A ban on cigarettes draws ever closer

Apologies for having been absent, but I’ve not been well; immobilized for a few days to the degree that even a slight movement caused severe pain and a pitiful whining noise to be emitted, in the direction of my wife, who has a rather put-upon expression right now. Serves you right, you might be thinking, with your lifestyle, all that alcohol and cigarettes – something was going to go wrong sooner or later. Well, you’d be half right. It is a lifestyle problem. It’s the consequence of a mishap which occurred when I was using my fucking running machine, a couple of torn stomach muscles when I inadvertently hit the “sprint!” button. The thing set off like the bloody clappers but I, initially, did not and there was an audible tearing as I grasped desperately for the handlebars. My wife bought me the treadmill as a forty-ninth birthday present, so that I might become thinner and healthier. Thanks love; you reap what you sow.

I emerge from the cocoon of pain to discover that the ton ton macoute within the medical profession are now trying to ban smoking in cars, another absurdly unjust imposition upon our choices of lifestyle. They say it is in order to protect the kiddies – a specious argument which they assume will be the clincher, because it can never be gainsaid – but it is not. As others have pointed out, it is another step on the journey to ban cigarettes throughout the country. They are still not happy in just having destroyed the pub trade and making 15 million lives exponentially more miserable; their views will always prevail, even though their calculations are ever quantitative, rather than qualitative, as David Hockney has said.