a stray wisp of smoke
Needless to say, your bedbound correspondent is not planning on trying out the new smoking ban just yet; indeed, with a house-guest possessed of a penchant á fumer, we could almost say Ms B is currently going against the zeitgeist. So when I do venture back out into the world it will seem an even stranger place.
Here, now that the ban is firmly in entrenched in law, is a rather delicious backward glance at the century in which "everyone" smoked, pleasingly narrated by the novelist Alan Sillitoe. I say delicious; Sillitoe is not only unapologetic about his love of smoking, he also seems uniquely untroubled by it. I particularly like the bit where he talks about the chiaroscuro in the cinema, the magic of light and air and smoke.
In short: the film is refreshing. Whether it's as refreshing as one of Alan Sillitoe's pipes is hard to say.
2 comments:
Wonderful stuff. I bemoan the day I gave up, though I suppose I'm fitter if fatter.
The cinema effect was wonderful. St Andrews had the last smoking cinema, where I used to puff away and watch films as late as the mid 1990s. Such a joy...
The ban has to go the way of all other ones. In a few months everyone will be thinking why it didn't happen earlier, as the capacity for rapid assimilation to new conditions is a defining feature of life, and when one thinks about it, smoking is stupid, even those who smoke know it, and the idea of the "freedom" to smoke in pubs, places this "right" over the right of people at work in pubs not to have to breath it in.
In Ireland, the main unforeseen benifit are the outside smoking areas, one pub in Rathmines just cut out its roof at the entrance and there the industry standard has gone much higher than it used to when pub gradens were all the rage as ambient extra spaces.
It really is a fantastic thing, and it is small cutlural changes like this one, which allow us to recognise how to go about greater ones, as we see that the lament for the "good aul days" is an emotional pull we are conned into believing by the parties most interested at keeping the staus quo of smoking in pubs.
The rich business people who profit from it are like Brown at the start of the year when they come up with their million and one doom and gllom reasons why cutting passive smoking cancer rates in pub staff, is somehow a retrograde or foolish step in the long run.
The thing that struck me is the many many arguments and reasons rehearsed in the years of debate, vanished overnight when the reality happened. Walking into a pub in full swing, smoke-free, is not an amzing reality, but nearly, if we had opted to vote for the sophists arguing from a standpoint of selfish interest, whilst attempting to dress it up as an interest in the benifits of the wider human good.
Like the WMD that were never found, so to those who try to make this a "freedom" issue, as if it's an erosion of human rights, these people are forgotten and their false predictions seen as the shabby con they are.
Hopefully Brown will have an effect on the country like Blair before the hubris maimed him..
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