Smoke without fire

I have what could reasonably be described as conflicting opinions on smoking. On the one hand, I've never smoked in my life. My g/f and I don't allow people to smoke in our house, banishing them to the garden if they want a ciggy, and if it were up to me everybody would give up smoking completely.

On the other hand, I can't stand the smoking ban. Don't get me wrong, I see the benefits of course, and suspect I hardly need to go through them fully here – the lack of stink on one's clothes/hair, the removal of the effects of passive smoking from the pub's employees and punters etc etc. But it's not that I have a problem with. Firstly, there's the fundamental nanny-state mollycoddling in banning an elective and legal activity, which should not be up to government. I just don't like that on a fundamental level.

Secondly there's the sort of smoker/non-smoker apartheid which has developed as smokers huddle outside pubs, indulging their habit in all weathers while the non-smokers either have to come outside and breathe their smoke anyway or abandon their conversation while they remain inside. Then there's the smell – pubs now smell of farts and sweat, which cigarette smoke used to mask rather effectively.

Now it seems that even e-cigarettes are coming into the line of fire of certain health groups. I think they're marvellous things, and I've never used one. My partner's mother, a committed smoker all her adult life despite a heart attack and two hospitalisations for breathing difficulties, had just these past few days managed to get off real cigarettes completely by using them. Eight days without smoking when she'd previously been singularly incapable of giving up.

They smell of warm candy floss rather than smoke. They contain no tar. There's no risk of passive smoking – they emit water vapour, not smoke. They allow people to stay together inside. In theory at least. (Recently a workmate of mine was told by an All Bar One manager that it was 'company policy' that e-cigs are forbidden in their bars. I can find no mention of this on their website or within their corporate communications – he and his companions chose to leave, taking their business with them. I just don't understand that attitude. The pub trade in Britain is in crisis, you'd think they'd welcome something which encourages people back inside.)

It also appears that the BMA is not taken with them. Despite Professor John Britton, the Royal College of Physicians' tobacco advisory group leader, pointing out that nicotine itself is no more hazardous than caffeine, the BMA want them 'heavily regulated' because they 'don't know they're safe'. There's also a concern that they could 'legitimise something that looks like smoking'. Well smoking real cigarettes is already confirmed as unsafe, hugely so. It also looks exactly like smoking, and is legitimate. So what would they rather have, in the absence of being able to simply make everybody stop completely?

I was, I'll confess, unaware that they could be legally sold to kids – that certainly should be regulated because anything which plays a role in starting children smoking should most wholeheartedly be discouraged. But most adults – almost a million in Britain already, apparently – buy them, I strongly suspect, as part of an effort to at least cut down on the real thing. That has certainly been the empirical evidence I've seen – plenty of my workmates now hardly smoke real fags at all, and a few have stopped altogether, thanks to e-cigs.

If a real hard-core smoker like my g/f's mum can give up because of them (and one of her friends now wants to try to do the same thing, having seen her success), then anybody can. You'd have thought the BMA, and others like them, would encourage something like that.

What happens in Dublin...

I'd like to tell you a little bit about the city of Dublin, where I spent a fun couple of days this weekend just passed. Regrettably, I can't because apart from a restorative circuit of St Stephen's Green on Saturday lunchtime, I saw precious little of it which wasn't the inside of some drinking establishment or other.

I don't think I've been so thoroughly (or pleasantly) soaked in alcohol for a very, very long time, and in the true spirit of stag and hen affairs, what happens in Dublin stays in Dublin. (Either that, or my memory of the thing is inexplicably patchy. One of those two things is definitely the case). I can tell you bits of what I do remember, though.

We were, by any measure, a civilised bunch. Not for this intrepid eight the cringeworthy shame of humiliating the stag in a mankini or some other sartorial horror. Indeed we were described by one of the musicians playing a pub we visited as, "...the best-behaved stag party in Dublin." I recognise that this would be a source of shame for some stag groups. Not for me. I've always hated that sort of shit and have no desire to see even a good mate's bare arse on even the most ribald of weekends, let alone parade it though the streets of an unfamiliar city and then try to gain access to a pub.

