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I miss passive smoking. Ever since the ban came into force, I’ve been
twitchy and irritable. Now it’s too cold to join my addicted friends puffing
on the pavement, I’ve got even worse. It’s time to admit I have a
problem: my life’s less fun without secondhand smoke.
Yet again the law of unintended consequences strikes the most
vulnerable. The government can feel smug for sending smokers home
early from the pub, but they’ll just breathe all that precious nicotine
over their children, who won’t appreciate it. Meanwhile, I’m stuck in a
saloon bar that smells of Air Wick and starting to shake. I’m going to
have to start buying my own Silk Cut just to get through the day.
Passive smoke was definitely better for me than this.
I wouldn’t mind, but I don’t even know how to smoke. It’s alright for
those who learnt when they were thirteen. I was the boring kid picking
his algebra out of the mud at thirteen. When your head’s down the toilet
every break, there’s little opportunity to learn the niceties of buying fags
from the unscrupulous newsagent on the corner.
So now I’m stuck between my shaky hands, with the serious attendant
risk of them spilling my drink – and social embarrassment of the worst
kind. Smokers are outcasts after all, but incompetent smokers? I bet
even smokers don’t talk to them. They’ll see me holding my ciggie like a
dead mouse and then push me into the gutter or tap ash down my collar
when I’m not looking.
I don’t even know what size they come in: does one ask for ‘ten’,
‘twenty’ – are there other options? It’s an etiquette minefield. Are only
girls allowed to smoke menthol? Imagine the embarrassment of pulling
out a packet of girl cigarettes at a poker night.
Maybe I’ll stick to cigars. But I bet I end up biting the wrong end.
Bring back secondhand smoke. Sure, toking another man’s roll-up fumes
was either stealing or socialism, but it beats trying to convince the
owner of Jolly News that you’re still fourteen.
A S H Smyth writes:
When tobacco was first introduced into Britain, it was blamed for mental
deficiency, physical deformity, moral turpitude and everything else that
hails from the vocab of an Irish nun. In short, pretty much all the things
marijuana (and/or masturbation) is blamed for these days.
And of course cigarettes give you cancer. Obviously they do, and plenty
of other nasty stuff, besides (like yellow fingernails). But you do have to
die of something – that’s kind of a rule – and at this rate, for most of us,
that thing is going to be boredom.
Because everything, sooner or later, is going to be banned. Everything
interesting, anyway.
Whatever it is you like, whether it be burgers, stamp-collecting or car-
maintenance it can always be proven to have a detrimental effect on
someone. Your burgers make you fat, drain NHS resources, and infringe
people’s human rights on the train. Your stamp-collecting takes you
away from your adolescent offspring, and so robs them of the emotional
stability they so need. Your car-maintenance keeps a beautiful but non-
eco-friendly E-type on the road, belching carbon and killing more people
in an afternoon than the Khmer Rouge.
Take salt (go on, let your hair down!). You like salt in your food, but
despite the facts that
some doctor has decided that it’s not good for you.
But that’s not all. When you persevere with your filthy salt addiction,
your neighbours shun you for your irresponsibility. You are, they argue,
wilfully neglecting your obligations to your wife and children. When you
die of a heart-attack (in your late 60s), you will be abandoning your
dependants, leaving them defenceless and alone in a big bad salt-
snorting world.
Following this morbid logic, there’s almost no penchant, activity or solid
object you couldn’t make a case against. Before you know it, we’ll be
walking everywhere (because all forms of transport are dangerous) and
only eating lentils because, dahl aside, lentils never harmed anyone.
There will be clinics for meat-eaters going cold turkey; circuses
featuring acts like The Incredible Full-Fat-Milk-Drinking Weirdos;
Facebook groups called When I Was Young, We Were Positively
Encouraged To Play Contact Sports.
We will end up with pubs where you not only cannot smoke, but you
can’t drink, can’t buy a steak and chips, can’t use metal cutlery, and
definitely cannot eat mixed nuts from a bowl on the bar-top.
Think I’m over-reacting?
Well, last week coffee was causing miscarriages. The decaf stuff, too.
Besides, what happens if you ban everything fun?
The defence cites Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men on the Bummel:
‘Every luxury in the world Carlsbad provides for its visitors, with the one
exception of pepper. That you cannot get within five miles of the town
for money; what you can get there for love is not worth taking away.
Pepper, to the liver brigade that forms four-fifths of Carlsbad's
customers, is poison; and, prevention being better than cure, it is
carefully kept out of the neighbourhood. "Pepper parties" are formed in
Carlsbad to journey to some place without the boundary, and there
indulge in pepper orgies.’
So, not only does public hysteria lead to the irrational banning of
perfectly normal things in the fullness of time, but it is also a cause of
desperation, moral decay and, eventually, illegal behaviours. Uphold the
ban on smoking in public places, and soon enough reasonable middle-
aged accountants will be mugging grannies to fund their pepper habits. I
give it ten years.
