THE “FUTURE OF SMOKING”

I pulled up at a petrol station the other morning, as I have to do most weeks nowadays since I rejoined the ragged masses making their various ways through the morning commute.

Every week I have to fill up the tank with petrol, which has the sole purpose of moving me back and forth between the same two places, and finding me using the best part of a full tank of fuel every week in order to cover a couple of hundred miles in order to end up in exactly the same spot as I started out from.

But I don’t suppose that’s an unusual situation. I’m pretty sure that, given the amount of other vehicles which I see to-ing and fro-ing each day, I’m not the only one doing precisely the same thing day in, day out throughout most of the year.

After all, it’s by doing precisely that that I get to buy all the lavish goods and services that make up my spectacularly exciting lifestyle.

Things like toilet rolls and tea bags and loaves of bread…

Glamorous, exciting things like that…

Oh, I know that sitting here in my ivory tower somewhere in what we like to think of as the “first world” it’s easy to complain and moan about the dreadfulness of our mundane little lives when, compared to much of the world, we really don’t know that we’re born.

But sometimes, especially on those days when I have to buy petrol to go to a job I once did quite happily from the comfort of my own home, and when I realise that suddenly having to fork out for petrol again each week in order to simply get there is effectively like getting a pay cut, especially when I notice that my pay hasn’t actually gone up in nearly five years, it really, really gets me down.

So, every week, I pull onto the forecourt and walk over to the petrol pump, and I place the nozzle into the aperture provided and squeeze the trigger and watch as the numbers spin around and around and around and my thoughts drift off to wherever they might as I ponder upon what else I might be doing with those many poundlettes as they are drunk away by my motor vehicle.

Once upon a time I got very vocal about a planned congestion charge. I even wrote to the papers and everything in a proper “nutter-like” way. It’s what I used to do before I discovered blogging. Naturally, some people agreed with me and some did not, which tends to be the way of these things. One “radical cyclist” did go as far as to reply to my complaints by suggesting that people like me in our “country houses” driving to our “fancy jobs” were what was causing the problem in the first place.

I did toy with replying, pointing out that it wasn’t my fault that my job and my house were so far apart and that my own economic shortcomings were what had led to me having to find a job I could do and where that happened was rather beyond my control and that I couldn’t afford any houses that were any nearer to either it or where I grew up but I decided not to. After all, in terms of the abstract “me” that he was addressing, I had to concede that he might have had a point, and, sometimes in life, in the words of Professor Henry Jones, you really have to learn to know when it’s time to “let it go…”

As I idly looked around the forecourt that morning, however, my thoughts were not really on the price of petrol. My eyes happened to glance at a sign attached to the top of the fuel pump and blowing around in the breeze advertising, for the princely sum of £6.95 (if you bought some other something or other) you could have “The Future of Smoking…!”

To be honest, I didn’t think that it had much of a future these days, and certainly I didn’t expect to find it being advertised in somewhere as highly inflammable as a petrol station.

Anyway, for your money it appeared that you got something that looked a bit like a thin plastic torch to suck on, and a bulb would light up at the end you didn’t have in your mouth to give you a smoking experience “just like the real thing” which, it seemed, had the added “advantage” that you could still suck on this thing and not be bound by the restrictions of the smoking ban.

Personally I did wonder whether if you did walk into a public place with one of these devices clamped between your molars you’d still get asked to put it out, and I began to think about how much “hilarity” might ensue when the complainant realised their stupid mistake…

The real clincher, though, is that the wretched things still contained nicotine, so you could still do yourself just as much harm only without filling the air for everyone around you with nauseating toxic fumes.

What, as they say, is the point…? It might very well be the devil’s work to be seen sucking upon a cancer stick these days, and it might be as hard as hell to give up, but do people really, really still need to be seen indoors sucking on a daft bit of plasticky electronic gadgetry to give themselves the  “genuine smoking experience…?”

Give it up, my friends, I think the war is over.

Now all that they have to do is find a way of getting my car to run on the occasional glimmer of sunlight…