No smoking here, dummy!

I'm retired now, but I can't help musing on certain things when I see them. One of those things I saw recently was on top of a partially built house in a new housing development near where my parents live. It was a chimney stack on top of a roof. Except the roof was as yet no more than flimsy timber trussed rafters. There was no actual chimney below the roofline to support the bricks-and-mortar chimney stack, nor any chimney breasts in the rooms further down. The stack, complete with earthenware chimney pot, appeared to balance unsupported above the uncompleted house as if hoisted wholesale into position. Which, I concluded, it probably was.

During my working life in architectural practice I came across fakes of various kinds, including plaster and glass-fibre pretending to be something else, and I've been against them on principle, despite many being such good fakes that without actual physical contact it wasn't possible to distinguish them from the real thing. My objection isn't based on how poorly they replicate the real thing, but on how well they do it. They do it so well that it's impossible, at a moderate distance, to tell that they are fakes.

But once you know such fakes exist, that knowledge devalues the genuine article. You see something that looks genuine, but is it? The existence of convincing counterfeits puts everything into question. Does this matter? In the grand scheme of things, probably not, but if you care about truth, it most certainly does.

So I now look at chimneys with a degree of suspicion. Nowadays of course, this also applies to news media.

From the Stormking website:

The Stormking GRP SmartStack dummy chimney applies the same principles of the Stormking GRP chimney that enhance the appearance of any building offering the builder virtually maintenance free product, with a traditional aesthetic look, but with the added bonus of incorporating a GRP lead effect plinth box and lead flashing detail, saving you time and money with installation. Whilst the chimney used to have a function to them in the past, today they are viewed as unnecessary features that add to the build cost but are required under planning restrictions.

Patriotic bells on St George's Day

This morning, at the end of my drive into work, I heard the sound of church bells. St George's Church is within earshot of my office - and today being St George's Day, the church was doing its patriotic best to annoy me.


I like church bells. The idea of enthusiastic, sweaty campanologists exerting themselves in not-quite-perfect synchronism is a splendid concept, and imagining a group of them in earnest, muscular concentration at the foot of St George's modern bell-tower should have brought a patriotic glow to the cockles of my cynical heart. But it didn't, because I knew that these were not real bells. The cacophonous impingement on my morning serenity was likely initiated by someone pressing a button - or perhaps even by a pre-programmed timer*.

So what, you ask? Why should it bother me that these were not real bells? Because I care about what is and isn't real; about what's true and what's false. Because every single fake thing calls into question the genuine article.

But maybe I shouldn't be surprised - this noise was coming from a church. Fake bells from a fake god - what did I expect?

*Actually this is more probable, as the 15-minute ear-assault was repeated at 12 noon and 3 pm (and for all I know 6 pm as well, though I'd escaped by then).