There are some things about the UK that seem so ordinary to the natives that they never think to mention them. In fact, such things are becoming ordinary to me, too, so I’d better write them down before I forget how weird they are.

The street lights here are orange. In Australia (and presumably all the other countries I’ve visited because I hadn’t noticed differently), street lights use white light, or occasionally, slightly blue light. Maybe it was a yellowish white.

In England (don’t know about the rest of the country), they use sodium arc lamps, which are orange. I don’t like them. They don’t seem quite bright enough.

If you want to own a TV or watch TV on your PC, you need to buy a television licence. This is in addition to what you pay for a TV and costs about £135 a year. I believe it goes to fund the BBC.

The TV Licensing Authority is aggressive, like a debt collector. If you don’t have a TV licence, you can get threatening letters (‘If you don’t pay up, we’ll send our people along to search your house’). People tell me that the Licensing people drive around in vans equipped with special detectors that know whether or not you are watching TV illegally.

There is a High Street chemist (pharmacy, drugstore) chain called Boots. I think this is a silly name.

If you see a nice restaurant, there is a 50% chance that it belongs to a chain of restaurants. Those restaurants that look like once-offs are actually not. ‘Chain store’ and ‘quality’ are not mutually exclusive terms here.

Everyone uses cheques here. It feels old-fashioned. Back in Oz, if I needed to handle lots of money, usually I sent it electronically. Here, cheques are even used to paid small amounts, like £5 for a movie ticket. If you deposit a cheque, it takes almost a week to clear. If you transfer money electronically, it takes at least three days to get to the account. This country runs on slow. It drives my American friends nuts.

Street signs are stuck on buildings or walls instead of on poles at intersection corners. This makes signs difficult to find because you can’t predict where they will be or at what height or even what style of sign it will be (will it be a metal plate with old fashioned writing or a modern bright green label?). I wish they’d get some consistency.

For my first six months here, I assumed an engineer was an engineer. I see vans go by, which have written on them, ‘scaffolding engineer’, ‘air conditioning engineer’, or ‘boiler engineer’. I thought it was interesting that so many engineers have started small businesses.

Then Gina told me that in the UK, anyone can call themselves an engineer. All those engineers I saw driving past are what we in Australia call ‘tradies’ or tradespeople. At best, we call them engineering technologists. I grew up somewhere where an ‘engineer’ presumably had a four year university degree.

Because of the way British people use ‘engineer’, I’m told that engineering is a relatively low status profession. When you say that you’re an engineer, people think you fix air conditioners. Perhaps this is why professional qualification (chartered status) is such a priority in the UK and not so in Australia.

I have been thinking about whether or not this ambiguity is a problem. I don’t like professional snobbery, especially as experienced tradies and draftspeople know more about ‘engineering’ than graduate engineers and get paid less. It doesn’t quite seem fair. Other people say that one should be rewarded for having slogged through four years of university.

Maybe this isn’t a question of snobbery and superiority. Maybe there is a case for having two different names for engineers and tradespeople because they do different things. Whether or not one occupation is ‘better’ than another is for society to sort out. It’s a separate issue from the terminological one.

After all, would it be sensible for a legal secretary to be called a lawyer, or a nurse to be called a doctor?

If UK’s engineering associations decided this was a problem, how could it solve it? How do you ‘take back’ a term, say to people, ‘Sorry, guys. You can’t be engineers any more’? It doesn’t seem like you can do that. They could invent a new term for university-qualified engineers, I guess, either using a new word or some sort of modifying descriptor. Or they could continue down the path of chartered status and try to reduce public confusion through advertising (‘Doing something big? Check if your engineer is chartered!’).