A Few Words on Smoking

Summer may have just arrived, or perhaps this is just another mocking preamble to another dismal washout. Summer is, let's face it, a dream we've been dreaming for a number of years now. Whichever it turns out to be, though, I can at least say I've made it through another winter without dying of pneumonia. Whilst it wouldn't ever be enough to consider voting for those mendacious incompetents for whom it is a campaign platform, I do miss smoking in pubs.

It was a July, if memory serves, when the ban came into force, and otherwise rather a pleasant day. I had been out the night before, locked-in, late for work and was decidedly the worse for wear. Stumbling out of work and into the pub, there was still something of a party atmosphere (these were the glory days of the old pub, when come-down Sundays were so much fun, the Monday and often the Tuesday were needed to come down from them). The Landlord, with malicious irony, had replaced the customary bar-bowl of generously over-salted popcorn with those sweet cigarettes for children which were somehow still legal.

There was a party atmosphere, but it was, for the most part, all happening in the garden. The interior of the pub was curiously deserted. Not smoking was a novelty, and just as the night before had been spent in a carnivalesque celebration of the last day of legality, so today, released again by the novelty of the situation the carnival continued, as if a rolling party were merely looking for something to which to attach itself.

The novelty of the situation wore off very quickly, but that summer, such as it was, was passed outdoors. The pubs (and I think this was true of most pubs), remained deserted inside, the rumour spread of a possible extension of the ban because the young were seeing smokers having too much fun outside, and an echo of carnival remained. It was winter when the ban took on its final form.

On any evening, in any pub, the universal expression of memory lapse would punctuate proceedings. At random times and at random points around the pub, the cry of “oh, fuck” would be heard, and to the accompaniment of ironic cheers, someone with a lit cigarette in hand would make an embarrassed dash for the door. The last time I was caught out in this way was a full three years after the ban was introduced. Old habits die hard, but the most disturbing thing was not so much the ban itself, but the speed with which it became normal.

Normality breeds the rituals of the normal: you adapt, for better or worse, your ways of being to any situation into which you are thrown. An etiquette emerges, and the smoking ban became a way to manage ones social obligations. On entering the pub, if there was no one at the bar you recognised, you would buy your pint, have a few sips, and then pop into the garden for a smoke. You would, however, leave your pint at the bar, so that if there was anyone in the garden you knew but didn't want to speak to, you had an excuse to leave their company after a relatively short period of time. An unattended pint is universally recognised as overriding any other obligation, thus no breach of etiquette has been committed and you can depart an unwanted situation with honour intact.

Similarly, if you found yourself stuck at the bar in one of those conversations that are the occupational hazard of the pub-drinking man, you, your pint, and your cigarette could all decamp to the garden, in the hope that by the time you needed to refill, your interlocutor would have wandered off in search of someone else to annoy. Of course, wherever there is etiquette, there are breaches of etiquette, but in the end, being followed around by a nutter with an agenda is at least no worse than being cornered by a nutter with an agenda.

And this is how the dance of the pub plays out, flitting from garden to bar, to friends and from nutters, from pint to cigarette and back again. The dance was always there, of course, made of groups and their offshoots and the solo-drinkers joining together with each other or other groups before spinning off again into the evening. Particles and their compounds at play to the music of chance. The ban just made clearer what had been happening all along, it underlined the movement and clarified its articulation. And the ban did one other thing, which I think its architects didn't have in mind. In the dancing and spinning and moving from group to group and from place to place, I'm smoking much, much more than I ever used to.

Anyway, for now at least the sun is out, and I'm tempted to call it summer. I'm also tempted to while away the afternoon in a pub. And as a wise woman once said to me, the best way to deal with temptation is to give into it. Cin-cin.