Showing posts with label Smoking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Smoking. Show all posts
31 July 2008
31 August 2007
Trials of a smoker
I have noticed that the smoking ban in ‘enclosed public spaces’ has unleashed a rather priggish attitude in many non-smokers.
On July 1st, the very first day of the ban, a middle-aged woman at the bar of my pub turned to a man waiting to be served and made the comment, ‘Isn’t it nice now there’s no smoking?’
‘**** off,’ was the reply.
Appropriate, I thought, if a little discourteous.
But it’s not only disgruntled smokers who can be rude. I myself was standing outside the pub a week later, enjoying a cigarette and watching the summery girls walk by, when a man passed me. A rather anonymous, unprepossessing character, whom I could imagine washing his car on a Sunday morning while listening to Richard Kledermans. As he walked past me he flapped his hand in front of his face to waft away imaginary smoke.
‘Yes, it is hot today,’ I remarked, but what I thought is unprintable, probably unspellable.
Sometimes I get very angry about this business. In fact, I often get angry about it. I hate to sound pompous, but it IS a denial of my personal freedom. More than that, it is a denial of choice and an interference in the working of the market economy.
When you get angry you sometimes cease to bother about consequences. The other evening I got up out of my seat in the pub to go outside for a smoke. As a tiny gesture of rebellion I lit up before leaving. I heard a muttered complaint from somewhere but ignored it, but determined to repeat the gesture later.
When I did, I heard the same shocked protest, and so I turned to enquire if my action was of any real consequence to this individual. Except I put my query more succinctly. I must admit I had a slight twinge when I realised that the protester appeared to what is known as ‘handy’. What the hell? He was obviously a man with great respect for the law.
What irritated me was that, although I was in the wrong, I doubt I’d have been rebuked so automatically if I had been dropping litter on the floor, swearing, telling racist jokes, making lewd remarks to the barmaids, slurring my speech or being sick on the carpet. No, I was smoking. And that gives a green light to every smug, self-righteous, sanctimonious prig to feel superior for once in their pitifully useless lives.
And now the bastards have got one of my friends - angrier, braver than I - barred.
On July 1st, the very first day of the ban, a middle-aged woman at the bar of my pub turned to a man waiting to be served and made the comment, ‘Isn’t it nice now there’s no smoking?’
‘**** off,’ was the reply.
Appropriate, I thought, if a little discourteous.
But it’s not only disgruntled smokers who can be rude. I myself was standing outside the pub a week later, enjoying a cigarette and watching the summery girls walk by, when a man passed me. A rather anonymous, unprepossessing character, whom I could imagine washing his car on a Sunday morning while listening to Richard Kledermans. As he walked past me he flapped his hand in front of his face to waft away imaginary smoke.
‘Yes, it is hot today,’ I remarked, but what I thought is unprintable, probably unspellable.
Sometimes I get very angry about this business. In fact, I often get angry about it. I hate to sound pompous, but it IS a denial of my personal freedom. More than that, it is a denial of choice and an interference in the working of the market economy.
When you get angry you sometimes cease to bother about consequences. The other evening I got up out of my seat in the pub to go outside for a smoke. As a tiny gesture of rebellion I lit up before leaving. I heard a muttered complaint from somewhere but ignored it, but determined to repeat the gesture later.
When I did, I heard the same shocked protest, and so I turned to enquire if my action was of any real consequence to this individual. Except I put my query more succinctly. I must admit I had a slight twinge when I realised that the protester appeared to what is known as ‘handy’. What the hell? He was obviously a man with great respect for the law.
What irritated me was that, although I was in the wrong, I doubt I’d have been rebuked so automatically if I had been dropping litter on the floor, swearing, telling racist jokes, making lewd remarks to the barmaids, slurring my speech or being sick on the carpet. No, I was smoking. And that gives a green light to every smug, self-righteous, sanctimonious prig to feel superior for once in their pitifully useless lives.
And now the bastards have got one of my friends - angrier, braver than I - barred.
15 July 2007
Sorry to be so boring
IT IS PETTY and perverse of me, I admit, to look around my local pub and observe with complacent satisfaction the empty chairs, the bored staff, and the increasingly desperate special offers.
I read in the local press that pub trade has reduced by 10 per cent since the smoking ban and backstreet boozers with no opportunity to provide outside facilities are facing a harsh commercial winter.
I got up from my table the other day, where there was a smug conversation going on about the administrative cock-up that is ‘Smoke-on-Trent’ to order another drink. I noticed a sign on the bar offering a steak at half price. ‘Vegetables of your choice,’ it promised. ‘Just ask our friendly staff.’