So, gain access to pubs we did. Without any difficulty at any one of them, on account of the fact that even shit-faced we were a civilised lot. I was then, once inside, faced with the task of making up for the years of lost 'real' Guinness drinking I'd inflicted upon myself by never having been to Ireland before. I can report, dear reader, that I did my best. We all did. The Guinness is indeed different, though not as much as some would have you believe. But nowhere was it served badly, nowhere did it have that metallic tang it acquires if it hasn't been cared for correctly, and nowhere did it taste better than in the 360-degree Dublin panorama that was the bar at the top of the brewery.

I congratulate the eight men, good and true, who did their best to drink their own weight while at the same time not descending into that awful Brits-abroad stereotype. Good luck with the forthcoming wedding, Mr M. (Don't tell anybody I said this but he's batting well above his average there).   ;o)

I look forward to seeing all of you again on April 20th.



Edit: I've just had a flashback of one of the more vivid sights of the weekend. A lad sitting on the stone steps of one of Dublin's grander buildings, being copiously sick into his own hand, while his killer-heeled girlfriend kicked him repeatedly in the ribs. Oh, Dublin in the spring...

3 into 1 does go, sometimes

I have, to say the least, been indolent in my blog entries lately. But there's nothing like a bit of self-indulgence to prompt a renewal of effort. I should warn you that if you find self-congratulatory back slapping nauseating, look away now.

I have, in what I hope will also be sufficiently energising to renew my efforts at writing fiction, sort of been published in print for the first time. I say 'sort of' because I am only one of twenty writers published in this book, and a very long way behind some of them.

Yay!

Some time ago I entered a competition organised in an effort raise money for The Arthrogyposis Group, in which the idea was to write a short story which linked a black queen chess piece, a bunch of flowers and a ten-pound note. I entered and, already to my considerable delight, won fourth prize. This brought a very welcome two hundred spondoolies which I banked and spent some time ago, but much more gratifyingly the promise of an actual printed, tangible book in which my story would appear.

It had originally been planned for Christmas but, and this is something I understand all too well after spending 20 years as a print buyer, things were evidently rather delayed. This evening, when I got home from work, there was an envelope containing said document, entirely unexpectedly. I can't tell you how pleasing this is. Anyway, enough of the patting of my own back.

Should you feel sufficiently interested to buy the thing, you'd be supporting a good cause. And I'd be extremely flattered. For God's sake don't feel obliged, but it's available from here for a tenner including the postage if you feel like it. Just promise not to compare the winner too closely with mine - it's an absolute lesson in just how far I've got to go before I can consider myself a writer.

A good day for equality?

The Parliamentary vote on the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill was, in many ways, something of a landmark. That it should pass with such a strong majority should, I suppose, be viewed positively. But something in the breakdown of the votes still irks me.

The motion was passed by 400 votes to 175, giving it a strong mandate as it moves to the Lords (one wonders what they will make of it!). It's that 175 that gives rise to disappointment. This was a free vote – no whip was issued, giving MPs free rein to vote as they, or their constituents in an ideal world, saw fit. 136 of the 'nay' votes were Tories – almost 80% of them. That's nearly half the Parliamentary Tory members. Given that 35 Tories abstained, this means only 127 of them actually voted in favour – fewer than voted against.

This means that the majority of the rank and file MPs of the largest party in our government believe that people should be denied the same rights as everybody else simply because of their sexuality. And that's what it boils down to – they may make indignant noises about the sanctity of the union between  a man and a woman, or various other bollocks, but that's just Emperors' new clothing over the naked truth of the matter.

I'll be watching this one through the Lords with interest, because I can't see it passing into law unscathed – there will be objections from a Lords which is rather less representative of the general population than the Commons, and the disquiet among so many Tories will surely give Cameron cause to think, and possibly water it down to keep his own party happy. Cameron himself, to give him credit he rarely receives in these pages, has vocally supported this bill. But he's got a problem on his hands with so many of his party in open opposition to it.

Assuming this does, down the line, pass into law, all that will then remain will be to give heterosexual couples the right to civil partnerships currently only enjoyed by same-sex couples. Then we really would have across-the-board equality in these matters. For now, on balance, I think this was a good day for equality – a single step in the right direction, at any rate.

