Smugless smoking

Having spent the last couple of days trapped indoors by the incessant dankness of the British weather, I’m starting to understand how people could use seasonal affective disorder as an excuse for a cathartic killing spree. For over a week now, I have travelled to three different parts of the country and in each have been met with unremitting, pissing weather where the day before it was sunny. Within minutes of leaving each place, we have been gleefully informed that the sun has returned, which has me suspecting that this has gone beyond the point of coincidence and that there is indeed some higher power, whose sole, untiring focus is on driving me to insanity. Being based back at my family’s home doesn’t help much. The first hour or so is all home cooked meals and lovingly made cups of tea, but pretty soon the walls are closing in. Eventually there will be a demand for me to perform some form of excessive manual labor like moving my shoes and I’ll be twitching for the high calibre rifle.

Certainly it’s given me time to reflect on the differences between the two countries. The most striking it seems to me, except, clearly from the great big fucking mountains everywhere, is the smoking ban in UK pubs and restaurants. In Switzerland, it’s legislated that all nationals must start smoking at the point of being umbilically separated from their mothers. This is reflected in the industrial levels of smoke that are emitted in pubs and restaurants. I’m not, for a change, complaining about this. It’s allowed me to claim I’ve given up, when in reality I’m simply feeding my pangs with the astronomical levels of nicotine and tar, hanging in the air like an oil slick. Back in the UK, I don’t have this luxury, unless I hang around grotty local pubs demanding that the semi-feral alcoholics smoking outside breathe directly into my open mouth. And even then you are eventually asked to move on.

I do prefer the situation in the UK in general though, and applaud the recent decision to move the same way in Zurich. Though I can’t claim to have my finger on the pulse on the local populace, I am yet to witness the screeching levels of protest about civil liberties and promises of an armed up rise which greeted the move in many parts of Britain. Though I’d take the Swiss far more seriously if I ever heard them threaten such a thing than ever I would the Daily Mail brigade of paranoid mentalists, I suspect we will all look back and wonder how it was ever allowed in the first place. And on that note, I’m heading back to my pedestal of purity and innocence, to wallow in the warming glow of self-righteousness that ex-smokers secrete through every pore.