Confusion

Very much the building season in our road and yesterday we were moved to take a look at the planning applications for our road in the Epsom & Ewell council planning system, a system which makes the whole business usefully transparent. No more need to make the time to trundle down to the Town Hall to look at stuff - although one can still do that if one feels strongly enough about something to want to talk to somebody about it.

The pictures included left were presumably the product of some design package on a computer and my first thought was that there must be some mistake. The top picture does not seem to be of the same building as the bottom picture.

Looking at the right hand side of the left hand element of the top picture, I saw a narrow chimney like structure springing off the top of the right hand side of the ground floor. Great ugly and rather useless looking bit of space which seemed to be absent from the left hand side of the right hand element of the bottom picture.

Eventually I work out that the two pictures do agree, but the computer package has not been very clever about the viewing angle or the shading of the left hand element of the top picture. The pink oblong which I had taken to be the vertical, rear face of the chimney like structure was actually the bit of sloping roof which is hidden but implicit in the right hand element of the bottom picture. The two part line rising up through the middle of the same left hand element is not vertical as I had thought; rather the lower part is vertical and the upper part slopes away, a confusion which would have been avoided with a slightly different angle of view which would have bent the line in the middle.

But even now that I have worked it all out, the brain refuses to conform. The ugly chimney is still there, albeit not quite as stark & brutal as it was in the beginning. Perhaps it will fade with time.