Dominic Hilton writes:
What’s 1.3 centimetres between friends?
Philip Morris is about to launch Marlboro Intense, a snack-size cigarette
cleverly designed for the Age of Bans. One Marlboro Intense is packed
full of goodness and measures in at 7.2cm. A standard coffin nail is at
least 8.5cm (135cm if you use a telescopic holder).
The idea is obvious, even to smokers: a shorter, fatter fag gives you a
quicker hit in less time, allowing you to dive back inside, away from the
cold, rain, drizzle, snow, sleet, hailstones, pigeon shit, dog turds,
urinating winos, tourists, charity punks, lurking paedophiles, vomiting
northern girls, and mind-numbing conversation with the remedial kitchen
staff.
Last week I was strolling along Pall Mall when I chanced upon a huddle
of corporate bigwigs in John Lobbs sucking on their ciggies in the damp
puddles that surround the Institute of Directors like a medieval moat. It
was a glorious sight. All these Savile Row pinstripes forced to brave
nature and hang with the plebs. The servants were clinging to the same
railings as the chairmen of multimillion quid conglomerates. Combovers
were being blown to the Gods by a howling wind. A tailored kingfish was
bumming a light off of a Polish slave. Everyone had been brought down
to the level of addict. Here was egalitarianism in action. I couldn’t resist
a chuckle as I headed towards St. James’s.
And yet... Egalitarianism is a vile concept, cooked up by Orwell’s wicked
pigs. It lowers us all the status of cattle (or is it horses?). It strips
society of its incentives and tells us not to bovver. It slams a wrecking
ball into the Corinthians that hold up the temples that keep us all dry.
The smoking ban stinks worse than my hair used to in the shower the
morning after a night out before the ban. As I climbed back into my
cardboard box outside St James’s Palace, I realised that when I am a
corporate big cheese and am lunching daily in my booth at the IoD, I will
be damned if I have to nip outside to smoke my $440 Cohiba Behike and
be harassed by guttersnipes like me, begging for spare change.
twitchy and irritable. Now it’s too cold to join my addicted friends puffing
on the pavement, I’ve got even worse. It’s time to admit I have a
problem: my life’s less fun without secondhand smoke.
Yet again the law of unintended consequences strikes the most
vulnerable. The government can feel smug for sending smokers home
early from the pub, but they’ll just breathe all that precious nicotine
over their children, who won’t appreciate it. Meanwhile, I’m stuck in a
saloon bar that smells of Air Wick and starting to shake. I’m going to
have to start buying my own Silk Cut just to get through the day.
Passive smoke was definitely better for me than this.
I wouldn’t mind, but I don’t even know how to smoke. It’s alright for
those who learnt when they were thirteen. I was the boring kid picking
his algebra out of the mud at thirteen. When your head’s down the toilet
every break, there’s little opportunity to learn the niceties of buying fags
from the unscrupulous newsagent on the corner.
So now I’m stuck between my shaky hands, with the serious attendant
risk of them spilling my drink – and social embarrassment of the worst
kind. Smokers are outcasts after all, but incompetent smokers? I bet
even smokers don’t talk to them. They’ll see me holding my ciggie like a
dead mouse and then push me into the gutter or tap ash down my collar
when I’m not looking.
I don’t even know what size they come in: does one ask for ‘ten’,
‘twenty’ – are there other options? It’s an etiquette minefield. Are only
girls allowed to smoke menthol? Imagine the embarrassment of pulling
out a packet of girl cigarettes at a poker night.
Maybe I’ll stick to cigars. But I bet I end up biting the wrong end.
Bring back secondhand smoke. Sure, toking another man’s roll-up fumes
was either stealing or socialism, but it beats trying to convince the
owner of Jolly News that you’re still fourteen.
A S H Smyth writes:
When tobacco was first introduced into Britain, it was blamed for mental
deficiency, physical deformity, moral turpitude and everything else that
hails from the vocab of an Irish nun. In short, pretty much all the things
marijuana (and/or masturbation) is blamed for these days.
And of course cigarettes give you cancer. Obviously they do, and plenty
of other nasty stuff, besides (like yellow fingernails). But you do have to
die of something – that’s kind of a rule – and at this rate, for most of us,
that thing is going to be boredom.
Because everything, sooner or later, is going to be banned. Everything
interesting, anyway.
Whatever it is you like, whether it be burgers, stamp-collecting or car-
maintenance it can always be proven to have a detrimental effect on
someone. Your burgers make you fat, drain NHS resources, and infringe
people’s human rights on the train. Your stamp-collecting takes you
away from your adolescent offspring, and so robs them of the emotional
stability they so need. Your car-maintenance keeps a beautiful but non-
eco-friendly E-type on the road, belching carbon and killing more people
in an afternoon than the Khmer Rouge.
