US Construction Industry Still Not Entirely Clear On Concept Of Bricks And Mortar

As Hurricane Irene threatens to smash millions of flimsy wooden houses to matchwood and scatter the wreckage and its hapless occupants all over the east coast of America, the rest of the western world is desperately trying to understand why anyone in their right mind who lives in a corner of the globe noted for its extreme weather conditions would willingly choose to live in an overgrown shed in the first place.

“This is a brick, which is a reassuringly solid block made of baked clay,” explained a horrified British builder. “You stack them up on top of one another, offset by 50%, and put a layer of mortar in the middle – that’s a sort of quick-drying paste made of pulverised stone. When you’ve built up a rectangle of sufficient height, you top it off with a roof made of tiles, which are also made of stone. People can live in it for a couple of hundred years, despite pretty much anything the weather might throw at it. It’s been working pretty well over here for about eight centuries. You might want to give it a go.”

A typical American residential street

“Another thing you might want to bear in mind the next time the temperature drops to minus 20 is that bricks have pretty impressive insulating properties,” he added, “Planks, on the other hand, do not.”

Cowering Americans, however, stubbornly continue to believe that a flimsy assembly of timber easily recognisable to any time-warping refugee from the Dark Ages is the acme of a perfect dream home, even when it is hurtling through the sky at 90mph.

“The flight characteristics of wood are well-documented and epitomised by Britain’s legendary Mosquito fighter-bomber,” said Britain’s brick champion. “On the other hand, there’s a pretty obvious reason why no pilot ever took to the skies in The Bricky Wonder.”