“Ex smokers are the worst,” say some smokers. “They give up smoking and then try to spoil everyone else’s fun.” I plead guilty on all counts, m’lud, having quit cigarettes on 1st January 1994 and then somehow managed to develop asthma, or late onset asthma, as a GP described it, as I wheezed my way into the surgery. Shortly thereafter, almost every inhalation of tobacco smoke set off my asthma and today it still does. It does make me a bit cross, but at the same time I feel I need to apologise to those poor folk on whom I inflicted my own smoke on before I saw the smoke-free light. On 1st July 2007, smoking was banned in enclosed public spaces and workplaces and life, for the non and ex smoker, got better. Now, according to The Sun, “smoking could be banned in pub gardens, outdoor restaurants and outside stadiums”. All I can say is this: not before time.
The Sun – and I don’t link link to Rupert Murdoch’s Sun in my blogs so if you want confirmation you’ll have to find it yourself – refers to having seen “secret Whitehall papers”, so not very secret, then, which suggest that ministers are considering these measures. Well, given that cigarettes kill around 80,000 people every year and damage the health of many more, I’d be amazed if any government didn’t consider action to reduce the levels of smoking.
I was surprised to learn that 12.9% of British adults aged over 18 smoke, which is to say one in eight people. I know hardly anyone who smokes – when it comes to my own family, all of my mother’s side, including my mother, died as a direct result of smoking – but if I am out enjoying a swift half in town, I am aware of many more people who smoke and, sadly, many more vape. And where I used to enjoy flooding my body with at least 300 carcinogens every time I took a puff of my Peter Stuyvesant fag, I detest the very smell of it these days. There is never an occasion where I think: ooh, I could murder a fag, not least because the odds are that the fag would murder me.
You might wonder why governments don’t simply ban smoking. Can you imagine if smoking was invented today? Years ahead of his time, the great Bob Newhart did a very funny, yet deadly accurate, skit on it. In more modern parlance, “We’ve got this exciting new product which will at best take years off your life and at worst kill you.” Who among us, discovering tobacco, would not be tempted? Hmm. Maybe all of us? Instead of banning tobacco, governments have made the product very expensive – fags were around £2.50 for 20 when I quit – and less glamorous. “Fags make you smell and can ruin your erection.” “20 Embassy Regal it is, then.”
Even Rishi Sunak, a footsoldier from the right of politics, wanted to end smoking. He sabotaged his own opportunity by calling a suicidal general election, but the debate was never going to be ended when he was replaced by a Labour Party which set up the NHS in the first place. And so, if The Sun is to be believed (which requires a giant leap of faith). the next steps are on the way.
Banning smoking in pub gardens, outdoor restaurants and outside stadiums would mean that us ex smoking zealots would no longer have to walk through clouds of floating cancer when going about our business. It would be tricky to enforce, but then, everyone said that about the smoking ban when it was introduced all those years ago. Would there be enough coppers to visit pubs up and down the land, telling folk to put out their fags? In the end, they were never needed because, in their heart of hearts, even smokers could see the logic of the argument. Smoking is bad for you. If you want to smoke, then fine. But don’t force me to as well.
Speaking personally, I wouldn’t ban fags and nor would I ban vapes which, for all we know, may be dangerous for our health, too, when science does its investigative job and proves it one way or the other. My happy compromise is to leave smokers alone and to leave us reformed smokers alone, too. Some of my best friends are, and sadly were, smokers. Since my mum, my only uncle, my only auntie and both my maternal grandparents died because of smoking, I’m anxious not to join them at the crematorium any time soon.
