tell you something strange and true.
Behind the factory (at right-hand side of picture above) is a self-styled “nature reserve”: a little wood next to a sports field. In Babylon Town, a nature reserve is any place where the trees have grown wild and the ground cover has not been laid by landscaping contractors. Entering the wood, once past the discarded beer cans and supermarket trolleys, you find a muddy meandering path. It takes you to the pharma’s boundary fence, a few yards from the towering steel-clad wall you see in my picture.
Silhouetted against the blue sky, and jutting slightly from the roof’s top edge, stood the massive statue of a falcon: I’d guess at least eight foot tall. I tried to take photos but kept focusing on tree twigs instead.
As I shifted position, I saw more statues at widely-spaced intervals. Each one seemed different. Their heads were gilt: I could not see the colours of the breasts and folded wings. Why are they there? They cannot be viewed clearly from any position. They must be the tutelary deities, designed to protect the infernal activities within against an equal and opposite witchcraft beamed from without.
As I tried to see clearly, I could almost swear that whilst they stood rigid, their heads and beaks slowly swivelled round. If I find out more, I’ll let you know.
a wayfarer’s notes 
Hi Vincent, most interesting post! I am reminded of a friend, a factory engineer, who was working in an engineering factory in Calcutta, and spent the lunch break flying kites outside the factory with the local kids. He was told that was not officer-like behaviour, and eventually had to quit.
Best
rama
LikeLike
I confess that I enjoy the massive, practical architecture of industry. I do not love industry that is indifferent to it's effluences, neighbors and appearance. Along the bay trail, where I so often walk, are many corporate “campuses.” They are typically the most pleasant areas to walk, and often alive with birds and other small creatures.
LikeLike
Hayden, what is requisite in west is day dream in east. industries are always dirty and polluting surrounded by slums in third world countries. most of them dump from the west and assembled again in countries like Bangladesh. nuclear hazard and birds can not live hand in hand.
LikeLike