Take salt (go on, let your hair down!). You like salt in your food, but
despite the facts that
- it is your food
- salt has been around for millennia
- and salt is actually known to be a vital element in our diet
some doctor has decided that it’s not good for you.
But that’s not all. When you persevere with your filthy salt addiction,
your neighbours shun you for your irresponsibility. You are, they argue,
wilfully neglecting your obligations to your wife and children. When you
die of a heart-attack (in your late 60s), you will be abandoning your
dependants, leaving them defenceless and alone in a big bad salt-
snorting world.
Following this morbid logic, there’s almost no penchant, activity or solid
object you couldn’t make a case against. Before you know it, we’ll be
walking everywhere (because all forms of transport are dangerous) and
only eating lentils because, dahl aside, lentils never harmed anyone.
There will be clinics for meat-eaters going cold turkey; circuses
featuring acts like The Incredible Full-Fat-Milk-Drinking Weirdos;
Facebook groups called When I Was Young, We Were Positively
Encouraged To Play Contact Sports.
We will end up with pubs where you not only cannot smoke, but you
can’t drink, can’t buy a steak and chips, can’t use metal cutlery, and
definitely cannot eat mixed nuts from a bowl on the bar-top.
Think I’m over-reacting?
Well, last week coffee was causing miscarriages. The decaf stuff, too.
Besides, what happens if you ban everything fun?
The defence cites Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men on the Bummel:
‘Every luxury in the world Carlsbad provides for its visitors, with the one
exception of pepper. That you cannot get within five miles of the town
for money; what you can get there for love is not worth taking away.
Pepper, to the liver brigade that forms four-fifths of Carlsbad's
customers, is poison; and, prevention being better than cure, it is
carefully kept out of the neighbourhood. "Pepper parties" are formed in
Carlsbad to journey to some place without the boundary, and there
indulge in pepper orgies.’
So, not only does public hysteria lead to the irrational banning of
perfectly normal things in the fullness of time, but it is also a cause of
desperation, moral decay and, eventually, illegal behaviours. Uphold the
ban on smoking in public places, and soon enough reasonable middle-
aged accountants will be mugging grannies to fund their pepper habits. I
give it ten years.
Dominic Hilton writes:
What’s 1.3 centimetres between friends?
Philip Morris is about to launch Marlboro Intense, a snack-size cigarette
cleverly designed for the Age of Bans. One Marlboro Intense is packed
full of goodness and measures in at 7.2cm. A standard coffin nail is at
least 8.5cm (135cm if you use a telescopic holder).
The idea is obvious, even to smokers: a shorter, fatter fag gives you a
quicker hit in less time, allowing you to dive back inside, away from the
cold, rain, drizzle, snow, sleet, hailstones, pigeon shit, dog turds,
urinating winos, tourists, charity punks, lurking paedophiles, vomiting
northern girls, and mind-numbing conversation with the remedial kitchen
staff.
Last week I was strolling along Pall Mall when I chanced upon a huddle
of corporate bigwigs in John Lobbs sucking on their ciggies in the damp
puddles that surround the Institute of Directors like a medieval moat. It
was a glorious sight. All these Savile Row pinstripes forced to brave
nature and hang with the plebs. The servants were clinging to the same
railings as the chairmen of multimillion quid conglomerates. Combovers
were being blown to the Gods by a howling wind. A tailored kingfish was
bumming a light off of a Polish slave. Everyone had been brought down
to the level of addict. Here was egalitarianism in action. I couldn’t resist
a chuckle as I headed towards St. James’s.
And yet... Egalitarianism is a vile concept, cooked up by Orwell’s wicked
pigs. It lowers us all the status of cattle (or is it horses?). It strips
society of its incentives and tells us not to bovver. It slams a wrecking
ball into the Corinthians that hold up the temples that keep us all dry.
The smoking ban stinks worse than my hair used to in the shower the
morning after a night out before the ban. As I climbed back into my
cardboard box outside St James’s Palace, I realised that when I am a
corporate big cheese and am lunching daily in my booth at the IoD, I will
be damned if I have to nip outside to smoke my $440 Cohiba Behike and
be harassed by guttersnipes like me, begging for spare change.
| CONTACT THE LIZARD |
| Updated at least 26½ times a day |
In Defence of Smoking
by Dominic Hilton, Marc Sidwell & A S H Smyth
Monday, February 4, 2008
Monday, February 4, 2008
- For every one of those you smoke, I smoke half.
- That’s alright, you can buy me a beer sometime.
Bill Hicks
- That’s alright, you can buy me a beer sometime.
Bill Hicks
Marc Sidwell writes:
© lizardmagazine.com, 2008
Also see:
Also see:
The ban on smoking in public places is an obvious first step towards the
complete illegalisation of tobacco. The Lizard editors, non-smokers all,
offer three straightforward reasons why the ban should be overturned.
complete illegalisation of tobacco. The Lizard editors, non-smokers all,
offer three straightforward reasons why the ban should be overturned.