A take on the flying buttress

I remarked on the 23rd September about two good patches of fashion in the house building industry, patches when houses were less adorned with clutter without function than is usually the case.

And yesterday we came across an extreme case; a flying chimney quite unconnected to the fabric of the host house and certainly nothing to do with fires. A flying chimney which appears to involve at least some brick. Was it hoisted into position entire or was it built in-situ? Do the builders claim the function of weighing the roof down so that it does not blow away in one of the increasingly frequent global warming fueled temperate tornadoes?

And while we are on the silliness of fashions, the marmalade from Mackays (authentic fabrication since 1938. See http://www.mackays.com/)) taken with toast this morning deserves a mention. The lid of the jar proudly proclaims fabrication in copper pans, in the way of my family jam back in the fifties and sixties. I have memories of licking up residue from the gleaming interior of the copper jam pan, not being of an age to understand that the reason that the pan gleamed was that the acid in the fruit had taken a layer of tarnish & metal off the pan into the jam. A massive intake of copper into my childish interior, something which I thought had been banned for many a long year. How do Mackays get away with it?

Copper pans were once easier to make & mend than steel pans and well made with good thick, flat bottoms substantially reduced the chance of burning one's jam, usually made in parallel with sundry other domestic activities and so did not get quite the attention that it needed, particularly to stirring. None of which is relevant in this context, but presumably the association is copper to family jam making to family to mummy & childhood equals good therefore buy, subliminally drilled into us by hours of cunning television advertisements. Leaving aside the recent mummy in the news who was far from good, although not perhaps deserving of quite so many years inside, charged to our pockets and probably destructive of whatever is left of her personality.

I do not recall suffering from hematemesis in consequence but until recently I had a very respectably low blood pressure, perhaps the result of copper induced hypotension as a child? See Wikipedia.