Doing my food shopping at Asda last week - yes, I am so rock n' roll it hurts - I witnessed a bizarre phenomenon which nonetheless did not really surprise me but rather induced a sort of weary, sardonic resignation.
The contents of the tobacco counter - yes, the tobacco, which you might surmise to be such a counter's raison d'etre - are now to be covered, presumably to shield us delicate souls from the deadly glamour of the evil weed. Further, if you request, say, Lambert and Butler, and they are out of stock, and you then enquire as to the availability of other brands, staff are not allowed to give you this information! To my mind, this conjures up images of a nightmarish mixture of bemused customer playing a considerably less fun version of deal or no deal - what's in the box, ten Mayfair or a disposable lighter? wow, the extra frisson it'll add to your shopping! - and staff trying the generation game conveyor belt as they attempt to remember what's behind the big fibreglass board. Of course, some staff will not remember and may thus lie, if they are not tempted to lie to start with to enliven the existential despair of their wage slave working day.
Now, the arguments about the smoking ban have all been done to death and it's not my purpose to rehash them, although astute readers may be able to hazard a guess as to which side I came down - particularly when the silly season opened and we were banned from smoking in our own homes for two hours before the arrival of a work person, presumably to allow for full clearance of the biohazard area, and such pearls of wisdom were heard on the radio as smoking not around your children, but when they have gone to bed, will induce childhood cancers despite your responsible actions, due to residual nicotine. (Because of course that's the only dangerous pollutant children are at risk from). Now as I say, I won't comment on my own stance, but here's a clue: last time I looked, an English man's home was still his castle.
Neither is it my purpose to repudiate medical evidence on the dangers of smoking. Seeing as it is plastered all over our cig packets and baccy pouches and putting us all off our breakfast, you'd have had to be living in a cave not to know this. What I do object to is the mass moral blackmail of small children on my TV, in my living room, in my home saying Mummy, please don't die. The hypocrisy sickens me, apart from anything else - war, pollution, mass poverty, I could go on and on and yet who gets scapegoated again, who gets the big finger of disapproval and exclusion?
However, I have been distracted from my main purpose here again, and it may be evident I find this an emotive issue. Those who think it is trivial are missing an important point. This attempted micromanagement of behaviour not only ignores the fact that adults who smoke are well aware of the risks, but choose to anyway - but it's also a timehonoured way for government to distract people from their wholesale incompetence, blame others, and look like they are at least doing something in one fell swoop. And it won't work. Here's why.
If the trajectory of my smoking career had gone something like this, then covering tobacco products might be a way forward: Growing up, from an early age I was seduced by the fatal and pernicious allure of the tobacco products seeming to call to me from the newsagent's shelf. I determined to experiment with them at the first opportunity. Clearly, seeing the products was the only factor in why I started smoking and the reason I continued, for every time I tried to stop, dammit! I'd go into a shop, and see the cigarettes on the shelves, and be reminded how much I loved smoking! Whereas if they had been hidden, I would have completely forgotten they existed and this would somehow have taken care of the nicotine withdrawals as well, and I'd have been a happy and fully reformed ex smoker!
On the other hand, here's how my smoking career, and that of everyone else I know, panned out in the real world. First, and importantly, I became a teenager. (Perhaps the only legislation which would actually stop people lighting up for the first time would be if the government somehow found a way to ban the teenage years. Which it would if it could, given that "feral youth" are another modern persecuted minority, and middle England's perennial obsession. But I better stop there, if I get started on the social construction of the hoodie menace I'll go wildly off topic and be typing all night to boot). I wanted to kick against the pricks and look cool, and all my mates were smoking. I started smoking and enjoyed it. I carried on. The smoking ban came along and merely annoyed me into smoking more, because the government is not the boss of me. The End.
This type of legislation is not only useless, but in these troubled times it also smacks unforgivably of fiddling whilst Rome burns.* Not to mention passing the buck, once again, to smokers, who have now been cast as the deviants responsible for all social ills, if you believe the legislation and the hype.
And just one more thing, on a related subject. Anyone else noticed that most adverts for house rentals these days contain the caveat, "No smokers, no DSS, no pets?" And anyone else reminded of the old, "No blacks, no Irish, no dogs" signs? Discrimination against society's poor and the excluded group du jour is alive and well, it seems. Plus ca change . . .
* I know "fiddling" in this saying refers to playing the violin, but I prefer to think of it as actual fiddling in times of disaster, for example rearranging the paperclip drawer whilst your whole family is drowning.
Here bloody here!
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