Thank You for Not Smoking

I have always regarded the above phrase as, basically, what the late great Guardian journalist James Cameron would have called "a bit of cant".

The word "cant", for those unfamiliar with it, and it has, regrettably, fallen rather into disuse, is defined on my handy Oxford three-click desktop dictionary, as "insincere pious or moral talk", although that is only part of the story. In my book, "cant" is used in order to claim and keep the moral high ground, while pretending to have the greater good of all, or worse, the implicit truth and rightness of everything, at heart. Cant is still very much with us, although it is now known as "political correctness", or, in big business, "management bollocks".
Thus, returning to smoking, a PC issue if ever there was one, the use of cant is designed to hide the fact that anyone is telling us to do, or not do, something. Hence the phrase at the top of the piece, clearly some semi-literate goon thought that if it looked as though people were being patted on the back, it would disguise the fact that here was yet another dreary prohibition. And before any of the non-smoking lobby starts in, I had better state here that, although I have been a smoker since the age of sixteen, I only smoke occasionally, and not at home nor at work. Equally, I get annoyed, as you do, by people smoking on trains and buses, in any kind of public enclosed space, and, as happened yesterday, at the dining table, when the first person to clear his plate lights up without waiting for the others to finish their meals. This is very common in Spain, though the perpetrator yesterday was in fact British; when in Madrid, you know... So I am not here campaigning for the freedom to smoke wherever one might. My beef is about the harm keen non-smokers are prepared to do to their native tongue in order to achieve their ends.

What I am interested in seeing the back of is the cant, as I said, the insincerity of thanking people for not smoking, when we all know that if people had smoked, the penalties might be something more than just forgoing the thanks of a grateful management (incidentally, have you noticed how frequently managers regard thanks as something which is every bit as good as a pay rise?). There are other ways in which organisations inform people that they can’t smoke too, without, they fondly imagine, actually uttering those harmful, cruel words, "no smoking". One of them is to use the word "policy". Like "inappropriate" which I referred to a while back, "policy" is a catch-all device meaning that no argument or discussion is to be entertained: "it is Centre policy not to let teachers see the timetable, as this is a management document", an example from my own workplace (I am not making this up). So in the UK, and on the EasyJet flight there and back, I was constantly being informed that wherever I happened to be "operated a no smoking policy", whereas the truth of the matter was that they did not allow people to smoke. Manchester Piccadilly station, quite a bit of which is in the open air, is, for fire-watchers everywhere, "a non-smoking station" (though down on Platforms 13 and 14 people smoke anyway; the security guards are too busy checking tickets).
Why this modern obsession with not smoking? Yes I know it is bad for the health, even in Spain, thanks to the EU (how would we manage without it?) cigarette packets have that huge black lettering covering almost half of them, with the usual slogans: SMOKING CAN KILL; SMOKING CAN HARM YOUR BABY and the like (though I hardly notice this any longer, and suspect that no-one else does, either). So it is clearly a Bad Thing, but my argument is that it is not by a very long way the Worst Thing. As I mentioned in my note from Hay-on-Wye (I've put the hyphens in this week), not smoking and TV licences are the most rigorously policed things in Britain. Other, worse, things, kill, lots of babies are harmed each day, if the papers are to be believed, but the policy-operating, gratitude-for-not-doing-it expressing, non-smoking designating managers are nowhere to be seen.

Some years ago, Victoria Wood told a joke about being on a train when a young couple began to have sex. No-one objected, until afterwards, when Ms Wood said she was deeply shocked; they lit cigarettes. This was meant as a light, satirical comment on the way things were going, but that is the way they have now gone. In fact, far more people smoke than you would believe, and far more want to than is usually thought. I mentioned last week that almost everyone on my delayed train at Chester got out on to the platform and smoked. I couldn’t help wondering why, as we had paid a huge amount of money to be hanging about there, and we all clearly liked smoking, we weren’t going to be allowed to on the train (not that I specially wanted to, it is just a question of democracy). And why was it that in a news report of a warehouse fire in Birmingham, which I was reading on Teletext one morning last year, did it say that the fire "could have been started by a cigarette-end", when no-one had any idea of the cause at the time? (In fact it turned out not to have been caused by a cigarette at all). One imagines some non-smoking fanatic news editor seeing a chance to put in a plug for his pet obsession, and to hell with truthful news reporting. Cant will do, every time.

When I was growing up there were big signs in a surprising number of places. They read "No Smoking"; indeed they were so common in the ‘thirties that a music-hall comedian decided to adopt it as his stage name, and Nosmo King was born. I do not for the life of me see why they can’t be brought back, and the non-smoking stations, the operation of non-smoking policies and the managerial gratitude for observing a regulation, abolished. We all know what they mean, they mean that you can't do it. Here in Spain "No Fumar" (Don’t smoke) is the usual way, and nobody minds. Though what I would really like to see is what Manchester City Transport did in the mid-sixties. They decided that they wouldn’t ban smoking upstairs on buses, just discourage it, so the words "Please do not smoke" appeared at the front of the upper deck (on the inside, of course) on all their buses. As a result, most people didn’t smoke, but if they did, they weren’t contravening a by-law, they were just refusing to accede to a polite request. And the bus conductors didn’t have to get involved, as train conductors presumably have to these days. I would also like to see an end to those hieroglyphics displaying a lighted cigarette with a line through it. "No smoking" plain and simple, and no gratitude: a prohibition is a prohibition, not a policy, or smokeless zone, or whatever, and down with management bollocks, as always.