Who's next?

It's been a bad few weeks for high street retailers. Nothing unusual in that, at the moment, but the last couple to have gone (or at least look like they're going) are names which we're all very, very familiar with.

I've never been into music, and though I do really enjoy films, I'm not an obsessive watcher of them by any means. Even so, hearing that HMV had gone into receivership struck a chord that will resonate in all of us. As a kid I used to go into the big HMV in Churchill Square in Brighton and browse the film section - videos when I was young, DVDs later, of course – or, rarely, the music section. This is one of those shared experiences which pretty much anybody can relate to - it didn't matter if you were a hardcore death metal-head or a serious classicist, what you were looking for could probably be bought there. Later, they added head- and earphones, books and mags, 'cool' bags and T-shirts, everything the yoof of the day may need. Ultimately, it didn't matter – a very long, drawn-out death is finally coming to its conclusion and 4,000 people are, in all likelihood, going to lose their jobs.

Blockbuster is another one; another of those collective experiences most of us have shared at some point. When videos arrived for the masses, they used to have to get multiple copies of the big blockbusters when they came in, and there'd still occasionally be a wait for the very biggest of them. Disappointed, you'd have to browse the racks of cases looking for an alternative, now and then taking a chance on something you'd never heard of. What was that chance based on? Who starred? The design on the case? What the shop staff said? That shared experience has also died a slow death, and now it seems Blockbuster too is in the final throes.

It's easy to see what's killed off these high-street institutions. "Internet killed the video star," said the local paper in Brighton, where HMV still had (has? I don't know) a store in the main shopping centre. Indeed the internet is, of course, the killer, but it has millions of accomplices – everybody buys their films and music from Amazon, Play.com and the like now, don't they? At Christmas, you can do all your shopping without getting off your backside, if you're so inclined. And millions are so inclined. The market simply moves the trade from the high-street to the large online retailers, goes the capitalist thinking, and the jobs move with it. Adapt or die – pretty simple economics.

We should, though, stop and think on what we're doing here for a moment. The big online stores employ, of course, far fewer people than they would if they ran shops selling similar quantities of merchandise. It's how, no doubt, they can offer products so much cheaper – lower wage bill, lower rent, lower utility charges; just a few fuck-off warehouses in strategic bits of the countryside and a sophisticated distribution network and Bob's your mother's brother. It certainly lacks something of the romance of our younger selves' experience of shopping for the latest must-have album.

I am no different to anybody else – I've used these online retailers plenty of times, though I don't buy music at all, but even I have bought books, gifts, household appliances, all sorts online. And I believe we've lost something valuable in ditching those collective experiences I mentioned earlier. These days, people don't even necessarily buy an actual artefact at all – they download films, music and books digitally. These objects, sometimes things of beauty and collectability even before the actual content – the music, film or story – is taken into account, have been reduced to a series of binary data, nothing more than electronic pulses to convey the creative efforts of all those people who conceived and produced them. So we're losing something there as well.

All these things have a knock-on affect. If fewer and fewer of the packages are being designed and produced, there's a net harm done to the design and production industries which feed off them. And if retailers keep closing, shopping centres become run-down agglomerations of charity shops, pound shops, pawnbrokers and the like, the grim flag bearers of hard economic times. I fear, though, it's too late. The small, independent places which survive (I assume because of a resurgence of interest in vinyl) now stand out even more as little beacons – when I pass Fopp, one such place right by my work, it's always full of earnest-looking men (always, always men) still scratching that itch, searching through racks of music or film for some arcane gem. So the need is still out there. Just not, it seems, in sufficient numbers to sustain these familiar names. And that, for me, is a loss to all of us.

If I ruled the world...

In conversation with one of my workmates today, she happened to mention that if she ruled the world, the first thing she'd do would be to ban e-readers (Kindles and the like) and execute anybody flouting that ban(!)