‘Are you one of the friendly ones?’ I asked Molly, the barmaid. ‘I’m never quite sure?’
‘What?’
‘Well, it says here, ‘’Ask our friendly staff.’’ I don’t want to ask any one unfriendly by mistake.’
She expressed doubts about my grip on reality and advised me to absent myself forthwith. Except she didn’t bother with the circumlocution.
Now that’s the thing about the English language. It’s so gloriously imprecise in some ways. In other ways it’s quite the opposite, because it’s got twice the number of words as, say, German. It’s a great mongrel of a language – and my father always told me to avoid pedigree dogs – unlike French, which even has an Academy to maintain its incestuous decline.
But French can’t be accused of being imprecise. I wouldn’t have been able to make my joking remark about ‘friendly staff’ in that language. Because French allows you to put an adjective before or after a noun, depending on the sense. Take ‘green grass’, for example. If you want to distinguish the green grass from grass of another colour, you would place ‘verte’ after ‘l’herbe’. If on the other hand you were just using green as a standard description of grass – all grass is by default green – it would go in front. This was the purpose of ‘friendly staff’, I presume.
I LEFT MY PINT on the table and strolled along the outside of the pub, to smoke a cigarette. I paused to light it and realised I was by an open window. What, I thought, if my smoke were to waft inside the pub? Would that count as ‘smoking inside a confined public space’? This thought took me back to my Latin lessons. Well, it would, wouldn’t it?
I had to ask myself if ‘confined space’ is in the ablative case or the accusative. If the former, ‘smoking in the pub’ would have the sense of ‘inside the pub’. If, on the other hand, ‘in’ is followed by the accusative case of the noun, it would mean ‘into the pub’. I would therefore be on the wrong side of the law (except in Stoke, that is).
Surprisingly, for such a language as English, flexible if you like, vague if you prefer, people will insist on being pedantic about it. Lynne Truss famously, and very profitably, wrote Eats, Shoots and Leaves, a combination of diatribe against poor punctuation and manual of correct practice.
I read in the local press that pub trade has reduced by 10 per cent since the smoking ban and backstreet boozers with no opportunity to provide outside facilities are facing a harsh commercial winter.
I got up from my table the other day, where there was a smug conversation going on about the administrative cock-up that is ‘Smoke-on-Trent’ to order another drink. I noticed a sign on the bar offering a steak at half price. ‘Vegetables of your choice,’ it promised. ‘Just ask our friendly staff.’
‘Are you one of the friendly ones?’ I asked Molly, the barmaid. ‘I’m never quite sure?’
‘What?’
‘Well, it says here, ‘’Ask our friendly staff.’’ I don’t want to ask any one unfriendly by mistake.’
She expressed doubts about my grip on reality and advised me to absent myself forthwith. Except she didn’t bother with the circumlocution.
Now that’s the thing about the English language. It’s so gloriously imprecise in some ways. In other ways it’s quite the opposite, because it’s got twice the number of words as, say, German. It’s a great mongrel of a language – and my father always told me to avoid pedigree dogs – unlike French, which even has an Academy to maintain its incestuous decline.
But French can’t be accused of being imprecise. I wouldn’t have been able to make my joking remark about ‘friendly staff’ in that language. Because French allows you to put an adjective before or after a noun, depending on the sense. Take ‘green grass’, for example. If you want to distinguish the green grass from grass of another colour, you would place ‘verte’ after ‘l’herbe’. If on the other hand you were just using green as a standard description of grass – all grass is by default green – it would go in front. This was the purpose of ‘friendly staff’, I presume.
I LEFT MY PINT on the table and strolled along the outside of the pub, to smoke a cigarette. I paused to light it and realised I was by an open window. What, I thought, if my smoke were to waft inside the pub? Would that count as ‘smoking inside a confined public space’? This thought took me back to my Latin lessons. Well, it would, wouldn’t it?
I had to ask myself if ‘confined space’ is in the ablative case or the accusative. If the former, ‘smoking in the pub’ would have the sense of ‘inside the pub’. If, on the other hand, ‘in’ is followed by the accusative case of the noun, it would mean ‘into the pub’. I would therefore be on the wrong side of the law (except in Stoke, that is).
Surprisingly, for such a language as English, flexible if you like, vague if you prefer, people will insist on being pedantic about it. Lynne Truss famously, and very profitably, wrote Eats, Shoots and Leaves, a combination of diatribe against poor punctuation and manual of correct practice.
