Fake 12

A variation on the theme noticed at reference 1, the fake dormer, I think on one of the houses on the new estate in the grounds of what used to be the Manor Hospital.

So whereas the builder of fake 9 had done a more elaborate fake, with added stone-like masonry, his fake still had a residual former window function, in this case the dormer effect is merely a stick-on job on the roof. There may be some minor perturbation to the rafters holding it all up, but I think that there is no perturbation at all to the bedroom below, which remains neatly regular & rectangular. If you like, in the shape of a brick without a frog.

I notice in passing, that with increasing wealth we are no longer to content just to have a house which does not leak and does have internal plumbing. My house has to be different from your house, the fact that there are thousands of broadly similar houses in the immediate vicinity notwithstanding. Luckily, modern house builders are well up for this and introduce random variations into the houses that they build, variations in size, shape and position, along the way introducing a whole new level of faking, that is to say the fake village. Not quite quaint and old, but that might come with time, if the houses last long enough. The bit they have most trouble with is village shops and facilities, which no longer pay, so it is hard to give these fake villages any real village life of the sort that Miss. Marple would recognise. See reference 2.

From where I associate to an observation from TB to the effect the in the US they build houses to last 50 years, and when their time is up they just pull the whole lot down and start over. While we have pretensions to longevity and build houses which last 100 years, which is far too long given how fashions & needs in these matters move about. Rather wasteful. And just think of all those ugly extensions messing up the lines of what were once decent suburban houses. An observation which I think largely nonsense, but there is a core of sense to the effect that one should think about life cycles, how long houses should last.

I also associate to a white person being rather shocked at the rows of concrete boxes in which his black neighbours (this being somewhere in what was British Africa) had to live. Not realising that the grass huts which these boxes replaced were apt to be leaky and to be full of all kinds of wild life. Spores, fungi, bacteria, insects of all sorts and sometimes larger animals, sometimes dangerous. All very unhealthy and all swept away by blocks and cement. Presumably the tasteful grass huts now making up the posh resort hotels in such places have all been treated with some hard-core chemicals to keep all such livestock at bay.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/fake-9.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/the-miss-marple-companion.html.

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