Now, putting to one side her enthusiasm for what I suspect would be near genocide, given the ubiquity of these things, I actually agree with her preference for the printed form. Were I plenipotentiary world leader, I certainly wouldn't ban them, but nor do I want one. I can see how useful they are for holidays, commuting etc, but I just like books too much to want to ditch them. The beauty of a well-designed dust jacket, the satisfaction of handling them, the smell when they're new.* The visible progress as you make your way through them. The author's signature on the fly leaf, if you're lucky. The contentment of surveying a full bookshelf, perfectly parallel spines, upright like so many soldiers; simultaneously alluring and alluding to their content, all jostling for your attention, each suggesting a cheeky re-read. You just don't get that with e-readers.

But I'm digressing a bit from what was to be my original point. Digressing quite a bit, actually, because what I actually wanted to say was that, of all the things you could do with absolute power at your disposal, all the wrongs you could right, all the failings and everyday unfairnesses you could sort out, this was the first thing she wanted to do? Ban Kindles and start bumping off 'refuseniks'? I even offered her the chance to think about some more far-reaching and beneficial options, but she stuck with her choice. The theory was that the ban would be a quick undertaking, something that had been bugging you that you could now get done swiftly and move on to more important stuff. Like changing that dead lightbulb before you get on with building the extension.

So - forcing an end to conflicts, reaching for Mars, sorting out Third World debt, feeding the hungry millions? All in good time. Get rid of those wretched gadgets first and all, or at least more, would be right with the world.

*I used to buy print for a living. If you didn't already know that, did that sentence rather give it away?

On this day to end all days...

...apparently(!), here's what's been on my mind in the planet's final moments.

Starting with a serious note, it seems that the latest gun atrocity in the States has been sufficiently shocking that, finally, there may be some real debate on gun control. The President is openly supporting a ban on assault weapons which, while hardly a cure-all, would at least be a start and suggest the conversation was beginning to happen. Let's hope some small good comes out of what has been an unimaginable horror for those of us detached from it.

But turning to the forthcoming apocalypse (as I write there are just a couple of hours to go). It seems there are now two mountain redoubts built by aliens to shield the believer from the end - one in Serbia, one in France. The small French village at the foot of one of them has had so many visitors (over 10,000!) that they've had to seal the area off and the Mayor had called for people not to go there. This raises questions:

How are people supposed to get into the hideout once they get there? How does one enter a mountain? Is there a door? Some sign, invisible to those of us who think these poor souls are deluded nincompoops, pointing the way?

What do they think they'd emerge into? I've read tales of the end coming about in various ways, from another planet hitting us, through rapture to zombie apocalypse (which plenty of people seem positively itching to happen). What exactly do those, assuming they'd got in, think there'd be left to come out to? Would you even want to?

Anyway. I was thinking about all this in the Post Office queue the other day, as you do. I was waiting to collect a parcel that they'd been unable to deliver, and it being near Christmas - why are people bothering? The world's going to blow up. - there was a bit of a wait. So I perused the various posters etc., adorning the walls. One of them, helpfully, informed one that the little cubby-hole from which undelivered parcels could be collected would be open extra days and longer hours in the build-up to the festive period, in order that people could 'collect there parcels' (sic).

This at the Post Office. The very deliverer, at least until recently, of the written word no less. Makes me wish I were sealed in a mountain sometimes, it does - fair gives me the shivers.

Happy apocalypse, all.

Consequences

I've had to leave this one a couple of days because it made me so angry that I couldn't trust myself to write about it either coherently or, frankly, within the bounds of the libel laws. So I hope that what follows is at least vaguely cogent.

I've always hated prank calls. Always. That whole type of comedy escapes me completely, and hasn't been funny since it was new, Candid Camera style. But that was basically sixty years ago. All the modern incarnations of that type - Fonejacker, Dom Jolly, Gotchas and the like - I can't stand them. They irritate, humiliate people, get their laughs at others' expense and, worst of all, simply aren't bloody funny.

Or at least, worst of all up to now. Now, of course, as part of the fall-out from such a 'prank', a nurse is dead at her own hands and two DJs in Australia find themselves suspended, vilified worldwide and accused of having blood on their hands. Called murderers, even, by some of the more hysterical posters on the website, Twitter feeds and Facebook page of their employers. Advertising suspended as sponsors rush to pull out. Threats against the two DJs and the digital security of Austereo. They've paid a high price for this phone call.