Interestingly, if the New York Times is typical, the Americans were not impressed. This article not only disagrees with her rules of punctuation, but criticises her prose style, her grammar and her syntax.
I REMEMBER the fuss when the Ministry of Transport had a campaign about the dangers of falling asleep at the wheel of the car. ‘Don’t Drive Tired’ was the slogan.
‘Tired’ is an adjective. A verb must be modified by an adverb, must it not? What kind of message does it send when a government department propagates bad English? Etc . . . etc..
The criticism was misplaced, of course. The slogan may not be very elegant, but it’s more elegant, and certainly more effective, than ‘Don’t Drive Tiredly’, or ‘Don’t Drive While Fatigued’.
If I wanted to get into syntactic analysis, I could prove that the adjective, ‘tired’, is qualifying the understood ‘you’, part of the understood phrase, ‘while you are’. And in any case, if Dylan Thomas could write ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, why can’t we say ‘Don’t drive tired’?
(Should that question mark come before the quotation mark, I wonder? After all, Sir Roger Casement was hanged on a comma.)
The imprecision of English leads to inadvertent humour – ‘I see chickens are going cheap in Asda;’ bawdy humour – ‘I wonder if you’d be so kind as to introduce me to your wife;’ and poetry – ‘Now does he feel his secret murders sticking to his hands.’ Is any other language so prone to punning?
A LITTLE LATER, once again outside indulging the pleasures of the flesh, I stopped to read the notice warning against smoking in the pub. What a contemptible little scrap of card, and what execrable English. What a perfect feast for lawyers, so perfect an example of imprecise English it is.
‘These are no smoking premises. It is an offence to smoke or knowingly to permit smoking in these premises.
‘If you observe someone smoking here, a complaint may be made to the manager.’
‘These are no smoking premises.’ That could mean that ‘these premises don’t smoke.’ And if you’re not going to say ‘NON- smoking premises’, shouldn’t you at least put the hyphen after ‘no’.
‘Knowingly to permit . . .’ Well, at least the writer didn’t split the infinitive. But does this mean that other customers are obliged by law to prevent smoking? Are citizen’s arrests permitted?
‘A complaint may be made.’ Does this mean that there is a possibility of complaint or that you have permission to complain? Or could it mean that a complaint may be made about you observing smoking?
You see what nicotine deprivation does to people.
And if you’ve reached the end of this blog, you’re a sadder man that I am.
I REMEMBER the fuss when the Ministry of Transport had a campaign about the dangers of falling asleep at the wheel of the car. ‘Don’t Drive Tired’ was the slogan.
‘Tired’ is an adjective. A verb must be modified by an adverb, must it not? What kind of message does it send when a government department propagates bad English? Etc . . . etc..
The criticism was misplaced, of course. The slogan may not be very elegant, but it’s more elegant, and certainly more effective, than ‘Don’t Drive Tiredly’, or ‘Don’t Drive While Fatigued’.
If I wanted to get into syntactic analysis, I could prove that the adjective, ‘tired’, is qualifying the understood ‘you’, part of the understood phrase, ‘while you are’. And in any case, if Dylan Thomas could write ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, why can’t we say ‘Don’t drive tired’?
(Should that question mark come before the quotation mark, I wonder? After all, Sir Roger Casement was hanged on a comma.)
The imprecision of English leads to inadvertent humour – ‘I see chickens are going cheap in Asda;’ bawdy humour – ‘I wonder if you’d be so kind as to introduce me to your wife;’ and poetry – ‘Now does he feel his secret murders sticking to his hands.’ Is any other language so prone to punning?
A LITTLE LATER, once again outside indulging the pleasures of the flesh, I stopped to read the notice warning against smoking in the pub. What a contemptible little scrap of card, and what execrable English. What a perfect feast for lawyers, so perfect an example of imprecise English it is.
‘These are no smoking premises. It is an offence to smoke or knowingly to permit smoking in these premises.
‘If you observe someone smoking here, a complaint may be made to the manager.’
‘These are no smoking premises.’ That could mean that ‘these premises don’t smoke.’ And if you’re not going to say ‘NON- smoking premises’, shouldn’t you at least put the hyphen after ‘no’.
‘Knowingly to permit . . .’ Well, at least the writer didn’t split the infinitive. But does this mean that other customers are obliged by law to prevent smoking? Are citizen’s arrests permitted?
‘A complaint may be made.’ Does this mean that there is a possibility of complaint or that you have permission to complain? Or could it mean that a complaint may be made about you observing smoking?
You see what nicotine deprivation does to people.
