The Daily Novel

Like most smokers I am feeling more oppressed as each day goes by and the first of July draws ever closer. Appropriately enough it is a Sunday when I am to be excommunicated by the thought police of the new nanny state. Unless I reform, admit the error of my ways, I am going to be banished from civilised society. Deprived of the company of my fellows blending conversation withe the flow of wine and the chewing over of succulent foods. The ‘No Smoking’ notices are going up all over the place, and they have to be big, otherwise the owner is liable to a fine. I am even to be banned from smoking in the doorways. And if I dare to stub out a cigarette on the pavement, Camden Council will slap a fine on me.

The public service ads are filling the newspapers. (Rupert Murdoch must be rubbing his hands with glee as he counts up his advertising income.) I am being offered free help by the thought police in being brain washed into believing that the State is doing me a good turn by depriving me of the thing I have always liked about smoking.

It was a sharing thing. You passed round your packet of ten amongst your friends. If you were down to your last cigarette on a Saturday night you were totally happy to share it with a friend who had smoked the last one in his packet. It fuelled human discourse. It enriched relationships with the unique double action of nicotine, both a stimulant and a depressive. You paused to take a drag, and while doing so found just the right words for your next sentence.

I write in the past tense, because the new generation is going to be deprived of this most valuable drug. Which also can kill you. Like all the officially sanctioned drugs it has unpleasant side effects. Just like the new epilepsy drug which my youngest daughter is taking, which is making her hair fall out.

Most important depressives and manic depressives are going to be deprived of the drug which helps them to live with their condition, whose benefits have been proven by endless research studies. These are ignored in the zeal for the new orthodoxy. I fear in will get even worse.

I may wake up tomorrow and hear that some policician or police chief has asked for new stop and search powers, so that people can be charged with the possession of cigarettes. In case they offer one to another human being. Or blow the smoke their way on the windy corners where smokers will gather.

The legislation goes far beyond reason. It goes far beyond the need to protect non-smokers from the very small risks of passive smoking, which can only be harmful in very confined and poorly ventilated rooms. It is a nanny policy dictating to citizens how they should live their lives. And it ignores the fact that human beings are infinitely variable.

And this legislation has been brought in by a Labour government, which has already hiked the tax on cigarettes to a draconian level. Though all the evidence shows that most remaining smokers are the oppressed classes, the poor and women for instance. Which Labour is supposed to care about.

Ironically, one of the few places where you will still be able to smoke is prison. Presumably because it helps the governors to keep control of prisions. Cigarettes help the prisoners to deal with the deprivations of prison life and help them to control their anger.

I live in hope that one day I shall be able to wean myself off cigarettes. That if I can find new ways of raising my tranquility level that I shall no longer feel the need to smoke.

Not yet. Everytime I see a new No Smoking sign I have a powerful urge to light up a fag immediately, as my anger rises at the waste of public money (for many are totally unnecessary) and, to say the least, aesthetically unappealing.

In the olden days I could live with anyone who put up one of those ‘Thank you for not smoking’ signs. And I always obeyed such notices. But the whole tone of the No Smoking campaign appeals to the worst in human beings; it appeals to the petty fascist in human beings, the urge to control and dictate the behaviour of other human beings.

So perhaps I better send out a public warning. If any nasty little fascist tells me to  stop smoking my fag on the Dorset coastal path, he, or she, is in serious danger of being thrown over the cliff.