Not as high, of course, as the now bereft family of Jacintha Saldanha. It may well be that she was suffering with mental health issues beforehand. It may well be than any other person answering the phone would not have reacted in anything like the way she did. The tragic outcome could not possibly have been foreseen, 2Day FM's owners said. No, no they couldn't. But, quite apart from the fact that they're not funny, they're tasteless and they're unoriginal, that's exactly why you shouldn't do these things in the first place. You don't know who you're dealing with. You don't know how they'll react, what sort of trouble they'll have to deal with in the aftermath, when you've got your laugh and hung up.

All you can do, if you go ahead anyway, is accept the consequences. 2DayFM may rightfully claim that the extreme consequences couldn't have been predicted, but it's not inconceivable that anybody falling for their jolly jape could have lost their job. They must have known this would cause a very large fuss - this is the Royal family, for fuck sake.

Their protestations that they couldn't know what was coming ring pretty hollow, regardless of how truly they may mean them, especially in the light of their previous in this regard. Their licence has twice been placed on probation under threat of closure, and another of their efforts went horribly wrong when a 14-year-old girl revealed live on air that she'd been raped when she was just twelve. Then there's Kyle Sandilands, responsible for that poor girl's revelation, who has a string of misogynist, hateful and generally unpleasant incidents behind him - calling a journalist a 'fat bitch' and the Australian Highway Patrol 'scum' live on air among them. So I don't think it's being unreasonable to expect a modicum more care from the radio station when they're considering something like this.

Have some compassion for the DJs, I've been told. They didn't wake up that morning intent on killing somebody. They're distraught, beside themselves at what's transpired. Well, yes. Perhaps in time I'll feel some compassion for the two, who must indeed be feeling absolutely terrible. But just at the moment, rightly or wrongly, I think that's exactly how they bloody well should be feeling. And, but for the fact that it would only put people out of work who had nothing to do with it, I'd be pretty pleased if their wretched radio station closed down as well.

Scouts' honour

A welcome bit of news to update a piece I wrote a few weeks ago about George Pratt, the eleven-year-old thrown out of the Scouts for being an atheist.

It seems the Scouts are reconsidering their position, and are thinking about amending their pledge to recognize that some kids have no religious affiliation. I applaud their willingness to at least talk about it, and can only hope the change is pushed through. I'd be very happy to withdraw my criticism of any organisation that shows right-mindedness in this regard, and open their doors to everybody. Fair play to them.

Let's see if it actually happens - perhaps Master Pratt would do them the honour of rejoining, if, ironically enough, he can practice one of what is supposed to be the main tenets of Christianity, and forgive them what they've done.

Countdown to the apocalypse

This handy countdown clock has been set up on the interweb for those wanting to keep tabs on how long Earth has left. It seems the world is to end, as 'predicted by the Mayans'™ at 11.11:11am on 21st December, so any plans you had for Christmas you'd better not pay for up front, people.

I have questions, of course. Why such a specific time? Were the Mayans getting their predictions mixed up and confusing the end of the world with the Armistice? How's it going to happen? Does that time represent merely the start of the end of the world, or is everything simply going to blink out of existence at that precise second? Does anybody really believe that's going to be it?

The answer to that last one is, of course, regrettably but rather inevitably, yes. Check this page out. It brings news that the Russian government has had to make official announcements on the matter, and various cults around the world are no doubt preparing for the end. Among my favourites, though, is this lot. Their enigmatic leader 'AB' suggests he doesn't necessarily believe in this end of the world, of course, but he is preparing for an inevitable something. He does acknowledge, though, that some of his group do indeed think that 21.12.12 is it. How exactly those members are preparing to survive the end of the world, one can only guess at. What I imagine is the usual assortment of kit for survivalists – tinned food, water, a gun, an underground shelter and some warm weather clothing – are not going to get you through the planet exploding.

Anyway, with end of the world dates piling up (remember Harold Camping, whom I wrote about earlier this year? He's finally knocked it on the head, but others will no doubt be along in his stead in due course.), pretty soon we're going to have to count down to pretty much any date you care to mention if we gather them all together.

I'll see you, if not before, on the 22nd.  :o)