Passive Smoking May Harm Your Buildings

They say society is crumbling, well, it bloody is. I'm liking stone at the moment so imagine my surprise when this so called permanent material that is holding up civic land turns out to be coming apart at the seams.

First I saw a little bit that had fallen off, to leave a soon to be rounded edge where a sharp block had previously been. Well you know, ce la vie, I thought. I'm privileged to see a bit fallen off I thought, probably only happens once every 150 years, might be the frost? Next thing I know there's another big bit lying on the ground, nice bit of detail, gone to the dogs. Now I'm thinking this isn't natural selection, something more sinister is at work. Could be all that acid rain, but I'm not sure were getting so much anymore. Could be some of those careless delivery drivers with their sack trucks banging into things and knocking chunks out of the fabric of the place? For a moment I imagined some teen goths with their big reinforced shoes bouncing them off the walls.

And then I noticed all the fag butts, everywhere I looked, millions of the damn things and I thought oh yeah, all those toxic fumes, nicotine crazed smoky joes puffing their semi industrial waste matter all over the place, maybe that post-ban invasion of the streets could be having adverse affects. It's certainly a phenomena of sorts, and its quite charming at times to see them all chatting away under streetlamps with a hint of that elusive Parisian cafe culture wafting past. But a plague of cigarette butts ten times worse than locusts and battling through clouds of smog worse than in the industrial revolution takes the romantic edge off it a bit, and now this.

Anyway not too sure about the science of all this but it raises some important questions about, well global warming and that. If its in the natural order of things for bits of buff stone to flake off, well that's okay. But if it's being precipitated, accelerated, then, you know, maybe something should be done about it before the walls of the city come tumbling down. So it got me thinking, maybe we are witnessing the first signs of the grand downfall of man (people-kind) and we're just hurrying by, thinking well, maybe it's supposed to be like that.