Pea-souper

An interesting side effect of the smoking ban is the territory battle that has taken place. I never like to waste fine weather, particularly not when winter is around the corner, and definitely not when summer was another winter.

So recently, walking along a row of restaurants and coffee shops, I thought that I would sit outside and read my book in the sunshine - and of course enjoy some coffee. Naturally, outside is the place that people sit to smoke these days, but it seems to have stiffen smokers' resolve - I can't see any fewer people smoking, all I can see is a concentration of smoke outside the front. That means getting to the inside of the establishment that the government has kindly rendered smoke free for me means traversing a pea-souper fog in the doorway. So my clothes, my hair and my lungs are still exposed to the smoke that the government wanted to protect me from.

I can pretty much understand this from a smoker's point of view. If the government told me that drinking inside was hazardous because I might get drunk and spill my drink and create a slip hazard, then I think I would be fairly likely to tell the government where they could slip their hazard. It would only make me want to drink more. So here we are, in a situation where people don't actually seem to be smoking any less - in fact, they may be smoking more. I will await the official figures (and then the accurate, unspun ones) before passing judgement.

The only observation I have is that banishing smokers outside in the warm sunshine and keeping ourselves squashed inside seems rather like sending all of our convicts from dreary Industrial Revolution Britain to sunny Australia such a long time ago. I know that it was no picnic there in the early days, but I sometimes wonder why we didn't all pack up and move down under and leave the convicts behind in England to freeze.

Perhaps we should bear this in mind the next time we try to ban something...