And if you’ve reached the end of this blog, you’re a sadder man that I am.
01 July 2007
England's Smoking Ban
July 1st, 2007, a date that will live in infamy, the day when that coalition of puritans and pursed-lipped killjoys, of do-gooders, nannies and busybodies, control freaks, know-alls, health fascists and interfuckingfering bastards finally got their wish and banned smoking in ‘enclosed public places’. In other words my pub.
Who are these people, who talk of saving lives, but don’t know the first thing about living the short life we have? They’re not saving lives. At best they’re prolonging its misery until something other than cancer else gets us or rots our brains into not caring who or where we are.
Who are they? They’re teetotallers, vegetarians, feminists, calorie-counters, joggers, bureaucrats, censors. Eunuchs. How dare they tell me what to do, how to live? The same people who would have cockerels banned from the countryside and then pollute it with their four-by-fours; who fret about battery chickens and the fate of foxes, but are happy to pay for their daughter’s abortion; preen themselves over their catalytic converter and wonder why the police have nothing better to do than stop them speeding.
Listen to them with their hypocritical cant. How their heart bleeds for me and my health. How they lie awake at night crying over the poor barmaids breathing in all that smoke. Well, don’t weep for me, I do enough of that for myself; and if the barmaids don’t like it, let them work somewhere else. If other customers don’t like it, let them go and clutter up another bar with their requests for café latté and drinking chocolate.
Have we lost faith in the market? What’s wrong with a little smoking apartheid? Even God is supposed to have allowed us freedom of choice.
These people don’t like smokers because smokers don’t labour under the illusion that life is serious. Smokers are atheistic, amoral, adulterous, alcoholic, anarchistic – and, OK, on occasion absolute arseholes.
But they’re also gregarious, friendly, talkative, laid back and plain interesting. Non-smokers are attracted to them because they’re sick of the other nicotinophobes with their suburban gardens and their car-washing Sundays and their 2.4 children - who may be spoiled, fat and stupid, but at least they’re ‘not exposed to smoking’ – and their little wives with their little jobs and their sensible hairstyles and comfy flip-flops and their holiday videos and their sanctimonious pension schemes.
I know them. I’ve met hundreds of them. Frightened little people, envious pigmy-souled, joyless-hearted Lilliputians, striving to pin down free-spirited giants with a thousand restrictive threads.
Bitter? You bet I’m bitter. This is war, you petty-minded tyrants. And I’m going to enjoy it.
Now, where did I put my fags?
Who are these people, who talk of saving lives, but don’t know the first thing about living the short life we have? They’re not saving lives. At best they’re prolonging its misery until something other than cancer else gets us or rots our brains into not caring who or where we are.
Who are they? They’re teetotallers, vegetarians, feminists, calorie-counters, joggers, bureaucrats, censors. Eunuchs. How dare they tell me what to do, how to live? The same people who would have cockerels banned from the countryside and then pollute it with their four-by-fours; who fret about battery chickens and the fate of foxes, but are happy to pay for their daughter’s abortion; preen themselves over their catalytic converter and wonder why the police have nothing better to do than stop them speeding.
Listen to them with their hypocritical cant. How their heart bleeds for me and my health. How they lie awake at night crying over the poor barmaids breathing in all that smoke. Well, don’t weep for me, I do enough of that for myself; and if the barmaids don’t like it, let them work somewhere else. If other customers don’t like it, let them go and clutter up another bar with their requests for café latté and drinking chocolate.
Have we lost faith in the market? What’s wrong with a little smoking apartheid? Even God is supposed to have allowed us freedom of choice.
These people don’t like smokers because smokers don’t labour under the illusion that life is serious. Smokers are atheistic, amoral, adulterous, alcoholic, anarchistic – and, OK, on occasion absolute arseholes.
But they’re also gregarious, friendly, talkative, laid back and plain interesting. Non-smokers are attracted to them because they’re sick of the other nicotinophobes with their suburban gardens and their car-washing Sundays and their 2.4 children - who may be spoiled, fat and stupid, but at least they’re ‘not exposed to smoking’ – and their little wives with their little jobs and their sensible hairstyles and comfy flip-flops and their holiday videos and their sanctimonious pension schemes.
I know them. I’ve met hundreds of them. Frightened little people, envious pigmy-souled, joyless-hearted Lilliputians, striving to pin down free-spirited giants with a thousand restrictive threads.
Bitter? You bet I’m bitter. This is war, you petty-minded tyrants. And I’m going to enjoy it.
Now, where did I put my fags?
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